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                              WANDERING IN
                             NORTHERN CHINA


[Illustration:

  A constant stream of pilgrims, largely blue-clad coolies on foot,
    passed up and down the sacred stairway
]




                      WANDERING IN NORTHERN CHINA


                                   BY
                            HARRY A. FRANCK

 Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Roaming Through the
    West Indies,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” “Working North from
                         Patagonia,” etc., etc.

                      ILLUSTRATED WITH 171 UNUSUAL
                      PHOTOGRAPHS  BY  THE  AUTHOR
                      WITH A MAP SHOWING HIS ROUTE

[Illustration]

                            THE CENTURY CO.
                           NEW YORK & LONDON




                          Copyright, 1923, by
                            THE CENTURY CO.


                          Printed in U. S. A.




                                   To

                         KATHARINE LATTA FRANCK

    WHO CHOSE THIS PARTICULAR WANDER-YEAR TO JOIN OUR FAMILY CIRCLE




                                FOREWORD


There is no particular plan to this book. I found my interest turning
toward the Far East, and as I am not one of those fortunate persons who
can scamper through a country in a few weeks and know all about it, I
set out on a leisurely jaunt to wherever new clues to interest led me.
It merely happened that this will-o’-the-wisp drew me on through
everything that was once China, north of about the thirty-fourth
parallel of latitude. The man who spends a year or two in China and then
attacks the problem of telling all he saw, heard, felt, or smelled there
is like the small boy who was ordered by the teacher to write on two
neat pages all about his visit to the museum. It simply can’t be done.
Hence I have merely set down in the following pages, in the same
leisurely wandering way as I have traveled, the things that most
interested me, often things that others seem to have missed, or
considered unimportant, in the hope that some of them may also interest
others. Impressions are unlike statistics, however, in that they cannot
be corrected to a fraction, and I decline to be held responsible for the
exact truth of every presumption I have recorded. If I have fallen into
the common error of generalizing, I hereby apologize, for I know well
that details in local customs differ even between neighboring villages
in China. What I say can at most be true of the north, for as yet I know
nothing of southern China. On the other hand, there may be much
repetition of customs and the like, but that goes to show how unchanging
is life among the masses in China even as a republic.

Lafcadio Hearn said that the longer he remained in the East the less he
knew of what was going on in the Oriental mind. An “old China hand” has
put the same thing in more popular language: “You can easily tell how
long a man has been in China by how much he doesn’t know about it. If he
knows almost everything, he has just recently arrived; if he is in
doubt, he has been here a few years; if he admits that he really knows
nothing whatever about the Chinese people or their probable future, you
may take it for granted that he has been out a very long time.”

But as I have said before, the “old-timer” will seldom sit down to tell
even what he has seen, and in many cases he has long since lost his way
through the woods because of the trees. Or he may have other and more
important things to do. Hence it is up to those of us who have nothing
else on hand to pick up and preserve such crumbs of information as we
can; for surely to know as much of the truth about our foreign neighbors
as possible is important, above all in this new age. In our own land
there are many very false ideas about China; false ideas that in some
cases are due to deliberate Chinese propaganda abroad. While I was out
in the far interior I received a clipping outlining the remarks of a
Chinese lecturing through our Middle West, and his résumé left the
impression that bound feet and opium had all but completely disappeared
from China, and that in the matter of schools and the like the
“republic” is making enormous strides. No sooner did the Lincheng affair
attract the world’s attention than American papers began to run yarns,
visibly inspired, about the marvelous advances which the Chinese have
recently accomplished. Such men as Alfred Sze are often mistaken in the
United States as samples of China. Unfortunately they are nothing of the
kind; in fact, they are too often hopelessly out of touch with their
native land. There has been progress in China, but nothing like the
amount of it which we have been coaxed or lulled into believing, and
some of it is of a kind that raises serious doubts as to its direction.
For all the telephones, airplanes, and foreign clothes in the coast
cities, the great mass of the Chinese have been affected barely at all
by this urge toward modernity and Westernism—if that is synonymous with
progress. As some one has just put it, “the Chinese still wear the
pigtail on their minds, though they have largely cut it off their
heads.” How great must be the misinformation at home which causes our
late President to say that all China really needs is more loans, thereby
making himself, and by extension his nation, the laughing-stock of any
one with the rudiments of intelligence who has spent an hour studying
the situation on the spot. England is a little better informed on the
subject than we, because she is less idealistic, more likely to look
facts in the face instead of trying to make facts fit preconceived
notions of essential human perfection. China may need more credits, but
any fool knows that you should stop the hole in the bottom of a tub
before you pour more water into it. At times, too, it is laughable to
think of us children among nations worrying about this one, thousands of
years old, which has so often “come back,” and may still be ambling her
own way long after we have again disappeared from the face of the earth.

Though it is impossible to leave out the omnipresent entirely, I have
said comparatively little about politics. My own interest in what we
lump together under that word reaches only so far as it affects the
every-day life of the people, of the mudsill of society, toward which,
no doubt by some queer quirk in my make-up, I find my attention
habitually focusing. I have tried, therefore, to show in some detail
their lives, slowly changing perhaps yet little changed, and to let
others conclude whether “politics” has done all that it should for them.
Besides, the Far East swarms with writers on politics, men who have been
out here for years or decades and have given their attention almost
entirely to that popular subject; and even these disagree like doctors.
Some of us, I know, are frankly tired of politics, at least for a space,
important as they are; moreover, political changes are so rapid,
especially in the “never changing” East, that it is impossible to keep
abreast of the times in anything less than a daily newspaper.

At home there are numbers of young men, five or ten years out of
college, who can tell you just what is the matter with the world, and
exactly how to remedy it. I am more or less ready to agree with them
that the world is going to the dogs. What of it? You have only to step
outdoors on any clear night to see that there are hundreds of other
worlds, which may be arranging their lives in a more intelligent manner.
The most striking thing about these young political and sociological
geniuses sitting in their suburban gardens or their city flats is that
while they can toss off a recipe guaranteed to cure our own sick world
overnight, if only some one can get it down its throat, they seldom seem
to have influence enough in their own cozy little corner of it to drive
out one grafting ward-heeler. In other words, if you must know what is
to be the future of China, I regret that I have not been vouchsafed the
gift of prophecy and cannot tell you.

In the minor matter of Chinese words and names, I have deliberately not
tried to follow the usual Romanization, but rather to cause the reader
to pronounce them as nearly like what they are on the spot as is
possible with our mere twenty-six letters. Of course I could not follow
this rule entirely or I must have called the capital of China
“Bay-jing,” have spoken of the evacuation of “Shahn-doong,” and so on;
so that in the case of names already more or less familiar to the West I
have used the most modern and most widely accepted forms, as they have
survived on the ground. At that I cannot imagine what ailed the men who
Romanized the Chinese language, but that is another story.

                                                        HARRY A. FRANCK.

 Kuling, China,
 August 16, 1923.




                                CONTENTS


           CHAPTER                                      PAGE

                 I IN THE LAND WE CALL KOREA               3

                II SOME KOREAN SCENES AND CUSTOMS         23

               III JAPANESE AND MISSIONARIES IN KOREA     36

                IV OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN CHO-SEN        53

                 V UP AND DOWN MANCHURIA                  71

                VI THROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA              82

               VII SPEEDING ACROSS THE GOBI              108

              VIII IN “RED” MONGOLIA                     124

                IX HOLY URGA                             135

                 X EVERY ONE HIS OWN DIPLOMAT            160

                XI AT HOME UNDER THE TARTAR WALL         174

               XII JOGGING ABOUT PEKING                  195

              XIII A JOURNEY TO JEHOL                    230

               XIV A JAUNT INTO PEACEFUL SHANSI          252

                XV RAMBLES IN THE PROVINCE OF CONFUCIUS  265

               XVI ITINERATING IN SHANTUNG               288

              XVII EASTWARD TO TSINGTAO                  308

             XVIII IN BANDIT-RIDDEN HONAN                330

               XIX WESTWARD THROUGH LOESS CAÑONS         349

                XX ON TO SIAN-FU                         366

               XXI ONWARD THROUGH SHENSI                 387

              XXII CHINA’S FAR WEST                      405

             XXIII WHERE THE FISH WAGGED HIS TAIL        423

              XXIV IN MOHAMMEDAN CHINA                   447

               XXV TRAILING THE YELLOW RIVER HOMEWARD    468

              XXVI COMPLETING THE CIRCLE                 485




                             ILLUSTRATIONS


 A constant stream of pilgrims, largely blue-clad coolies
   on foot, passed up and down the sacred stairway        _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

 Map of the author’s route                                            12

 Our first view of Seoul, in which the former Temple of
   Heaven is now a smoking-room in a Japanese hotel
   garden                                                             16

 The interior of a Korean house                                       16

 Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter                  17

 At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a
   little oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his
   precious horsehair hat                                             17

 Some of the figures, in the gaudiest of colors,
   surrounding the Golden Buddha in a Korean temple                   32

 The famous “White Buddha,” carved, and painted in white,
   on a great boulder in the outskirts of Seoul                       32

 One day, descending the hills toward Seoul, we heard a
   great jangling hubbub, and found two sorceresses in
   full swing in a native house, where people come to
   have their children “cured”                                        33

 The _yang-ban_, or loafing upper class of Korea, go in
   for archery, which is about fitted to their
   temperament, speed, and initiative                                 33

 The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmic _rat-a-tat_
   of which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in
   the peninsula                                                      40

 Winding thread before one of the many little
   machine-knit stocking factories in Ping Yang                       40

 The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with
   their green mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully
   tended by the superstitious descendants                            41

 A chicken peddler in Seoul                                           48

 A full load                                                          48

 The plowman homeward wends his weary way—in Korean
   fashion, always carrying the plow and driving his
   unburdened ox or bull before him. One of the most
   common sights of Korea                                             49

 The biblical “watch-tower in a cucumber patch” is in
   evidence all over Korea in the summer, when crops
   begin to ripen. Whole families often sleep in them
   during this season, when they spring up all over the
   country, and often afford the only cool breeze                     49

 A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper
   in his high hat at the rear                                        64

 The interior of a native Korean school of the old
   type,—dark, dirty, swarming with flies, and loud with
   a constant chorus                                                  64

 In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea               65

 The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean
   cooking                                                            65

 One of the monks of Yu-jom-sa                                        68

 This great cliff-carved Buddha, fifty feet high and
   thirty broad, was done by Chinese artists centuries
   ago. Note my carrier, a full-sized man, squatting at
   the lower left-hand corner                                         68

 The carved Buddhas of Sam-pul-gam, at the entrance to
   the gorge of the Inner Kongo, were chiseled by a
   famous Korean monk five hundred years ago                          69

 The camera can at best give only a suggestion of the
   sheer white rock walls of Shin Man-mul-cho, perhaps
   the most marvelous bit of scenery in the Far East                  69

 Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just
   across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the
   relative inadequacy of their crippled feet                         76

 The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of
   Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most
   modern cities of the Far East                                      76

 A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the
   Russians at Port Arthur. Hundreds of such war
   memorials are preserved by the Japanese on the sites
   of their first victory over the white race                         77

 The empty Manchu throne of Mukden                                    77

 The Russian so loves a uniform, even after the land it
   represents has gone to pot, that even school-boys in
   Vladivostok usually wear them,—red bands, khaki, black
   trousers, purple epaulets                                          80

 A Manchu woman in her national head-dress, bargaining
   with a street vender of Mukden for a cup of tea                    80

 A common sight in Harbin,—a Russian refugee, in this
   case a blind boy, begging in the street of passing
   Chinese                                                            81

 A Russian in Harbin—evidently not a Bolshevik or he
   would be living in affluence in Russia                             81

 The grain of the _kaoliang_, one of the most important
   crops of North China. It grows from ten to fifteen
   feet high and makes the finest of hiding-places for
   bandits                                                            96

 A daily sight in Vladivostok,—a group of youths
   suspected of opinions contrary to those of the
   Government, rounded up and trotted off to prison                   96

 A refugee Russian priest, of whom there were many in
   Harbin                                                             97

 Types of this kind swarm along the Chinese Eastern
   Railway of Manchuria, many of them volunteers in the
   Chinese army or railway police                                     97

 One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray,
   with green domes and golden crosses, with much gaudy
   trimming                                                          100

 A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down
   upon                                                              100

 Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks
   in the “thieves” market of Harbin—when they catch any
   one who can afford to be blacked                                  101

 Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok,
   selling second-hand hardware of every description,
   suggest why the factories and trains of Bolshevik
   Russia have difficulty in running                                 101

 The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil ten or
   more hours a day for twenty coppers, about six cents
   in our money                                                      108

 Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no
   automobile can climb to the great Mongolian plateau
   unassisted                                                        108

 Some of the camel caravans we passed on the Gobi seemed
   endless. This one had thirty dozen loaded camels and
   more than a dozen outriders                                       109

 But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing
   home-made two-wheeled carts, often with a flag,
   sometimes the Stars and Stripes, flying at the head               109

 The Mongol would not be himself without his horse,
   though to us this would usually seem only a pony                  112

 Mongol authorities examining our papers, which Vilner is
   showing, at Ude. Robes blue, purple, dull red, etc.
   Biggest Chinaman on left                                          113

 A group of Mongols and stray Chinese watching our
   arrival at the first _yamen_ of Urga                              113

 The frontier post of Ude, fifty miles beyond the
   uninhabited frontier between Inner and Outer Mongolia,
   where Mongol authorities examine passports and very
   often turn travelers back                                         128

 Chinese travelers on their way to Urga. It is
   unbelievable how many muffled Chinamen and their
   multifarious junk one “Dodge” will carry                          128

 The Mongol of the Gobi lives in a _yourt_ made of heavy
   felt over a light wooden framework, which can be taken
   down and packed in less than an hour when the spirit
   of the nomad strikes him                                          129

 Mongol women make the felt used as houses, mainly by
   pouring water on sheep’s wool                                     129

 The upper town of Urga, entirely inhabited by lamas, has
   the temple of Ganden, containing a colossal standing
   Buddha, rising high above all else. It is in Tibetan
   style and much of its superstructure is covered with
   pure gold                                                         144

 Red lamas leaving the “school” in which hundreds of them
   squat tightly together all day long, droning through
   their litany. They are of all ages, equally filthy and
   heavily booted. Over the gateway of the typical Urga
   palisade is a text in Tibetan, and the cylinders at
   the upper corners are covered with gleaming gold                  144

 High class lamas, in their brilliant red or yellow
   robes, great ribbons streaming from their strange
   hats, are constantly riding in and out of Urga. Note
   the bent-knee style of horsemanship                               145

 A high lama dignitary on his travels, free from the gaze
   of the curious, and escorted by mounted lamas of the
   middle class                                                      145

 A youthful lama turning one of the myriad
   prayer-cylinders of Urga. Many written prayers are
   pasted inside, and each turn is equivalent to saying
   all of them                                                       152

 The market in front of Hansen’s house. The structure on
   the extreme left is not what it looks like, for they
   have no such in Urga, but it houses a prayer-cylinder             152

 Women, whose crippled feet make going to the shops
   difficult, do much of their shopping from the
   two-boxes-on-a-pole type of merchant, constant
   processions of whom tramp the highways of China                   153

 An itinerant blacksmith-shop, with the box-bellows
   worked by a stick handle widely used by craftsmen and
   cooks in China                                                    153

 Pious Mongol men and women worshiping before the
   residence of the “Living Buddha” of Urga, some by
   throwing themselves down scores of times on the
   prostrating-boards placed for that purpose, one by
   making many circuits of the place, now and again
   measuring his length on the ground                                160

 The Mongols of Urga disposed of their dead by throwing
   the bodies out on the hillsides, where they are
   quickly devoured by the savage black dogs that roam
   everywhere                                                        160

 Mongol women in full war-paint                                      161

 Though it was still only September, our return from Urga
   was not unlike a polar expedition                                 161

 Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall
   of the Tartar City                                                176

 The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists
   of (left to right) ama, rickshaw-man, “boy,” coolie,
   and cook                                                          176

 A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on
   the wall                                                          177

 Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our
   quarter                                                           177

 At Chinese New Year the streets of Peking were gay with
   all manner of things for sale, such as these
   brilliantly colored paintings of native artists                   192

 A rich man died in our street, and among other things
   burned at his grave, so that he would have them in
   after-life, were this “automobile” and two
   “chauffeurs”                                                      192

 A neighbor who gave his birds a daily airing                        193

 Just above us on the Tartar Wall were the ancient
   astronomical instruments looted by the Germans in 1900
   and recently returned, in accordance with a clause in
   the Treaty of Versailles                                          193

 Preparing for a devil dance at the lama temple in Peking            208

 The devil dancers are usually Chinese street urchins
   hired for the occasion by the languid Mongol lamas of
   Peking                                                            208

 The street sprinklers of Peking work in pairs, with a
   bucket and a wooden dipper. This is the principal
   street of the Chinese City “outside Ch’ien-men”                   209

 The Forbidden City is for the most part no longer that,
   but open in more than half its extent to the
   ticket-buying public                                              209

 In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven                         224

 Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like
   his father and grandfather before him, plays only
   female parts                                                      224

 Over the wall from our house boats plied on the moat
   separating us from the Chinese City                               225

 Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night soil of
   the city, brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as
   fertilizer                                                        225

 For three thousands miles the Great Wall clambers over
   the mountains between China and Mongolia                          240

 One of the mammoth stone figures flanking the road to
   the Ming Tombs of North China, each of a single piece
   of granite                                                        240

 Another glimpse of the Great Wall                                   241

 The twin pagodas of Taiyüan, capital of Shansi Province             241

 The three _p’ai-lous_ of Hsi Ling, the Western Tombs                248

 In Shansi four men often work at as many windlasses over
   a single well to irrigate the fields                              249

 Prisoners grinding grain in the “model prison” of
   Taiyüan                                                           249

 A few of the 508 Buddhas in one of the lama temples of
   Jehol                                                             256

 The youngest, but most important—since she has borne him
   a son—of the wives of a Manchu chief of one of the
   tomb-tending towns of Tung Ling                                   256

 Interior of the notorious Empress Dowager’s tomb at Tung
   Ling, with her cloth-covered chair of state and colors
   to dazzle the stoutest eye                                        257

 The Potalá of Jehol, said to be a copy, even in details,
   of that of Lhasa. The windows are false and the great
   building at the top is merely a roofless one enclosing
   the chief temple                                                  257

 Behind Tung Ling the great forest reserve which once
   “protected” the tombs from the evil spirits that
   always come from the north was recently opened to
   settlers, and frontier conditions long since forgotten
   in the rest of China prevail                                      260

 Much of the plowing in the newly opened tract is done in
   this primitive fashion                                            260

 The face of the mammoth Buddha of Jehol, forty-three
   feet high and with forty-two hands. It fills a
   four-story building, and is the largest in China
   proper, being identical, according to the lamas, with
   those of Urga and Lhasa                                           261

 A Chinese inn, with its heated _k’ang_, may not be the
   last word in comfort, but it is many degrees in
   advance of the earth floors of Indian huts along the
   Andes                                                             261

 The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone
   stairway which ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,”
   here seen in the upper right-hand corner                          268

 One of the countless beggar women who squat in the
   center of the stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every
   pilgrim to drop at least a “cash” into each basket                268

 Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan,
   capital of Shantung                                               269

 A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most
   sacred of the five holy peaks of China                            269

 A priest of the Temple of Confucius                                 272

 The grave of Confucius is noted for its simplicity                  272

 The sanctum of the Temple of Confucius, with the statue
   and spirit—tablet of the sage, before which millions
   of Chinese burn joss-sticks annually                              273

 Making two Chinese elders of a Shantung village over
   into Presbyterians                                                288

 Messrs. Kung and Meng, two of the many descendants of
   Confucius in Shantung flanking one of those of Mencius            288

 Some of the worst cases still out of bed in the American
   leper-home of Tenghsien, Shantung, were still full of
   laughter                                                          289

 Off on an “itinerating” trip with an American missionary
   in Shantung, by a conveyance long in vogue there.
   Behind, one of the towers by which messages were sent,
   by smoke or fire, to all corners of the old Celestial
   Empire                                                            289

 On the way home I changed places with one of our three
   wheelbarrow coolies, and found that the contrivance
   did not run so hard as I might otherwise have believed            304

 The men who use the roads of China make no protest at
   their being dug up every spring and turned into fields            304

 Sons are a great asset to the wheelbarrowing coolies of
   Shantung                                                          305

 A private carriage, Shantung style                                  320

 Shackled prisoners of Lao-an making hair-nets for the
   American market                                                   320

 School-girls in the American mission school at Weihsien,
   Shantung                                                          321

 The governor’s mansion at Tsingtao, among hills
   carefully reforested by the Germans, followed by the
   Japanese, has now been returned to the Chinese after a
   quarter of a century of foreign rule                              321

 Chinese farming methods include a stone roller, drawn by
   man, boy, or beast, to break up the clods of dry earth            336

 Kaifeng, capital of Honan Province, has among its
   population some two hundred Chinese Jews, descendants
   of immigrants of centuries ago                                    336

 A cave-built blacksmith and carpenter-shop in
   Kwanyintang where the Lunghai railway ends at present
   in favor of more laborious means of transportation                337

 An illustrated lecture in China takes place outdoors in
   a village street, two men pushing brightly colored
   pictures along a two-row panel while they chant some
   ancient story                                                     337

 In the Protestant Mission compound of Honanfu the
   missionaries had tied up this thief to stew in the sun
   for a few days, rather than turn him over to the
   authorities, who would have lopped off his head                   344

 Over a city gate in western Honan two crated heads of
   bandits were festering in the sun and feeding swarms
   of flies                                                          344

 A village in the loess country, which breaks up into
   fantastic formations as the stoneless soil is worn
   away by the rains and blown away by the winds                     345

 I take my turn at leading our procession of mule litters
   and let my companions swallow its dust for a while                352

 The road down into Shensi. Once through the great
   arch-gate that marks the provincial boundary, the road
   sinks down into the loess again, and beggars line the
   way into Tungkwan                                                 352

 Hwa-shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China                 353

 An example of Chinese military transportation                       353

 Coal is plentiful and cheap in Shensi, and comes to
   market in Sian-fu in wheelbarrows, there to await
   purchasers                                                        360

 The holy of holies of the principal Sian-fu mosque has a
   simplicity in striking contrast to the demon-crowded
   interiors of purely Chinese temples                               360

 Our carts crossing a branch of the Yellow River fifty
   _li_ west of the Shensi capital                                   361

 Women and girls do much of the grinding of grain with
   the familiar stone roller of China, in spite of their
   bound feet                                                        361

 An old tablet in the compound of the chief mosque at
   Sian-fu, purely Chinese in form, except that the base
   has lost its likeness to a turtle and the writing is
   in Arabic                                                         368

 This famous old portrait of Confucius, cut on black
   stone, in Sian-fu is said to be the most authentic one
   in existence                                                      368

 A large town of cave-dwellers in the loess country, and
   the terraced fields which support it                              369

 Samson and Delilah. This blind boy, grinding grain all
   day long, marches round and round his stone mill with
   the same high lifted feet and bobbing head of the late
   Caruso in the opera of that name                                  369

 The East Gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the
   capital of Shensi, rises like an apartment-house above
   the flat horizon                                                  384

 All manner of aids to the man behind the wheelbarrow are
   used in his long journey in bringing wheat to market,
   some of them not very economical                                  384

 The Western Gate of Sian-fu, through which we continued
   our journey to Kansu                                              385

 A “Hwei-Hwei,” or Chinese Mohammedan, keeper of an
   outdoor restaurant                                                385

 In the Mohammedan section of Sian-fu there are men who,
   but for their Chinese garb and habits, might pass for
   Turks in Damascus or Constantinople                               400

 Our chief cartman eating dinner in his favorite posture,
   and holding in one hand the string of “cash,” one
   thousand strong and worth about an American quarter,
   which served him as money                                         400

 A bit of cliff-dwelling town in the loess country, where
   any other color than a yellowish brown is extremely
   rare                                                              401

 A corner of a wayside village, topped by a temple                   401

 The Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed about once a
   month by the itinerant barber. This one is just in the
   act of adding a switch. Note the wooden comb at the
   back of the head                                                  408

 An old countryman having dinner at an outdoor restaurant
   in town on market day has his own way of using chairs
   or benches                                                        408

 A Chinese soldier and his mount, not to mention his
   worldly possessions                                               409

 Mongol women on a joy-ride                                          409

 Two blind minstrels entertaining a village by
   singsonging interminable national ballads and legends,
   to which they keep time by beating together resonant
   sticks of hard wood                                               416

 The boys and girls of western China are “toughened” by
   wearing nothing below the waist and only one ragged
   garment above it, even in midwinter                               416

 The “fast mail” of interior China is carried by a pair
   of coolies, in relays of about twenty miles each, made
   at a jog-trot with about eighty pounds of mail apiece.
   They travel night and day and get five or six American
   dollars a month                                                   417

 A bit of the main street of Taing-Ning, showing the
   damage wrought by the earthquake of two years before
   to the “devil screen” in front of the local
   magistrate’s _yamen_                                              417

 This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest                      436

 A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to
   escort us through the earthquake district, though
   whether for fear of bandits, out of mere respect for
   our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a few
   coppers which he could not give them himself, was not
   clear                                                             436

 Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old
   tree-lined highway. In places this was covered
   hundreds of feet deep for miles, in others it had been
   carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile or more
   away                                                              437

 In the earthquake district of western China whole
   terraced mountain-sides came down and covered whole
   villages. In the foreground is a typical Kansu farm               437

 Kansu earlaps are very gaily embroidered in colored
   designs of birds, flowers, and the like. Pipes are
   smaller than their “ivory” mouthpieces                            444

 It is a common sight in some parts of Kansu to see men
   knitting, and still more so to meet little girls whose
   feet are already beginning to be bound                            444

 The village scholar displays his wisdom by reading where
   all can see him—through spectacles of pure plate-glass            445

 A Kirghiz in the streets of Lanchow, where many races of
   Central Asia meet                                                 445

 An _ahong_, or Chinese Mohammedan mullah of Lanchow                 448

 Mohammedan school-girls, whose garments were a riot of
   color                                                             448

 A glimpse of Lanchow, capital of China’s westernmost
   province, from across the Yellow River                            449

 Looking down the valley of Lanchow, across several
   groups of temples at the base of the hills, to the
   four forts built against another Mohammedan rebellion             449

 A Kansu vista near Lanchow, where the hills are no
   longer terraced, but where towns are numerous and much
   alike                                                             464

 This method of grinding up red peppers and the like is
   wide-spread in China. Both trough and wheel are of
   solid iron                                                        464

 Oil is floated down the Yellow River to Lanchow in whole
   ox-hides that quiver at a touch as if they were alive             465

 The Yellow River at Lanchow, with a water-wheel and the
   American bridge which is the only one that crosses it
   in the west                                                       465

 The Chinese protect their boys from evil spirits (the
   girls do not matter) by having a chain and padlock put
   about their necks at some religious ceremony, which
   deceives the spirits into believing that they belong
   to the temple. Earlaps embroidered in gay colors are
   widely used in Kansu in winter                                    480

 Many of the faces seen in Western China hardly seem
   Chinese                                                           480

 A dead man on the way to his ancestral home for burial,
   a trip that may last for weeks. Over the heavy
   unpainted wooden coffin were brown bags of fodder for
   the animals, surmounted by the inevitable rooster                 481

 Our party on the return from Lanchow,—the major and
   myself flanked by our “boys” and cook respectively,
   these in turn by the two cart-drivers, with our
   alleged _mafu_, or groom for our riding animals, at
   the right                                                         481

 A typical farm hamlet of the Yellow River valley in the
   far west where some of the farm-yards are surrounded
   by mud walls so mighty that they look like great
   armories                                                          496

 The usual kitchen and heating-plant of a Chinese inn,
   and the kind on which our cook competed with hungry
   coolies in preparing our dinners                                  496

 The midwinter third-class coach in which I returned to
   Peking                                                            497

 No wonder I was mistaken for a Bolshevik and caused
   family tears when I turned up in Peking from the west             497

The author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to Mr. Edwin S.
Mills of Peking, China, for the use of the pictures of Urga.




                              WANDERING IN
                             NORTHERN CHINA




                               CHAPTER I
                       IN THE LAND WE CALL KOREA


The traveler from Japan to the peninsula still known to the Western
world as Korea has a sense of being wafted on some magic carpet
thousands of miles while he slept, a sensation which the splendid
steamers bridging the Straits of Tsushima several times a day do not
dispel. It is surprising how different two lands separated only by a few
hours on the sea can be. A fortnight on a Nippon Yusen Kaisha liner and
six weeks of wandering from end to end of the Island Empire gave us a
Japanese background against which many of the problems of the Far East
stood out more clearly, but it did very little to prepare us for the
physical aspects of the “Cho-sen” over which the banner of the rising
sun now waves. Those who have listened to the long and heated
controversy over the adding of this large slice of mainland to the
mikado’s realm must often have heard the apologists’ assertion that the
two peoples, Japanese and Koreans, are so nearly alike as to be
virtually the same. Perhaps they are; but if so, all the outward
evidences the casual visitor must depend upon to form an opinion are
deceiving. Superficially, at least, Japan and Korea are as different as
two Oriental lands and races could well be. In landscape, customs,
costumes, point of view, general characteristics, even in the details of
personal appearance, the two shores of the Sea of Japan strike the
new-comer as having very little in common.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Korea, to any one newly arrived
from Japan, is her treelessness. The lack of forests is, with the
possible exception of exclamations of incredulity over her extraordinary
costumes, almost certain to be the subject of any Occidental’s first
paragraph of Korean notes. In our own case this denuded aspect of the
peninsula was emphasized by the blazing, cloudless sunshine that beat
relentlessly down during all our first day of travel northward to the
old capital, and on many another to follow. The bare and sun-scorched
landscape suggested some victim of barbarian cruelty, who, stripped of
his garments, was being tortured to death by slow roasting. Possibly we
should have been prepared for this, but we were not. We had heard much
of the doings of Japan in Korea; we knew something of the opera-bouffe
hats of the men and the startlingly short waists of the women, but no
one had ever told us of the curiously pure and molten sunshine of
“Cho-sen,” of the vividness of its shadows and the filtered transparency
of its air, nor, for that matter, of the incessant heat we must endure
because chance allotted us from June to August in what was once the
Hermit Kingdom.

Trees as sparse as the hairs of a Korean beard stood out in lonely
isolation across the more or less flat lands of all that first day’s
journey; beyond these, usually rather near at hand, rose scarred and
repulsive hillsides as unsightly as the faces of those countless
inhabitants along the way who had been visited by the “honorable spirit”
of smallpox. It was not merely the barrenness of a naturally treeless
country, a barrenness as dreary as those upper reaches of the Andes to
which real vegetation never attains, but one which, like the denuded
plains of Spain, visibly complains of the wanton violence of man. To be
sure, many of the rocky hills that sometimes rose to be almost mountains
were here and there thinly covered with evergreen shrubs which might
some day be trees, and even forests. But these, travelers are informed
with what becomes tiresome persistency, were planted by the new
Government. The Japanese policy of reforestation, we were eventually to
know, has already done excellent things for Korea, and that not merely,
as those who resent the rape of the peninsula assert, where it will
attract the passing tourist’s eye, and it promises in time to accomplish
something worth while; but it is an unfortunate Japanese trait to fear
that good deeds will not speak loudly enough for themselves.

The reducing of a once well wooded land to its present nude state is
characteristic of the Korean, we were to learn, suggestive of his
general point of view. In the olden days the people were often driven to
the hills by their savage or demented rulers, and as the rigorous
winters that contrast with the tropical summers came on, they not only
burned the trees, but as roots make excellent charcoal they dug up even
these, leaving nothing that might by any chance sprout again. To replant
in better times, to take any serious thought for the morrow, would have
been un-Korean. The Korean even of to-day who covets the half-dozen
cherries or plums on a limb does not usually take the trouble to pick
them; he breaks off the branch and goes his way munching the fruit, with
never a thought of next year. Translate this improvidence, this almost
complete lack of foresight, into all the details of daily life, and the
condition and the final fate of Korea become understandable, in fact
inevitable.

Woods survive to any great extent in Korea only in two places—about
royal tombs and up along the Yalu River which forms the northern
frontier. Elsewhere in the peninsula, with minor exceptions, there are
only groups of trees planted by foreign missionaries, and rows of pine
shrubs set out directly by the Japanese Government, or by local
authorities, school children, or private individuals, under Japanese
influence. This treelessness is not the unimportant detail many may
think; it is the wanton destruction of her forests of long ago that
gives the Korea of to-day her mainly mud houses, much of her filth,
dust, and swarming flies, and those devastating floods of the rainy
season which sweep roads, bridges, fields, and even villages before
them.

There were many other things which gave the Korean landscape its
strikingly un-Japanese aspect. Fewer people were working in the larger
and less garden-like fields; the village roofs thatched with rice-straw
had a flatter, smoother look than the homes of Japanese peasants; the
towns themselves seemed to huddle together as closely and
inconspicuously as possible, as if to escape, or join in resisting, the
rapacious tax-gatherers of the olden days that are not forgotten.
Koreans in white, their inevitable color, so rare in Japan, were
everywhere, though more often in the shade of villages or rare wayside
trees or huts than out in the baking sunshine. The suggestion forced
itself upon us that perhaps the fields were larger because the people
could not coax themselves to work alone. In Japan it had been unusual to
see more than a peasant and his wife in the same field; here work seemed
to be done almost entirely by gangs. In spite of the general aridness of
the landscape, there were many flooded rice-fields, and in nearly all of
them waded a soldier-like line of often a dozen laborers, as many women
as men among them. Much of the country showed no signs of the languid
hand of man, yet even in the drier sections scattered rows of these
peasants, their garments still almost snow-white at a distance, gleamed
forth in the otherwise mainly reddish landscape.

Similar groups stood in semicircles on earth threshing-floors flailing
grain in a way that is familiar to the Western world, but which we had
never seen in Japan. Nor were there any reminders of the Island Empire
in the clusters of women kneeling at the edge of every bit of a stream
or mud-hole paddling clothes with a sort of cricket-bat. The ways of
life, the very architecture, were strangely reminiscent of lands
inhabited by negroes.

The most primitive of plows, drawn by bulls, dragged their way to and
fro in a field here and there. Along what passed for roads others of
these lumbering animals plodded almost hidden under loads of new-cut
grain or brushwood, at a pace which seemed to fit the languid
temperament of the country. In places a highway, constructed by the new
rulers, tried to preserve an unbroken march; but wherever a bridge
should have been they almost invariably pitched headlong down into the
bed of a stream as waterless as those of summer-time Spain. Even the
Japanese, we were to learn before leaving the peninsula, are poor
bridge-builders, while the Korean remains true to his natural
improvidence in constructing flimsy things of branches and earth, with
totally inadequate abutments, which the first dash of the rainy season
down the treeless hillsides converts into scattered masses of rubbish.

All the day long the scene varied little from these first few glimpses.
There was a certain rough beauty in the tawny hillsides and the broad
stretches of sun-flooded rice lands, but of a similarity that grew
monotonous, while the ways of the people, until opportunity should come
to see them in closer detail, were such as the fleeting tourist is wont
to sum up under the outworn word “picturesque” and quickly lose from
between the pages of memory. Korea has often been called a land of
villages, and in all the two hundred and eighty miles from the southern
point of the peninsula to Seoul there was little more than a frequent
succession of smooth-thatched, closely snuggled towns varying, outwardly
at least, only in size. Not until later on, and by more primitive means
of travel, were we to know of the remnants of bygone civilization, the
pine-grove tombs of royalty, the ruined palaces of fallen dynasties, and
the welter of modern problems with which the peninsula teems.


The Korean wardrobe has so little in common with that of the Occident,
and includes so many startling absurdities, that it merits a few words
in detail, even though some of its more striking features are fairly
familiar to those interested in foreign lands. To begin with the basis
of all wardrobes, there is that ingenious contrivance with which the
Korean gentleman protects his other garments from perspiration during
the blazing months of summer. A missionary who carried home a set of
these and offered them to any one in his native parish who could
identify them recorded forty-two guesses, all equally wide of the mark,
which was the simple phrase “summer underwear.” Out of their environment
these useful garments look more like primitive bird-cages or light
baskets than what they really are. In their entirety they consist of a
kind of waistcoat, a high collar of the Elizabethan period, and cuffs so
long as to be almost sleeves—all made of small strips of ratan very
loosely woven together. That they are effective in allowing the free
circulation of air, and at the same time preserve the cloth garments
from contact with the perspiring body, one is willing to grant without
the evidence of actual personal experience. Now and again one runs
across a Japanese petty official who, in an effort to mitigate his
midsummer sufferings, has adopted at least the cuffs; but on the whole
this ingenious contribution is likely to suffer the common fate of never
finding appreciation beyond its native habitat.

Over his ratan skin-protectors the Korean gentleman wears a kind of
waistcoat-shirt, trousers (if so commonplace a term may be used for so
uncommonplace a garment) which are more than voluminous even in use and,
when hung out to dry, suggest the mainsails of a wind-jammer, and
finally a _turamaggie_, an overcoat reaching to the calves and tied
together with a bow over the right breast. All these articles are
snow-white, and in summer are made of a vegetable fiber so thin as to
suggest starched cheese-cloth. The mainsail trousers are fastened
tightly about the ankles with a winding of cloth, which also supports
the carefully foot-shaped and curiously thick white socks, which are
thrust into low slippers cut well away at the instep, slippers formerly
of leather richly embroidered or otherwise decorated, but now rapidly
giving way to the white or reddish rubber ones made in Japan which are
ruining the feet of Korea. The crowning glory and absurdity of this _de
rigueur_ costume, however, is the head-dress. About the brow is bound,
so tightly as to cause violent headaches when first adopted and to leave
lifelong marks, a black band about four inches wide and reaching well up
over the curve of the head. On top of this sits a brimless cap shaped
like a fez with an L-shaped indentation in its front, and finally over
all else reigns an uncollapsible opera-hat. Both the hat and the cap
beneath it are made of horsehair, or cheap imitations thereof, and are
so loosely woven and screen-like in their transparency that facetious
and unkindly foreigners are wont to refer to them as “fly-traps.” This
term is as unwarranted as it is offensive, for the one place in Korea
which is free from flies in season is the hat-protected crown of the
adult Korean male. One need not take the word of “old-timers,” but will
find ample evidence in photographs of a decade or more ago that the
opera-bouffe contraption with which the Korean gentleman tops himself
off once had brim enough to do duty almost as a real hat. Such
utilitarian days are past, however; perhaps it is that universal bugbear
of the human family, the high cost of living, which has reduced the brim
to little more than a ledge. The fact remains that a fly must walk with
caution now in making a circuit which in the good old days he might
safely have accomplished after sipping long and generously at the edge
of a bowl of _sool_. However, let there be no misapprehension, no
uncalled for sympathy under the impression that this shrinking has
worked hardship upon the wearer. The Korean hat was not designed to be a
protection for the head and a shade for the face. Its purpose in life is
far more serious and is concentrated on one single object,—to protect
from evil spirits the precious topknot which is the badge of full Korean
manhood. Hence its duty is not merely an outdoor one; wicked beings of
the invisible world have no compunction in taking unfair advantage of
their victims, so that to this day it is a common practice for the
Korean man to lay him down to sleep—on his bare papered floor, using a
hardwood brick as a pillow—with his precious top-hat still in place.

However, we have not yet completely garbed our _yang-ban_, our gentleman
of the Land of Morning Calm. His hat, being light, almost ethereal, in
fact, must be held in place, whether in sleep or in the slightest
breeze, for which purpose a black ribbon under the chin serves the
ordinary man and a string of amber beads his haughtier fellow-citizen.
Add to this the unfailing collapsible fan, and a pipe as long and heavy
as a cane, with a bowl the size of the end of the thumb, and you may
vizualize in his entirety the proud gentleman who sallies forth from his
mud hut and picks his way leisurely between the mud-holes and
offal-heaps of any town or city street. The fan is rarely inactive, now
dispensing a breeze to the copper-tinted face of its owner, now shading
it from the direct rays of a burning sun. The pipe, bowl down, swings
with the jaunty aggressiveness of an Englishman’s “stick”; above all
else the features remain fixed and unalterable in their serenity, for in
the code of the genuine Korean gentleman of the old school there is no
greater vulgarity than to show in public either mirth, anger, curiosity,
or annoyance. Nothing could be more specklessly white than this
dignified apparition, for do not his servant-wives spend their days, and
no small portion of their nights, in preparing his garments for the
daily sortie and mingling with his fellows? Behold him, then, as he
joins the latter, in a shop-door or on a shaded street-corner, where he
squats with them in that fashion which has caused a row of Korean males
to be likened to penguins, letting his spotless starched _turamaggie_
spread out on the unswept earth with a carelessness which seems a boast
of his ability to command unlimited female labor.

We must come back again, however, to the incredible hat, as the eyes and
the attention constantly will as long as one remains in Korea. If the
Japanese are commonplace and unoriginal in their head-dress, certainly
their newly captured fellow-subjects make up for it. Set usually at a
jaunty angle, whether by design, breeze, or cranial malformation, a
jauntiness enhanced by its scarcity of brim, the “fly-trap” hat
furnishes Korea half its picturesqueness. Graduates of modern mission or
Japanese government schools, self-complacent young men who have been
abroad, native Christian pastors, may wear the Panama or the felt of the
West above their otherwise national white garb, but the “fly-trap” is
still the prevailing head-dress throughout the length, breadth, and
social strata of the peninsula. Far and wide, in city or village, in
crowded marts or on lonely country roads, indoors or out, awake or
asleep, the high hat is seldom missing. It persists to the very edge of
the frontier, then disappears as suddenly as it had sprung up at the
other extremity of the country. After one has weathered the first shock
it does not look so greatly out of place on your city gentleman, but I
never learned to behold it with proper equanimity on the heads of
porters, plasterers, and peasants. Even the workman without it, however,
is still conspicuous. Tattered, soiled, and sun-scorched men wandering
across the country with a kind of tramp’s pack on their backs wear the
horsehair bird-cage on their heads; perhaps the most incongruous sight
of all is to behold a battered old man of the rice-fields solemnly
squatting on a garbage-heap in his mud hamlet, with his opera hat
perched on guard above his gray and scanty topknot.

Once or twice we caught a glimpse of the light-brown hat formerly worn
by all men about to be married, or to add a new wife to their collection
of servants; once the custom was wide-spread of painting the hat white
in sign of mourning, but to-day black is almost universal, and an
excellent foil to the otherwise white garb. Bridegrooms no longer feel
compelled publicly to announce their happy status, and there is another
and more effective means of showing grief at bereavement,—a mourner’s
hat like a large, finely woven, inverted basket with scalloped edges,
which completely hides the afflicted face of the wearer. As he ambles
along under this ample protection instead of blistering beneath a
horsehair cage, surely a feeling of gratitude toward the departed
relative must pervade the thoughts of the bereaved, particularly as the
Korean term of mourning lasts for three years. There is a still more
enormous, very coarsely woven, sunshade worn by peasants in the
midsummer months, while Buddhist priests, otherwise indistinguishable
from layman tramps and beggars, wear a smaller hat of similar shape to
that of the mourners, but raised on bamboo stilts well above the head.
The horsehair hat is costly, by Korean standards, the better ones even
by our own, and, being put together with glue, is frail and perishable.
Water is particularly fatal to it. Let the first drop of a shower fall,
therefore, and from within the garments of every Korean man appears a
hat-umbrella, a little cone-shaped cover of oiled paper or silk, like a
miniature Japanese parasol, which is quickly opened and slipped over the
precious hat. As to the rest of the male garb, no damage is possible
which cannot be repaired by the return of sunshine or a few hours’ labor
by the women at home. Thus on a rainy day the black heads above white
bodies characteristic of all Korea turn to drenched cheese-cloth
surmounted by oily yellow clowns’ caps.


It is fitting that the wardrobe of the insignificant sex should be
simpler, and more easily described. Except that anything in the way of
head-dress is denied them, lest they compete with the decorative male,
the garb of the Korean women is in the main a crude replica of that of
the men. All reasonably available evidence goes to show that the women
are never permitted the luxury of wickerwork undergarments. Trousers,
socks, and slippers are similar to those worn by the male; above these
is the thinnest and slightest of garments, which barely covers the
shoulders, and over the trousers is worn a white skirt fastened well up
above the floating ribs. In summer at least that is all, except in a few
old-fashioned communities, where a muffling white cloak covering
everything except the eyes and the feet is still occasionally seen.
That, I repeat, is all, and from our puritanical point of view it is not
enough. For the Korean woman insists that the waistline is at the
armpits, and makes no provision to have the upper and lower garments
contiguous, with the result that she displays to the public gaze exactly
that portion of the torso which the women of most nations take pains to
conceal. Missionaries, who are as prone as the rest of us to lose their
native point of view through long contact with other races, assure us
that Korean women are extremely modest. In general deportment the
statement holds water; but a married lady of Korea, marching down the
main thoroughfare of one of our cities in her native garb, would be
granted anything but modesty. One might fancy that the costume was
prescribed by some lascivious tyrant of olden days; those who have
looked deeply into the matter, however, assure us that it is due to the
pride of motherhood. The fact remains that, though the precept and
example of Western nations have tended to lengthen the upper garment
among better-class women of the cities, and particularly among those who
have attended modern schools, the great majority of the adult female sex
in Korea still wear their breasts outside their clothing. Sun-browned
and leather-textured as the face, the plumpness of matrons or the
withered rags of age are almost always in plain, not to say insistent,
evidence. In fact neither the men nor the women of the masses often
succeed in making both garments meet; males below the _turamaggie_ class
as habitually display their navels as their wives do their bosoms.

White is as universally the color of Korean garments in winter as in
summer; the only difference is that they thicken from cheese-cloth to
cotton-padded ones as the cold season advances. The incongruous sight of
skaters in what looks like tropical garb, of whole towns of people
wading through the snow from which they are barely distinguishable,
provokes the wonder of winter visitors. The whiteness of a Korean crowd
can be duplicated nowhere on earth. Within the lifetime of any one
capable of reading these lines the glimpse of a figure in dark or
colored garments anywhere in the peninsula betrayed it at once as that
of a foreigner. The first record of any variation from this rule was
when, a decade ago, the upper classmen of a mission school in Seoul
agreed by resolution to adopt dark European trousers, in order to spare
their wives or mothers some of their incessant washing and ironing.

The sounds of these two occupations are never silent in Korea. Stand on
an eminence above any town or city of the land, and to the ears will be
borne the similar yet easily distinguishable _rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat_ of a
hundred housewives busy with one or the other of their two principal
duties. How they attain the snowy whiteness required by their
unaffectionate masters by paddling their garments at the edge of any
mud-hole or trickle of sewage is one of the mysteries of the East; yet
not a roadside puddle or a hollowed rock but is turned into a wash-tub,
and never is the visible result outwardly anything but spotless purity.
In contrast to the dull _plump-a-plump_ of washing paddles is this
falsetto tone of ironing, prolonged far into every night. Nay, wake up
at any hour and it will be strange if you do not catch the sound of some
distant housewife putting the finishing touches on the garments in which
her lord will strut forth into the world in the morning. For in Korea
the hot iron is not in vogue, except a tiny one used along the sewed or
pasted seams. Instead, the clothing is folded over a hardwood cylinder
and beaten with two miniature baseball-bats, beaten with an endless
persistency that suggests an unsuspected durability in the apparently
flimsy material, and with a rhythm that has grown almost musical with
centuries of practice.

Children are often dressed in colors, and unmarried maidens may wear
garments of a green or bluish tinge; but all soon succumb to the
omnipresent white. Huge hats not unlike those of men in mourning were
once universally required for young women not yet sentenced to the
servitude of a husband, that their faces might not be disclosed to the
male sex. Missionaries by no means gray in the service recall how
half-acres of these basket-hats used to lie stacked up before native
churches on days of service. But the old order passes, even in the once
Hermit Kingdom, and one may travel far afield now and still perhaps look
in vain for any survival of this long prevalent custom. As in Japan, the
head-dress of the women of Korea is now a matter of hair, in this case
drawn smoothly and tightly down over the scalp, like a cap of oily black
velvet, and tied in a compact little knot behind, decorated perhaps with
a red cloth rosette and thrust through with what looks almost like one
of our new-fashioned nickel-plated lead-pencils.

The Koreans have never been reduced to any such crude expedient as a
bachelor-tax to keep up their marriage-rate. Until very recent years all
boys wore their hair in a long braid up to the day they took a wife.
Even now this custom survives in some outlying districts, though none
yielded more swiftly to the influx of foreign influence. As long as a
man wore a braid he was rated a minor; when he approached manhood he
became more and more a community butt, and shame and ridicule rarely
failed to drive him into an early marriage. Girls, too, had powerful
reasons for not long persisting in the dreadful condition of maidenhood,
not the least among which was the custom, still widely practised, of
burying the body of an unmarried woman in the public highway, to the
everlasting shame of her family to its remotest branches. Moreover, a
Korean woman is not given a name of her own until she has borne a son,
after which she is forever known as “Mother of So-and-So.” Before that
her title, even to her husband, is “_Yea!_” or the slightly more
honorable “_Yea-bo!_” which correspond fairly closely to our
affectionate “Heh!” or “Heh, you!”

[Illustration:

  CHINA
  AND
  JAPAN
]

When the happy day comes that is to put an end to the ridicule of his
fellows and the shame of his parents, the youth transforms his braid
into a topknot, a tightly braided, twisted, and doubled mass of hair an
inch in diameter and about three inches high, standing bolt upright in
the center of his head, and transfixed with a nickeled or silver
ornament similar to that worn by the women. Unlike the cue of the
Chinese, forced upon them as a sign of alien subjection, the topknot is
the Korean’s badge of manhood, his proudest and most precious
possession. Thenceforth one of his most serious problems in life is to
protect it from the powers of evil. About his brow is placed the
painfully tight band that he is seldom again to be seen without this
side of the grave, and he sallies forth under his gleaming new horsehair
hat with the masterly air that befits a man of family cares and
advantages. To its wearers the Korean top-hat must have become, as even
the worst eyesores of human costume will with long use, a thing of
beauty; for though many are the men, and myriad the youths, who now cut
their hair in Western fashion, numbers even of these still cling to the
native hat, while shopkeepers with close-cropped heads, or those whom
the evil spirits have outwitted and left bald, may be seen squatting
among their wares virtually without clothing but with the discredited
head-gear precariously perched upon their bare heads.

Once in a dog’s age even now a country youth turns up at a government or
a mission school wearing the braid that not long ago was universal among
unmarried males, or, since early marriages are still in vogue, with a
topknot; but it is seldom that the end of the first week does not find
his fashion changed. Pseudo-pathetic stories still come in from the
outlying districts of mothers who wept their eyes red at the cutting of
a son’s braid, or of conservative old fathers wrathfully driving from
home youths who have sacrificed the topknot that stands for manhood. But
the shearing goes steadily on, and thus is passing one of Korea’s most
conspicuous idiosyncrasies. The bachelor braid down the back yielded
swiftly to foreign influence; a generation hence the topknot, perhaps
even the stovepipe screen that surmounts it, may be as unknown in the
peninsula as the pre-Meiji male head-dress is now in Japan.


If one takes heed not to carry the likeness too far, the Korean might be
described as a cross between the Japanese and the Chinese. Some of his
traits and customs resemble those of one or the other of his immediate
neighbors, but a still greater number seem to be peculiar to himself
alone. He builds his house, for example, somewhat like those of Japan;
he heats it somewhat after the fashion in China, yet in neither case is
the similarity more than approximate. Certainly he is content with as
few comforts as any race, with the possible exception of the Chinese,
that ever reached the degree of civilization to which he once attained.
This, of course, is partly due to the centuries of atrocious misrule
under which he lived, when it was unsafe for even the wealthiest of men
to attract the ravenous tax-gatherers, turned loose upon the kingdom in
rival bands by both king and court, by living in anything more than a
thatched mud hovel.

Thus it is that even the larger Korean cities are little more than
numerous clusters of such hovels, huddled together along haphazard
alleyways of dust or mud, except where the hand of the new rulers of the
peninsula, or of those Westerners who have been striving for more than
three decades to Christianize it, show themselves. The typical Korean
house, whether of country or town, is made of adobe bricks or odds and
ends of stone completely plastered over, inside and out, with mud. Thus
the walls remain, until they crumble or wash away, for neither paint nor
whitewash is used to disguise their milk-and-coffee tint. Except in rare
cases, or a few special localities, a rice-straw roof covers them, a
roof so smooth and almost glossy, so low and nearly flat, that a village
suggests a cluster of dead mushrooms. The accepted shape of the dwelling
is that of the half of a square, though in its poorer form it may be
merely a hut somewhat longer than it is wide, and in the more
pretentious cases it sometimes completes the whole square. Whether it
does or not, it must be wholly shut off from the outside world, usually
by a wall or screen of woven straw as high as the eaves and enclosing a
wholly untended dust-bin of a yard between the two ells. The well built
and spick and span servants’ houses erected by a missionary community
near Seoul were unpopular with the domestics because they looked off
across a pretty valley to the mountains, instead of being shut in by the
customary mat-fence.

The outside of the half-square has no openings whatever, but presents to
the world a perfectly blank face. The inside, on the other hand, is
little else than openings, across which may be pushed paper walls or
doors somewhat similar to those of Japan. Like the Japanese, the Koreans
are squatters rather than sitters, so that the three living-rooms of the
average dwelling are barely six feet high, and not much more than that
in their other dimensions. The floors are raised somewhat above the
level of the ground outside, and are made of stone and mud, like the
walls, covered with plaster, or sometimes wood, and this in turn by a
heavy, yellow-brown native paper of a consistency between cardboard and
oil-cloth. None of the thick soft mats of the Japanese, nor of his
cushions or padded quilts, soften life by night or day in a Korean home.
When sleep suggests itself, the inmates merely stretch out on the floor
on which they have been squatting, thrust a convenient oak brick under
their heads, and drift into slumber. Rarely do they make any change of
clothing at retiring or rising, the men, as I have said before, often
wearing their top-hats all night. Shoes, or, more exactly, slippers, are
dropped as the wearers come indoors as unfailingly as in Japan on the
ledge of polished wood which forms a cross between a porch and a step
along the front of the house. To the Western eye the lack both of space
and furniture is surprising. In the center of the house, and usually
wide open, is a kind of parlor or sitting-room, at most ten or twelve
feet long, flanked at either end by two little living-rooms no longer
than they are wide, and the house nowhere has a width much greater than
the height of the average Western man. Eating, sleeping, the whole
domestic life, in fact, is carried on in a constant proximity exceeding
that of our most crowded tenements. It looks more like “playing house,”
like a building meant for children to amuse their dolls in, than like
the actual lifelong residence of human beings. This impression is
enhanced by the miniature furniture, usually as scarce as it is small.
There are, of course, no chairs, and no tables unless the little tray
with six-inch legs on which food is served be counted as one. If there
is a student in the family, or the father is engaged in business, there
may be a little writing-desk without legs set flat on the floor;
probably there is a _chang_, or legless chest of drawers, and one of the
famous Korean chests, both more than generously bound in brass, or even
silver if the family is more prosperous than the exterior of the
building ever suggests. That is usually about all, except perhaps a
little sewing-machine run by hand, and the few trinkets and
inconspicuous odds and ends which the women and children gather about
them.

In the ell, flanking one of the little square living-rooms, is the
kitchen, with earth floor and the crudest of stone-and-plaster stoves
and implements. Next to this, or perhaps across the dusty, sun-baked
yard in the other right-angled extension, is a rough store-room, which
commonly alternates in location with an indispensable chamber offering
much less privacy and convenience than a Westerner could wish. The walls
of the floored rooms are usually covered with plain paper, white or
cream-colored, though sometimes figured in a way that recalls both Japan
and China. In the yard sit half a dozen or more enormous earthenware
jars of the color of chocolate. In one or two of these water is kept;
others are filled with preserved or pickled food, particularly the
Korean’s favorite delicacy, _kimshee_, a kind of sauer-kraut of cabbage
and turnips generously treated with salt and time and rarely missing
from the native menu except in the hot months when it is perforce out of
season.

When it comes to heating his house the Korean takes complete leave of
his island neighbor and turns his face westward. Under the stone floor
runs a large flue, the entire length of the house, connected with the
kitchen at one end and springing out of the ground in the form of a
crude chimney or stovepipe at the other. None of this shivering over a
_hibachi_ filled with a few glowing coals for the otherwise
comfort-scorning Korean; he will have his dwelling well heated from end
to end, not merely his _k’ang_, or stone bed, after the Chinese fashion,
but every nook and corner within doors. While the cooking is going on he
may lie on the papered floor and toast himself to his heart’s content;
or a bundle of brushwood—almost the only fuel left him in his deforested
land—thrust into the business end of the flue in the morning and another
at night makes winter a mere laughing matter. It is an ingenious scheme,
yet not without its drawbacks. In the blazing summer-time, for instance,
there is no way of shutting off the kitchen heat, and the house-warming
goes as merrily on as in January. Not that the native seems to mind; he
is as immune to a hot bed as to a hard one. But many is the foreign
itinerant missionary who, having found lodging on a frosty night with
hosts who would outdo themselves in hospitality, has gratefully
stretched out on a nicely warmed floor and fallen luxuriously asleep—to
awaken half an hour later dripping with perspiration, and toss the night
through in a vain effort to shake off the nightmare impression of having
brought up in that very section of the after-world which all his earthly
efforts had been designed to avoid.

[Illustration:

  Our first view of Seoul, in which the former Temple of Heaven is now a
    smoking-room in a Japanese hotel garden
]

[Illustration:

  The interior of a Korean house
]

[Illustration:

  Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter
]

[Illustration:

  At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a little
    oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his precious horsehair hat
]

Like his neighbors, the Korean eats with chop-sticks, but he uses a flat
metal spoon with his rice. This grain is the basis of the better-class
meal, but is not so highly polished as in Japan; and it is too costly
for the common people, who replace it with cheaper grains, especially
millet. What may seem a hardship is really a blessing. The poverty which
denies them some of the refinements of the table imposes upon the people
of Korea a more healthful diet than that of their island neighbors; in
the mass they are more sturdily built; if all other signs are
insufficient one can usually distinguish a Korean from a Japanese by the
excellence of his teeth. Besides his beloved _kimshee_, no Korean meal
is complete without a pungent sauce made from beans pressed together
into what looks like a grindstone and then soaked in brine, a sauce into
which at least every other mouthful is dipped. Meat is more often eaten
than in Japan; fish, as generally. But tea is not widely used; in its
place the average Korean uses plain water, or the water in which barley
or millet has been cooked, or, best of all, _sool_, cousin of the fiery
_sake_ or _samshu_ of the neighboring lands. Then come a dozen little
side-dishes,—pickled vegetables, some strange, some familiar to us,
cucumbers cut up rind and all, green onions, and some distant member of
the celery family, all immersed in vinegar-and-oil baths, slices of hot
red peppers, tiny pieces of some hardy tuber, brittle sheets of seaweed
cooked in oil until they look as if they had been varnished, a jet-black
kind of lettuce, and other odds and ends for which there are no
equivalents in our language. Sugar is hardly used at all, and the
adaptable traveler who learns to be otherwise satisfied with a native
dinner usually rises to his feet with a longing for a bit of chocolate
or some similar delicacy.


It is curious how geographical names often persist in our languages of
the West long after they have become antiquated and even unknown in the
places to which we apply them. The name “Korea,” for instance, means
nothing to those who live in the peninsula we call by that term; nor for
that matter did the word “Korai” from which we took it ever refer to
more than a third of the country, and that long centuries ago. Ever
since they absorbed the former kingdom the Japanese have striven to get
the world to adopt the native name “Cho-sen” (the “s” is soft), a word
already legitimized by several hundred years of use. But the world is
notoriously backward in making such changes; perhaps it is suspicious of
the motives of Japan, and a bit resentful at her attempt to render whole
pages of our geographies out of date. Yet there is nothing mysterious or
tricky in the wholesale alterations in nomenclature which she has
wrought in her new possession, though there is often irksome annoyance.
Every province, every city, almost every slightest hamlet has been given
a new name; but this has come about as naturally as the Frenchman’s
persistent obstinacy in calling a horse a _cheval_. It is a mere matter
of pronunciation. A given Chinese ideograph stands, and has stood for
centuries, for a given town or village of Korea. The Korean looks at the
character and pronounces it, let us say, “Wonju”; the Japanese knows as
well as we know the word “cat” that the proper pronunciation is
“Genshu”—and there you are. It is hardly a dispute, but it is at least a
new means of harassing the traveler. If he is American or English, or
even French or German, for that matter, he will find that nearly all his
fellow-countrymen resident in the country, mainly missionaries, have
lived there, or been trained by those who have, since before the
Japanese took possession, and that they know only the Korean names. If
he has a guide-book, which is rather essential, it is almost certainly
concocted by the new rulers or under their influence, and insists on
using the Japanese names. So do the railway time-tables, all government
documents, and the like. Thus he discovers that it is almost impossible
to talk with his own people, at least on geographical matters.

“Have you ever been in Heijo?” he begins, with the purpose of pumping a
compatriot for information on that second city of the peninsula.

“Never heard of it,” replies the old resident, with a puzzled air,
whereupon the new-comer gives him up as a hopeless recluse and goes his
way, perhaps to learn a few days later that this very man was for ten
years the most influential foreigner in that very city, but that to him
it has always been, and still is, “Ping Yang.” Thus it goes, throughout
the length and breadth of the peninsula, so that the man who would
mingle with both sides must know that “Kaijo” is “Song-do,” that
“Chemulpo” is “Jinsen,” that what the guide-book and time-table call
“Kanko” has always been “Ham-hung” to the missionaries, that every last
handful of huts in Korea is known by two separate and distinct names,
though the erratic slashes with a weazel-hair brush which stands for it
in the ridiculous calligraphy of the East never varies. Long before his
education has reached this fine point the traveler will have completely
forgotten his resentment at finding, as he rumbles into it at the end of
a long summer day, that the city he has known since has early
school-days as “Seoul” is now officially called “Keijo.”

It doesn’t greatly matter, however, for the chances are that he has
always spoken of it as “Sool,” which is the native fire-water, instead
of using the proper pronunciation of “Sow-ohl”; and to learn the new
name is easier than to change the old. Our own impressions of what was
for more than five centuries the capital of Ch’ao-Hsien, the Land of
Morning Calm, and is still the seat of the Government-General of
Cho-sen, started at delight, sank very near to keen disappointment, then
gradually climbed to somewhere in the neighborhood of calm enjoyment.
Seen from afar, the jagged rows of mountain peaks that surround it
should quicken the pulse even of the jaded wanderer. The promise that
here at last he will find that spell of the ancient East which romancers
have enticed him to seek, in the face of his cold better judgment, seems
to rise in almost palpable waves from among them. Then he descends at a
railway station that might be found in any prairie burg of our central
West, and is bumped away by Ford into a city that is flat and mean in
its superficial aspect, commonplace in form, and swirling with a fine
brown dust. But next morning, or within a day or two of random
wandering, according to the pace at which his moods are geared, interest
reawakens from its lethargy, and something akin to romance and youthful
enthusiasm grows up out of the details of the strange life about him.

There are, of course, almost no real streets, in the American sense, in
the Far East; hence only those wholly unfamiliar with that region will
be greatly surprised to find that the “many broad avenues” of Seoul,
emphasized by semi-propagandist scribblers, are rather few in number
and, with one or two exceptions, are sun-scorched stretches of dust
which the rainy season of July and August will turn to oozing mud. But
the eye will soon be caught by the queer little shops crowded tightly
together along most of them, particularly by the haphazard byways that
lead off from them into the maze of mushroom hovels that make up the
native city. From out of these dirty alleys comes jogging now and then a
gaudy red and gold palanquin in which squats concealed some lady of
quality, though these conveyances now are almost confined to weddings
and funerals; the miserable little mud hovels disgorge haughty gentlemen
in spotless white who would be incredible did not the falsetto
_rat-a-tat_ of ironing and the groups of women kneeling along the banks
of every slightest stream explain them. There is constant movement in
the streets of Keijo, a movement that might almost be called
kaleidoscopic, were it not for the whiteness of Korean dress; but it
strikes one as rather an aimless movement, a leisurely if constant going
to and fro that rarely seems to get anywhere. Dignified _yangbans_, that
still numerous class of Korea, and especially of the capital, which in
the olden days was rated just below the nobility, strut past in their
amber beads and their huge tortoise-shell goggles as if they were really
going somewhere; but if one takes the trouble to follow them he will
probably find them doubling back on their tracks without having reached
any objective. In the olden days they could at least go to the
government offices where they pretended to do something for their
salaries; since Japan has taken away their sinecures without removing
the pride that forbids them to work, there is little else than this
random strolling left for them to do.

In contrast to this numerous gentry, outdistanced by modern changes,
there are sweating coolies lugging this or that, bulls hidden under
mounds of brown-red brushwood from some far-off hillside, sleek-haired
women slinking by with an almost apologetic air, many of them with the
uncovered, sun-browned breasts somewhat less general in the capital than
elsewhere, here and there a Korean pony, cantankerous with his full
malehood, all streaming to and fro between an unbroken gauntlet of
languid shopkeepers in their fly-trap “household” caps, of mangy dogs
and dirty children. “Old-timers” will tell you that this was not so long
ago all there was to Seoul, except inside the several big palace
compounds, now so uninhabited; that walking, still much in vogue among
the Koreans, was for the overwhelming majority the only means of getting
about the city. Then there were no rickshaws, not over-numerous even
to-day after twelve years of wholly Japanese rule; then none of the
little dust- or mud-floored tram-cars, now so crowded, bumped along the
principal avenues; certainly no battered and raucous-voiced automobiles
scattered terror among the placid foot-going population. It is not
difficult to picture the comparative silence of that bygone Seoul, with
slipper-clad footsteps pattering noiselessly through the dust, or the
mild clumping of that cross between the Dutch wooden shoe and the
Japanese _geta_ still worn in muddy weather, punctuated now and then by
the booming of a mammoth bell, the mild hubbub of passing royalty
surrounded by shrieking out-runners, and the incessant accompaniment of
the falsetto _rat-a-tat_ of ironing.

With the definite coming of the Japanese much of that ancient Seoul has
departed. The great wall that enclosed the city has been largely
leveled, for the Koreans, according to their new rulers, can only fight
behind walls. Only a pair of the imposing city gates remain, and these
as mere monuments instead of entrances and exits. The Independence Arch
built to celebrate the end of paying tribute to Peking stands shabby,
cracked, and blistered in a bed of sand in the ragged outskirts. Rubbish
and worse litter the dark, wooden-slatted enclosure in which the mighty
bell that once transmitted royal commands sits drunkenly and dejected on
the ground. Vagabonds build their nests beneath the Oriental roof that
shelters the stone-turtle monument of which the city was once so proud;
the magnificent Altar of Heaven has become a garden ornament within the
grounds of the principal hotel, and is generously furnished with
Japanese settees and capacious cuspidors bearing the railway-hotel
insignia. Of the three principal palaces one is a mere wilderness of
weeds and vacant-eyed edifices; another houses the weak-minded remnant
of the once royal family and has bequeathed most of its grounds to
museum, botanical, and zoölogical purposes; the third, and most
historic, is being completely hidden from the city by a mammoth modern
building designed to become the headquarters of the Governor-General.

One might almost assume that a policy of blotting out the visible
reminders of the old independent Korea had been adopted by the new
rulers. Yet it is hardly that, I fancy, but mainly the utilitarian sense
of modern improvement which is showing such small respect for the
monuments of bygone Cho-sen. The Japanese are ardent in their efforts to
make Seoul a city in the modern sense—the modern Western sense, I could
have said, for their new structures are hardly copied from Japan.
Imposing buildings that might have been transported from our own large
cities are growing up for the housing of banks and important firms and
government offices. There is already one genuinely asphalted street; new
parks have been laid out where only wilderness or rubbish heaps were
before. Besides the big central one there are adequate branch
post-offices in every section of the city; police stations at every turn
keep a watchful eye out for new candidates to the mammoth new
penitentiary, built on the latest approved model, out near the “Peking
Pass.” After their lights the new rulers are steadily improving the
material aspect of the city, as of the whole peninsula. It would be too
much to expect them to improve certain personal habits and domestic
customs beyond the point which the Japanese themselves have reached, so
that some forms of uncleanliness and undress, for instance, which a new
American colony would quickly be forced to eradicate, have been given no
attention.

The new rulers once planned even greater changes in the old city. They
set about with the apparent intention of virtually moving it, or at
least the commercial center of it, down nearer the River Han, in a
section they called Ryuzan. There they built the railway headquarters
and blocks of brick residences for the employees. A stone palace for the
mikado’s viceroy was erected, streets laid out, and improvements
impossible in the crowded portion of the city were projected. But
commerce has a way of choosing its own localities; the Koreans are
nothing if not conservative; local gossip has it that when Prince Ito
was taken down to see his new residence he remarked to his well meaning
subordinates that they might live down there in the swamp if they
wished, but that he for one would stay in town. The prince is well known
to have been no recluse and hermit who would deny himself the soft
pleasures of cities. In the end his choice proved wise, for it is a rare
rainy season that does not wipe out scores of native huts down along the
Han and encroach upon the unused and isolated palace he rejected. The
railway headquarters, residences, and school remain, and trains halt for
an exasperatingly long time at Ryuzan station, so near that of Nandaimon
to which most travelers are bound, almost as if the officials would vent
their pique at having their will thwarted; but even the Japanese
residents have preferred the old city. Along its southern edge, under
the brow of Nansan Hill, dwell and trade that quarter of the fourth of a
million of population which wears kimonos and _getas_, and the stroller
down “Honmachidori” and its adjacent streets, narrow, crowded, busy, and
colorful as a thoroughfare of old Japan, could easily imagine himself
back in the Island Empire, far from the languid, white-clad throngs of
the Land of Morning Calm.




                               CHAPTER II
                     SOME KOREAN SCENES AND CUSTOMS


It was our good fortune to dwell out over the hills beyond Seoul rather
than in the hot and often breathless city itself. The half-hour walk led
up past the big granite Bible School, along a little stream with its
inevitable clothes-paddling women, flanked the grave-mound of a little
prince, then climbed steeply over another half-wooded ridge from which
stretched a wide-spreading mountainous view, everywhere deep green
except for the broad brown streak of the River Han and here and there a
mushroom patch of village. An American mission college was building in a
big hilly pine-grove that owed its preservation to the tomb of a king’s
concubine. Pines as fantastic and sturdy as any in Japan stood out
against the sky-line; here and there a group of stinking chestnut-trees
kept them company. Before they were granted this semi-sacred site the
missionaries from our almost mythological land of “Mi-guk” had to agree
not to build anywhere overlooking the grave; they had already been asked
to close a path used as a short cut by students and an occasional
faculty member, because it ran along the brow of the hill above the
tomb. To look down upon a royal burial site is the height of disrespect
in Korea, hence they are all arranged after a fixed pattern designed to
avoid this sacrilege.

Out beyond the Todaimon, or East Gate, on the opposite side of the city,
is the tomb of a more famous queen; but we preferred what we called our
own, which is identical in form and size, and in a solitude much less
often broken. Besides, “ours” really contained the mortal remains, while
even the finger and a few bones which were all that remained after the
brutal assassination and burning of Korea’s last queen were now buried
elsewhere. Quite like ours are all the royal graves scattered up and
down the peninsula of Cho-sen, in the several regions where succeeding
dynasties built their capitals, flourished for a while, and fell, so
that leisurely to visit it was worth a hasty glimpse of many others.

We could wander up over the pine-clad hill to the grave, for all the
injunction against it; things are not so strict as all that in Korea,
unless something Japanese is involved. But it was more convenient, and
not merely more respectful, to approach the sanctuary from the bottom.
On a level space in the forest, wholly cleared of trees but thick with
grass, there was first of all the caretaker’s residence, a high-walled
compound set off in the edge of the woods to the left. In a direct line
down the center of the grassy rectangle stood first a _torii_, a square
arch made of three light tree-trunks painted red, the upper crosspiece
decorated with crude and fanciful carvings, a gateway without contiguous
fence or wall. The Koreans are sensitive about the use of this symbolic
entrance to their royal tombs; the caretaker of the little prince’s tomb
we passed on our way in or out of Seoul told us one day, when we found
that arch newly closed with barbed wire, that we might still pass
through the grounds, but not beneath the _torii_. A hundred feet or more
through this isolated entrance to her last resting-place stood the
concubine’s prayer-house, so to speak—a large building by Korean
standards, with a roof of highly colored tiles and four flaring
gable-peaks, along which sat as many rows of porcelain monkeys to guard
against evil spirits, as is the Korean custom. Through the many holes
that had been torn by time or inquisitive fingers in the oily paper
serving as glass between the slats of the many padlocked doors, one
could dimly make out a bare wooden floor, scattered with dust and bits
of rubbish, and a bare table-like altar on which, no doubt, boiled rice
and other foods are at certain intervals offered to the spirit of the
dead. It was plain that no such thoughtfulness had been shown recently,
for dust and dinginess and faded paint were the most conspicuous
features of the edifice, inside and out.

Two smaller but similar chapels flanked this main building, behind which
the grass-rug-ed ground rose gradually to the burial mound, another
hundred feet back and some ten feet high. In front of this plain
grass-covered hillock stood a huge stone lantern, like those in Japanese
temple grounds, in the opening of which the reverent or the
superstitious sometimes place offerings of rice. Directly behind this
graceful receptacle rose what we of the West would call a tombstone, a
high upright granite slab standing on a big stone turtle and carved with
Chinese ideographs briefly extolling the departed lady’s alleged
virtues. More fantastic still were the figures about the mound,
duplicated on either side. First came two large stone horses, such as
might be chiseled by some aspiring but untalented school-boy. Then a
pair of stone men, priests, or gods, recalling similar figures in the
ruins of Tiahuanaco beyond Lake Titicaca, gazed at each other with a
sort of smirking, semi-skeptical benignity. Two lions, two rams, and two
mythological beasts, even more crudely fashioned than the rest,
completed the menagerie, all these last with their backs turned to the
mound, out of respect for the departed. Finally an ancient stone wall
with tiled roof threw a protective semicircle close about all this at
the rear, beyond which the rather thin pine forest, gnarled and bent
with age, climbed the hill-slopes across which only disrespectful
mortals ever pass.


About the only Korean thing which moves rapidly is a funeral, and even
this may have been a concession to the incessantly sweltering summer. We
met one rather frequently in the streets of Seoul,—a barbarously
decorated palanquin in blazing reds and yellows, borne by eight or ten
coolies in nondescript garb, who jog-trotted as if in haste to be out of
reach of the evil spirit that had laid low the inert burden inside. If
the latter had been a man of standing and sufficient wealth, there were
two palanquins, the second bearing the actual remains, the first a false
bier meant to deceive the wicked beings of the invisible world. The rest
of the procession was made up of priests in fantastic robes and flaring
head-dresses, leaning back at contented ease in their rickshaws, and a
varying string of relatives and perhaps friends, most of them in
sackcloth and on foot. Just where these incongruously hurrying cortèges
finally brought up we never learned to a certainty until we ourselves
moved out over the hills.

In a hollow not far from our suburban residence rose the ugly red brick
chimney of what we at first took to be a small factory, but which turned
out to be one of the several crematories in the outskirts of Keijo.
Across the valley below us, by the little dirt road that wandered
through the flooded rice-fields, came several funeral processions a day,
announcing themselves by the shrieking auditory distresses which the
Koreans regard as music. The unseemly pace may have slackened somewhat
by this time for it is nearly five miles around the hills by the route
that even man-drawn vehicles must follow; but the clashing of colors was
still in full evidence, standing out doubly distinct against the velvety
green of newly transplanted rice. Now and again a procession halted
entirely for a few moments, while the carriers and pullers stretched
themselves out in the road itself or along the scanty roadside above the
flooded fields. We drifted down one day to one of them that was making
an unusually long halt, and found the chief mourner, a lean old lady of
viperous tongue, in a noisy altercation with the carriers over the price
of their services. But those who halted, or indulged in such
recriminations along the way were, no doubt, of the class that could not
pay for unchecked speed.

Several times, too, when whim took us to town over the high hill from
which an embracing view of Seoul was to be had, we saw processions
returning. Then they were quite different. The chief burden, naturally,
had been left behind, and the palanquins are collapsible, so that
mourners and carriers straggled homeward by the steep direct route as
the spirit moved them, the latter at least contentedly smoking their
long tiny pipes, and musing perhaps on the probability of soon finding
another victim. But the end and consummation of all this gaudy parading
to and fro remained to us only an ugly red brick chimney, standing idle
against its hilly background or emitting leisurely strands of
yellowish-black smoke, according to the demand for its gruesome
services.

Then one evening curiosity got the better of our dislike for unpleasant
scenes, and we strolled out to the uninviting hollow. In it, a little
above the level of the plain, sat a commonplace brick building with half
a dozen furnace-chambers not unlike those of a brick-kiln. Several
Koreans of low class, stripped to the waist, were languidly working
about it, now and then producing discordant noises, which was their
manner of humming a tune. Close before the principal building stood a
smaller one, from which rose the loud chanting of a single voice that
would have won no fame on the Western operatic stage. This, we learned,
belonged to the priest whose duty it was to give each client the
spiritual send-off to which he was entitled by the price of admission to
the furnaces. The cost of cremating a body, explained one of the
workmen, was twelve yen (nearly six dollars), but it included an
hour-long prayer by the priest. The latter was too steadily engaged in
his duties to be interrupted, but the cremators were openly delighted at
the attention of foreigners, and at the opportunity of helping us make
the most of what they called our “sight-see.” Into the ears of the
articulate member of our party, born in Korea, they poured the details
of their calling without reserve. _That_, inside the rude straw-mat
screen which stood between the house of prayer and the door to the
ovens, had come early in the afternoon, they explained, but he was only
a poor man and had to give precedence to his betters. We peered over the
top of the screen and saw a corpse completely wrapped in straw and
fastened to a board with ropes of similar material. Did we care to see
what was left of the last job? one of the coolies wished to know. It was
time that was finished, anyway. He led the way to the back of the
furnaces, opened an iron door, and, catching up a crude, heavy iron
rake, hauled out half a peck of charred bones and ashes. This, he
explained, unnecessarily, as he turned up one still glowing remnant of
bone after another, was a rib, that was a piece of what the man walked
on, and so forth. It was a rich man, he chattered on—to be rich in his
eyes did not, of course, imply being a millionaire—and he had been sent
here all the way from Fusan. The dead man’s relatives, he continued, as
he carelessly raked the still smoking débris into a tin pan and set it
aside to cool, had paid him to keep some of the ashes for them, instead
of dumping them in the common ash-heap. Rich people always did that. But
it was time to get that other fellow there out of the way, and go home
to supper.

“What did he die of?” we asked, as the straw screen was thrown aside and
the planked corpse fully disclosed to view.

“Of a stomachache,” replied one of the two coolies, as they caught up
plank, straw wrapping, and all, and thrust the last “job” into the
furnace, then salvaged the plank with a dexterous twist and jerk. No
flames were visible in the depositing-chamber itself; the heat was
applied externally, so to speak, perhaps as a sort of survival of the
olden days when Korean dead were wrapped in a mat and left to bake and
fester in the sun. We were turning away, satisfied for a lifetime with
one “sight-see” of that kind, when a sound, so out of keeping with the
matter-of-fact tone of the workmen as to be startling, brought us back
again. Out of the semi-darkness had appeared a Korean of the peasant or
porter class, past forty, lean and sun-browned; and with a wail that had
in it something of an animal in extreme distress, he flung himself at
the furnace door as if he would have torn it open and rescued the form
it had for ever swallowed up. We had never suspected the rank-and-file
Korean capable of showing such poignant grief. Nor was it seemly in one
of his standing, evidently, for almost at his second wail the three
carriers who had brought the body rushed down upon him and demanded
forthwith the price of their services. Their strident bargaining rose
high above the dismal, discordant droning of the so-much-a-yard prayers
that had never once ceased during our stay. The surly porters made it
plain that there was no time for vain mourning while the serious matter
of their hire was unsettled.

“He was my older brother,” wept the man, “the last of my family. Have I
any one left? Not one. And now....”

The unsatisfied carriers were still cruelly bullyragging him when we
left, and the sound of their quarreling voices, intermingled with the
never ending droning of the priest, came to us through the night after
we were well on our way home.

It is only the Buddhists who cremate by choice in Korea, and by no means
the majority of the people are of that faith. Many are mere
ancestor-worshipers, or placaters of evil spirits, or have a mixture of
several Oriental faiths and superstitions which they themselves could
not unravel. The non-Buddhists bury their dead, and thereby hangs, as in
China, a serious problem. For definitely circumscribed public cemeteries
will not do. The repose of the departed and the fortune and happiness of
his descendants depends upon the proper choice of a burial-place, which
is by no means a simple matter. It calls for the services of
sorceresses, necromancers, and other expensive professionals; it may
take much time; and the final indications may point to a most unlikely
and inconvenient spot. Green mounds, wholly unmarked except in the
rarest of cases, but each known to the descendants whose most solemn
duty it is to tend them, cover hundreds of great hillsides throughout
the peninsula, to the detriment of agriculture, Korea’s main occupation.
The Japanese took the Western utilitarian point of view and ordered
prescribed areas set aside for graveyards; but this was one of the most
hated of their reforms, and the right to lay away their dead at least in
private cemeteries has once more been granted to the Koreans.


Tucked away in the pine-clad hills about us were several little Buddhist
monasteries. The last word is deceiving, however, for there was hardly
anything monasterial about these semi-isolated retreats. In theory the
Buddhist monks and priests of Korea live in celibacy; in practice few
even of their most devout coreligionists pretend to believe that they do
so. About the tile-roofed clusters of buildings, varying mainly in
pretentiousness from the thatched homes of laymen, there was no dearth
of women and children; and the monks were the last in the world to deny
themselves the pleasure of wandering to the near-by city or up and down
the country as the mood came upon them. The brilliant saffron robe that
distinguishes the followers of the Way in central Asia, and adds so
vividly to the picturesqueness of lands farther west, is unknown in
Korea. A shaven head in place of the precious topknot is almost the
monk’s only difference in appearance from the ordinary layman; when whim
or a sincere desire to tread in the path marked out by Gautama sends him
out into the Korean world, the distinguishing hat of woven ratan may be
superimposed, but even the symbolic pretense of a begging-bowl hardly
marks him out from his more toilsome fellow-countrymen. For a long
period in the history of Korea, Buddhist monks were rated lower in the
social scale than even the peasants of the fields, and this attitude
toward them has survived, perhaps unconsciously, in a marked lack of
deference, almost an indifference to them, except in their official
capacity, or among an unusually superstitious minority.

In these monasteries the principal living-room—to use the word very
loosely—is floored with the thick oily brownish paper universal in
private dwellings, and the scant furniture is of a similar type. Perhaps
one of the big half-oval drums that call such of the monks as happen to
be within hearing to their not very arduous duties swings from the
center of the low ceiling; about the walls may sit a few bronze
ornaments or figures of some significance which totally escapes the
uninformed visitor. Certainly Gautama himself would not recognize the
barbarous gaudiness, the crowds of fantastic figures which clutter the
adjoining temples, as having been inspired by his simple teachings. Big
golden Buddhas in the center, behind a kind of altar and offering-table
in one, are flanked on either side clear around the three walls of the
room with hybrid manikins of Chinese mythology and demonology, often of
human size, which would outdo the phantasmagoric imaginings of any child
in terror of the dark. Fourth wall is there none, but only a long series
of double doors, which first open and then lift up to the horizontal,
where they are supported by quaint Oriental substitutes for hooks. If
the discreet rattling of a few small coins succeeds in accomplishing the
complete opening of the doors, the more than dim religious light of the
musty interior gives way to the glaring radiance of cloudless Korea, and
a myriad of details that are otherwise only suspected, if even that,
make their appearance. One discovers, for instance, that in addition to
the score or more of large figures in the gaudiest of greens, reds, and
all possible clashings of colors there are several times as many
figurines, knee-high or less, interspersed among them, as if these queer
puppets had their human quota of offspring. Like their adult companions,
these little effigies wear expressions varying all the way from that of
terrorizing demons to a smirking gentleness which suggests a well spent
babyhood. Mere words, however, are useless pigments with which to
attempt to picture the color-splashed paintings that cover the walls
behind the row of stodgy standing figures. All the chaos of Oriental
mythology seems to have been thrown together here, in battle scenes, in
court processions, in helter-skelter throngs of human beings in garbs
that were antiquated long before the Christian era, all fleeing in
terror from the mammoth central figure of some wrathful monarch, his
wildly bearded face painted jet-black to suggest the horror that his
countenance sheds upon all beholders. Every feature of these silent
temple denizens, be it noted, are Chinese, not Korean; and history tells
us that as late as the Boxer Rebellion it was not so much the European
troops as their black auxiliaries who put terror into the hearts of the
fleeing Celestials.

Gautama, the Buddha, as I have said, would puzzle in vain to find the
connection between the strange beings which clutter these Buddhist
temples and his own gentle doctrine. The medieval Christian, on the
other hand, should find himself perfectly at home in certain corners of
them, where are depicted such scenes as sinners fastened between two
planks in order to simplify the task of assistant devils nonchalantly
sawing them down the middle from crown to hips, in exactly the same way
that Oriental workmen turn logs into lumber to this day. Perhaps the
most surprising thing about these monasteries, to visitors from
Christian lands, is the complete lack of sanctity toward the objects
they worship which marks the outward behavior of the inmates. Casual
callers of other faiths, or of the absence thereof, are as freely
admitted to the most sacred corners as the monks themselves. The
elaborate genuflections and throaty chantings of a group of bonzes in
full barbaric regalia at the behest of a group of peasants come to lay
offerings of rice and copper coins before a favorite figure may be
followed a moment later by the tossing of a dirty altar-cloth or a dusty
old rag over the head of the same god to whom they have just been
appealing so grovelingly. Whatever their faults, there is always
something charming about the tolerance of Buddhists. No small number of
Christian missionaries in Korea spend their summer furloughs in the
monasteries of this gentle rival faith.


We struck out one Sunday afternoon over the high hill directly north of
us, to visit the famous White Buddha, carved and painted on a great
stream-washed rock cliff in the outskirts of the capital. It needs much
less of a climb beneath the blazing sun of midsummer Korea to leave one
drenched, but the view from the crest soon made that a half-forgotten
detail. Of the hills rolling away into mountains on every hand, or the
broad brown Han flecked with its rectangular junk-sails, little need be
said; such scenes are commonplace in Cho-sen. But the complete panorama
of Keijo, erstwhile Seoul, beginning at the very base of the
perpendicular rock cliffs below us and stretching from the “Peking Pass”
to far beyond Todaimon Gate, from ill sited Ryuzan to the section of old
city wall along a mountain ridge which the Japanese have permitted to
stand, called for a longer breathing-spell. Ancient Chinese-roofed
palaces, efforts at modern buildings which somehow still seem
unacclimated, the mainly Japanese city to the south of Shoro-dori—that
broad street which distinctly separates Keijo into two nearly equal
portions—the acres of yellow-brown thatched Korean huts of the northern
half so compact as almost to seem a great hayfield, all stand out with
the clearness of an illuminated engraving. Most incongruous, as well as
most conspicuous, of all the details of the picture are the homes and
other structures of the Christian missionaries, of red brick, and
standing forth, if the time-worn comparison is legitimate in such a
connection, like sore thumbs. Statistics assert that of the quarter of a
million dwelling in Seoul only two hundred are Caucasians, a statement
which there is no good reason to question, but which nevertheless seems
strange from any such point of vantage above the city, for the big
twin-spired Catholic cathedral alone, on the commanding site it has been
true to form in choosing, seems to imply far more than that number. It
was not merely the sounds of washing and ironing coming up to us in a
great muffled chorus from the city below on this brilliant Sunday
afternoon, however, which reminded us that for all these obvious
edifices we were in no Christian country.

At the foot of the swift jungle-clad descent to the narrow suburb along
the northern highway our ears were suddenly assailed by a great jangling
hubbub. We crowded into the little courtyard of the square-forming house
from which the sounds arose, and found that we had stumbled upon a
sorceress performance. Numbers of men and children and many women were
jostling one another along the wall-less fronts of two rooms on opposite
sides of the yards, inside which the typical native hocus-pocus was at
its height. On the papered floor of each room a sorceress was hopping,
posturing, grimacing, and from time to time shrieking, with an activity
which at least could not leave her open to the charge of physical
laziness. I am no custodian of fancy-dress ball costumes, hence I can do
little more than appeal to the vivid imaginations of those better fitted
for the task to picture to themselves the incredible regalia in which
these two middle-aged females, with the worldly wise faces, were
swathed, though I can throw in the hint that they would not have
suffered from cold six months thence, and that head-dresses which seemed
to have been built, and then improved upon and built some more, about
sections of stovepipe formed the crowning feature of their make-up.

We gave our attention mainly to the older, more agile, and more
demoniacal of the pair. In one hand she swung incessantly a curved knife
half as long as herself, and in the other a big clumsy iron
three-pronged spear not unlike the one attributed to Father Neptune, one
of her principal objects evidently being to slash and prod and swing as
near the credulous beings who crowded about her as she could without
inflicting actual physical injury upon them. In one corner sat half a
dozen dejected-looking men picking at native musical instruments as they
howled, and seeming to resent that the despised sex occupied the center
of the stage. Several ordinarily dressed women stood or squatted along
the walls. These, it was explained to us, had sick children and had come
to have the malignant devils that had entered their little bodies
exorcised and driven out. From time to time the sorceress called upon
them to rise and join in the dance, particularly to posture in the
center of the room while she made wild lunges at them with her two
weapons. At other times they were ordered to kneel and bow their heads
to the mats before what seemed to be imaginary gods or devils behind the
displays of food set around the edges of the room. Now and again they
ate bits of this, and at certain rather regular intervals the sorceress
ceased her hopping, lunging, and posturing to partake copiously of some
native drink respectfully tendered her by women of the house, or by
those who had come to get the benefit of her ministrations. Through it
all the dejected male orchestra, squatted on the floor in a corner,
screeched incessantly some incredibly discordant Korean conception of
music.

[Illustration:

  Some of the figures, in the gaudiest of colors, surrounding the Golden
    Buddha in a Korean temple
]

[Illustration:

  The famous “White Buddha,” carved and painted in white, on a great
    boulder in the outskirts of Seoul
]

[Illustration:

  One day, descending the hills toward Seoul, we heard a great jangling
    hubbub, and found two sorceresses in full swing in a native house,
    where people come to have their children “cured”
]

[Illustration:

  The _yang-ban_, or loafing upper class of Korea, goes in for archery,
    which is about fitted to their temperament, speed, and initiative
]

Half an hour or more after our arrival the sorceresses simultaneously
changed their costumes to something quite different but equally
fantastic, and after a deep drink and a long breath each they sprang
again into the fray. They had already been at it for hours and might
continue until dark. For these ceremonies seem to be rather of a
wholesale nature, to which come all those who happen that day to have a
devil to be exorcised, and the price of that service available. The
bystanders made themselves comfortably at home, as is commonly the
custom in the easy-going East, unawed by the great feats that were
taking place before their eyes. Children played in and out of the
throng; men, and some women too, placidly smoked their long tiny pipes;
the sturdy fellow who had brought the paraphernalia of the sorceress
calling slept babe-like on the box in which it had come, waiting for the
word to carry it away again. Apparently there was nothing to be feared,
except by the evil spirits which were being cast forth from within their
absent or present victims. For some of the women had brought their
ailing children in the flesh and were subjecting them to the noisy
balderdash in ways that should have increased rather than diminished the
demons of illness within them. How many mothers of sick infants came to
that day’s ceremony was only suggested by the dozen or more present at
one time. How many worldly-wise women of Korea, some of the most famous
of them blind or boasting some other infirmity reputed to increase such
powers, win their livelihood and even lay up small fortunes as
sorceresses, even the statistics-loving Japanese overlords probably
could not tell. One runs across them in wayside villages, in little
valleys hidden by brush and rocks out among the hills all over the
country—and in nearly every case there is a modern hospital run by
missionaries or the Government no great distance away, sometimes, as
here in Seoul, right on the road to the performance, where ailing
infants would be readily admitted, probably at less cost than the fee of
a sorceress.


The Japanese are so often accused of having no ideas of their own that
perhaps I am mistaken in believing that they did not copy from some
other nation their Railway School in Seoul. It is their own impression
that the idea originated with the general manager of the Korean part of
the South Manchuria Railway, and their opinion ought at least to be
worth those of passing strangers. The plan is to recruit young boys
after the usual six years of preliminary schooling and gather them
together into a kind of railway West Point, where future employees of
the railway shall be trained not merely in the immediate and mechanical
things of their calling, but in general citizenship, in _esprit de
corps_, in all those things which a body of men charged with so
important a job as running a great railway system should have and be.
There was already great eagerness to enter the school, though it was
only in its third year, since the future for which it prepares is not
only moderately bright but is definite and certain. At intervals
competitive examinations for admission are given. The latest one had
been attended by one thousand and eighty candidates, of whom a hundred
and fifty were admitted to the school. The Japanese officials asserted,
and seemed sincerely to believe, that, given equal preliminary training,
Korean youths have equal opportunities for admission to the school and
for preferment in what lies beyond. But the bare fact that of the five
hundred and thirty-eight students only eighty were Koreans did not make
it easy to accept this statement without question. It would scarcely be
natural in any nation, let alone one of so tight a national feeling as
Japan, to let such prizes get to any extent out of the hands of their
own people.

The school is a big red-brick building, or compact cluster of them, down
at Ryuzan, where the railroad community lives in an orderly, well built
town of its own, and it has everything which even the most exacting
peoples of the West expect a school to have. The principal is not a
railroad man, but an M.A. and a famous pedagogue from Japan, and the
whole curriculum is laid out with the idea of giving the future trainmen
as broad a training as could possibly be of use to them in the line of
work toward which they are heading. All of them take, for instance, six
hours of English a week. They are taught the importance of courtesy in
its practical as well as its ethical aspects—a point which seems to have
been largely missed by the labor-union brotherhoods of the West. To the
strictly utilitarian Occident some of the things taught would seem
highly fanciful. We would hardly expect our engine-drivers to take
fencing, samurai style, as well as jiu-jitsu, however handy these
accomplishments might be in ridding their trains of hoboes. But the
Japanese idea is to develop health and physique and a well-rounded
personality as well as mere mechanical ability, the spirit of fair-play,
character and _esprit de corps_, as well as mere laborers’ qualities,
that there may be a railway morale, as there is in most countries an
army and a navy morale. Thereby the founder of the school hopes to avoid
what he calls “labor-union madness,” and at the same time to have men
properly fitted to come into contact with the public; not merely pullers
of throttles and takers of tickets. The school, as I have said, is
barely three years of age, so that one could scarcely expect any
distinctly visible results of the policy as yet in the railway itself,
but the scheme strikes even the layman observer as at least one thing
Japanese well worth imitating.

When the Russians and the Japanese grappled with each other a couple of
decades ago, the railways of Korea, it will be recalled, were not linked
up with those of Manchuria, destined to be the chief battleground. The
little islanders pushed them quickly through, first in hastily
constructed emergency form for military use, and later in a more
finished manner. To this day they are straightening out curves and
moving higher up from flooding areas that were ill chosen in war-time
haste, and here and there along the way lie bits of the old road-bed and
the abandoned abutments of a bridge that is gone. Like the railways of
Japan, those of Korea are government owned; but they are not government
operated. The South Manchuria Railway system, comprising all the Treaty
of Portsmouth transferred from the Russians to their victors, has been
given, as a private corporation, the complete control of the lines in
Cho-sen for a long term of years, so that both comprise virtually one
system, and operate as two trunk lines—from Fusan to Mukden and from
Dairen and Port Arthur to Changchun, with their various branches. There
is nothing of the Japanese model about these railways; they are almost
exact copies of those in the United States, with standard gage, American
cars with only minor hints of European influence, even the deep-voiced
whistle which so instantly carries any wandering one of us back to his
home-land. There is no railroad in the world at which the carping
traveler cannot now and then find fault, but on few will he be harder
put to it to find just cause for grumbling often than on these two
systems operated as one from Dairen.




                              CHAPTER III
                   JAPANESE AND MISSIONARIES IN KOREA


In Korea the traveler who has seen them at home gets a somewhat
corrected picture of the Japanese. It is as if they had put their best
and their worst foot forward there simultaneously, and cause for high
praise lies plainly side by side with reasons for strong censure.
Everyone in the peninsula seems to admit that materially Korea is much
better off for having been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel, by
Japan. Intrigues, the selling of offices, brigands, few and virtually
worthless police, catch-as-catch-can tax methods to impoverish the
people, a government so corrupt that there was not a breath of hope left
in the country or the hearts of its inhabitants—there remained in all
the peninsula of Cho-sen little but the most primitive agriculture in an
almost wholly deforested land when the Japanese at length took upon
themselves the task and the pleasure of administering it. But like our
involuntary wards of the West Indies and elsewhere, the Koreans object
to being forcibly improved, and it is not, one comes to the conclusion,
merely disgruntled, because dispossessed, native politicians who are
creating the continued growl of dissatisfaction.

For all the admitted improvements they have brought, in spite of a
distinct change of policy now under a civil instead of a military
government, even the mere passer-by will scarcely fail to hear a long
list of Korean grievances against the Japanese, and he is not unlikely
to see some of these exemplified before his own eyes. The Japanese make
so free with the country, run the complaints; they treat it as something
picked up from the discard, with all signs of its former grandeur
obliterated, no memory even of a former existence. They always speak of
“Japan proper” when they mean their native islands, as if this great
peninsula, more than half as large as their Empire “proper” including
Formosa, and with seventeen million people who are distinctly not
Japanese, were a mere tatter on the garment itself. They change without
a by-your-leave not only the form of government but the very names of
the provinces; they interfere in the minutest matters of every-day
life—require people to walk on the left side of the street, for
instance. Those who came when the country was first taken over did
anything, the complaints continue, took anything, that pleased their
fancy or appealed to their appetites, without payment, or at whatever
they chose to pay. A new governor chased this riffraff out of the
peninsula and a better class is now in evidence; but even these strike
the passing observer as “cockier,” more arrogant than the average in
Japan—and perhaps somewhat brighter.

One is quickly reminded of Poland under the Germans, from whom it might
easily be suspected that the Japanese copied almost verbatim in their
annexation of what was once Korea. Japanese get the cream of mines,
factories, and other concessions; the advantages given the “Oriental
Development Company,” in reality a semi-official, strictly Japanese,
concern, amount to a scandal. The monopoly bank does about as it sees
fit in rates and exchanges; wherever there is a chance for it a Japanese
always seems to get the preference over a Korean. Railwaymen, policemen,
even the “red caps” at stations, are nearly all Japanese; at such places
the Japanese rickshaw-men are given the best stands, with their Korean
competitors in the background. I was returning one night from Gensan on
the east coast, whence there had just been put on a night train to
Seoul, which for some reason had not been found worthy of carrying a
sleeper. About twenty minutes before train-time I started through the
platform gate, only to be stopped by the gateman, who almost at the same
instant promptly punched the ticket of a little man in kimono and
scraping wooden _getas_ and let him pass. My training in taking a back
seat having been neglected, I pushed past the gateman and followed the
sandal-wearer across to the waiting train. From end to end it was half
full of Japanese passengers, most of them stretched out on two double
seats; and when, just before the train started, Korean passengers were
admitted to the platform, there was little left for them to do but to
squat on the floor or the arm of a seat here and there or stand up all
night.

I have seen a petty Japanese official keep a public autobus waiting for
half an hour while he played with his children or had a last cup of tea
with his neighbors. Railway stations are, with few exceptions, miles
from the towns they serve, though the line may run almost directly
through them. Possibly, as those in authority claim, this is for
protection, though I do not know from what; the disinterested visitor
finds himself agreeing with the Koreans that it is probably done so that
a Japanese town can grow up under more advantageous conditions than the
old Korean city behind it, as has already happened in many cases, and
perhaps to help the Japanese owners of Fords, rickshaws, and hotels. The
Japanese hold up and examine mail, whether of Koreans, missionaries, or
foreigners in general, at the slightest provocation, often, one
suspects, out of mere curiosity. Korean youths who wish to go to school
in America or Europe are almost invariably refused passports. Possibly a
dozen are granted out of a thousand applications, and it often takes as
long as a year to get those. One group of students who applied for
permission to study industries abroad were told to study them in
Chinnampo instead. To appreciate the joke fully one must have seen
Chinnampo. In general the Koreans are virtually prisoners within their
own country, and even if they escape from it they are not always safe.
Koreans whose land has been taken away from them by force have moved to
Manchuria and become Chinese citizens. Even if this prattle of
“self-determination” means nothing so far as nations are concerned,
certainly the right of an individual to choose his own allegiance should
be axiomatic in this day and generation. But the Japanese will not
recognize the Chinese citizenship of a Korean. Having taken the country,
they claim possession of all its people also, irrespective of their
location or personal choice, and send soldiers to round them up on the
foreign soil of Manchuria, forcing the Chinese to hold them in their
jails, bringing them back to Korea for trial, or shooting them on the
spot.

Everywhere the Japanese stick together—another German trait; if they did
not know the ropes and have everything in their favor, including the
official language, say those who know both races well, the Koreans would
outdo them in almost any line. Personally I could not sign so broad a
statement, for though I have seen many indications that the Koreans are
of quicker and sharper intelligence than the Japanese, they have other
weaknesses which largely neutralize this advantage. But the policy in
Korea, even in these improved days, seems never to be humanity and
justice first, but Japan and the Japanese _über alles_—and after that
whatever may conveniently be added. Koreans of standing say that Japan’s
inability to overlook her petty interests for the fulfilment of greater
things is her greatest weakness, as her policy of assimilation, of
trying to make Koreans over into Japanese, which the experience of
Germany in Poland should have taught her not to attempt, is her greatest
mistake. The same dominating instinct which insists that even a railway
porter shall be Japanese, if one applicant among a hundred is of that
race, is manifest in all her political dealings, and this
over-patriotism may prove her final undoing, where a bit less of it
might permit her to continue as an unconquered nation under a single
dynasty for another twenty-five hundred years.

Japan is eager to make Shintoists of the Koreans, to teach them that
ancient cult of the mikado as a direct descendant of the gods which has
been revived and repaired and strengthened during the last half-century
in Japan itself, that his “divine right” may survive even in an age that
is so completely in disagreement with such fallacies. Korean
school-children especially are subjected to this form of propaganda, so
similar to the German school- and pulpit-made _Kultur_ of kaiserly days.
The requirement that their children in government schools shall not
merely salute the banner of the rising sun at frequent intervals, but
shall bow down daily in what is virtually worship, however much the
Japanese may deny it, before a picture of the mikado, is one of the
sorest points with the Koreans. A modicum of intelligence should tell
any people that such methods are out of date and much worse than
useless. The new Shinto shrines on hilltops all over Korea, with their
newly peeled _torii_ before them, look like late and exceedingly weak
rivals of the Christian churches which dot the peninsula.

Until very recently all Japanese officials in Korea, including
_schoolteachers_, wore uniforms and carried swords! Picture to yourself
how much more handy the latter would be than a ferule. But Japanese
influence on the rising generation would be greater if there were not
such a discrepancy in the rights of schooling. With seventeen million
Koreans and less than three hundred and fifty thousand Japanese in
Korea, the 65,654 Korean children who find accommodations in government
schools represent something like one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of the
Korean population, while the 34,183 Japanese youngsters in school are
one tenth of the sons of Nippon in the peninsula. Yet the Government
still hampers to a certain extent private, and especially missionary,
schools. The Japanese have brought many improvements, say the Koreans,
but for whom?

Silk, tobacco, salt, _gin-seng_, to some extent beans, and in a certain
sense prostitution, are government monopolies in Korea. The Japanese
seem to bring immorality and “red lights” and disease wherever they take
root, and to adopt a callous, cynical attitude toward this matter which
marks them as closely related to the French in at least that one point.
Thirty years ago, say missionary doctors, before their war with China
brought the islanders to the peninsula in any great number, the diseases
of prostitution were virtually unknown in Korea; now they are widely
prevalent. As is their custom, the Japanese have established
_yoshiwaras_ in every city of any size, with Korean as well as Japanese
inmates—Chinese also in the zone they control in Manchuria—and while
these are not exactly government owned, the protection accorded them,
the official regulation of them, and the large income in the form of
taxes derived from them makes them virtually so.


A Japanese policeman in spotless white summer uniform and sword,
relieved by a blood-red cap-band which is said to be symbolical, is to
be found in any Korean gathering, even in the utmost corner of the
peninsula. The traveler will probably not be in Korea long before he
sees one or two such officers driving to prison a Korean with his arms
tightly bound with ropes, the loose ends of which serve as reins. This
is an old Oriental custom, but one feels that it could, to advantage,
yield to something a little more modern and reasonable, a bit less
conspicuous. In August, 1919, the police force under an army
lieutenant-general virtually independent of civil authority was replaced
by a gendarmerie or constabulary directly responsible to the new
governor-general, Baron Saito. The latter is widely admitted to be a
superior official, with the best of intentions and a high grade of
ability. But tales of oppression by subordinates, and cruelties by the
police, persist even under his comparatively beneficent rule. The
time-honored excuse that “excesses of police and gendarmes do not have
the approval of higher authorities” is out of date; if higher officials
cannot curb those under them, they are equally to blame. Baron Saito’s
Government seems to recognize this and has changed the formula to “It
cannot be true that the police still beat prisoners, for there is a law
against it.” Definite cases of persecution and torture still turn up
from time to time, but the victims are so cowed that they dare not
report the matter to higher authorities, and a fluent lie by the police
involved settles an investigation, since the word of a Japanese is
always accepted over that of a Korean. An American missionary who had
reported many cases of persecution to the present governor was asked to
bring the next victim in person. But when he suggested to a man who had
sneaked in to see him, badly cut up and mottled in black and blue from
head to foot, that he go and show himself to the governor-general, the
fellow all but fled at the bare suggestion. Word would be sure to get
back to the police of his own province, he insisted, and he would be
manhandled worse than ever when he went home. True, gendarmes who
misbehave are sometimes court-martialed, which sounds to the average
civilian like something dreadful, but those of us with a little military
experience know how often a court martial is a synonym for a
whitewashing, unless it is the sacred army itself which has been
wronged.

[Illustration:

  The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmic _rat-a-tat_ of which may be
    heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula
]

[Illustration:

  Winding thread before one of the many little machine-knit stocking
    factories in Ping Yang
]

[Illustration:

  The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with their green
    mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully tended by the superstitious
    descendants
]

It is not, of course, quite the same to a Korean to be beaten by the
police as it seems to us. Flogging has been practised in Korea as far
back as records go, and it is not unnatural that Japanese gendarmes
should consider this the only sure way of really reaching the intellect
or getting the truth out of some Koreans. But they failed to see that
while men punished in this time-honored way by their fellow-countrymen
might not feel particularly humiliated, might take it almost like a son
from his father, they would deeply resent being so treated by Japanese
aliens, little men whom they have always heartily despised. Certainly
some ugly stories are still afloat, and all indications point to the
probability that the torturing of prisoners—and of witnesses—still goes
on in the secrecy of some police stations, the perhaps real disapproval
of higher authorities notwithstanding. To say that the same thing
sometimes occurs in New York is not to make the practice any less
reprehensible.

Once convicted of a crime, it is another matter; but when a man is
suddenly arrested without warning and imprisoned for weeks, months and
sometimes more than a year without knowing what charge has been made
against him, without being allowed to get a word in or out of prison,
even to notify some one to communicate with his family or see a lawyer,
or to do anything but sit and await the good pleasure of his jailers,
which may include being bambooed for two hours daily, the infliction of
the “water cure,” the clamping of the fingers, the hanging up by the
thumbs, the forced squat, and many other ingenious tortures which are
guaranteed to leave no telltale marks on the body, it is not a sign of
civilization but a remnant of the barbarism from which Japan tries hard
to prove to the world that she has entirely recovered. Once the police
get a confession by such methods there is no going back on it, we were
told, no matter how innocent the sufferer really may be. His case is
turned over at once to the procurator, and only after he has been twice
condemned can he have counsel. The French system of considering the
accused guilty until he proves his innocence prevails, and the chief of
police has often been known to sit behind the judge and virtually to
give him his orders as to what is to be done with the prisoner at the
bar. Nine months in prison merely as a witness has been the experience
of many a Korean Christian. Interpreters, even in important conspiracy
cases, where it may be a matter of life and death, are reputed to
mistranslate testimony in favor of Japanese or in favor of conviction.
There is a classic case of an American missionary arrested during the
independence movement on the charge of “harboring prisoners,” simply
because he did not drive out of his house convert students whom he knew
to be innocent and whom the police were eager to torture. Though he was
ill at the time, he was refused permission to have a bed brought from
his house to the bedless prison, was not allowed even to send word of
his whereabouts to his wife, was kept _incommunicado_ for fifteen days,
during which he was grilled by a haughty Japanese official who spoke to
him only in “low talk,” such as one uses to coolies, and after four
trials his punishment was reduced from one year’s imprisonment to a fine
of a hundred yen.

Perhaps the most repulsive custom of the Japanese police in Korea, from
our Western point of view, is their indifference to domestic privacy.
They march even into school-girls’ dormitories or women’s apartments
with or without provocation; American missionary women traveling in the
interior have often been compelled to admit policemen to their quarters
at inns or in the homes of converts not only after they have prepared
for bed, but several times during the night, merely to answer over and
over again their silly “Who-are-you? How-old-you? Where-you-come-from?
Where-you-go?” questions.

The many reforms that have recently been introduced into Korea, say its
residents, would have been of far more credit to the Japanese if they
had thought of them before rather than after the independence movement
of March, 1919. The handling of that, by the way, was a typical example
of Japanese stupidity. The independence agitation which broke out
simultaneously all over the peninsula was merely a demonstration to
prove to the outside world that the Koreans had not been so completely
and successfully “Japalacked” (as the missionaries, with no unbounded
love for the little brown Prussians of the East, put it) as the Japanese
at the peace conference led the world to suppose. Their city walls had
been torn down; they had no weapons; the native Christians, who were
foremost among the agitators, had refused to have anything to do with
the demonstration until it was agreed that there should be no violence.
If the Japanese had acted with the jovial moderation which their power
over the peninsula made quite possible, the movement would very likely
have been nothing more serious than a kind of lantern procession on a
national scale. There is an anecdote floating about the Far East to the
effect that half a dozen British “Tommies,” strolling down the street of
a city in India, were met by a mob shouting the Hindu version of “Long
live Gandhi!” They neither raced back to the barracks for their rifles
nor fell upon the crowd with such weapons as they could snatch up; they
merely began shouting with the natives, “Long live Gandhi!” Within five
minutes the demonstration had broken up in peals of laughter at the
antics of the soldiers and their ludicrous Hindustani accent. Whether it
is true or not, the story illustrates a great weakness of the Japanese.
Almost no nation is so devoid of a sense of humor, as we use the phrase;
that is, they are wholly incapable of permitting anything but the
greatest solemnity of word or deed concerning their persons, their
country, or their “sacred” institutions.

Instead of treating the “Mansei” movement as more or less of a joke,
therefore, they acted with incredible childishness, as well as quite
unnecessary brutality. Groups of unarmed Koreans gathered on hills
overlooking the towns, shouted “Mansei!”—which is merely the Korean form
of the Japanese “Banzai!” or “Ten Thousand Years!” and means something
like “Long live Korea!”—then scattered. The silly police ran hither and
thither, distracted. The honor of their nation, the luster of their
military caste, the glory of their god-descended ruler might have been
at stake. They arrested sixty school-boys eight years of age because
some one among them had shouted the dreadful word, and they kept them at
the police station until ten o’clock at night. A high official quizzed a
roomful of little girls with such questions as how they could expect
liberty, and where they would get money to run the Government, if they
had it. When they answered, woman-like, “Oh, we’d get it,” the Japanese
on the platform foamed at the mouth and devised ingenious ways of
punishing the tots for their temerity. Brutalities like ours in Haiti,
and worse, were perpetrated on the population. Students were beaten if
they admitted they attended mission schools. They were asked at ferry
stations and other points of concentration whether they were Christians,
and if they replied in the affirmative they were cut with swords and
otherwise mishandled by soldiers and police. If they denied the
allegation, even though they were known to be converts, they were not
abused, the idea seeming to be to get them to apostatize. Prisoners were
tied together and driven on forced marches of sometimes a hundred miles,
sleeping on plank floors full of cracks, with no food whatever on
examination-day (otherwise known as “torture-day”). Great gangs were
marched into Ping Yang from the country roundabout, many of them
virtually unable to walk, and with carts of dead ones behind. Women who
had shouted “Mansei!” were taken to police stations, stripped, and
marched around while the police amused themselves by burning them with
cigarettes. Whether or not they were violated, they were subjected to
every other form of indignity. The Japanese claim that “not a few
policemen and their families in isolated stations were ruthlessly
massacred,” and that they were therefore provoked to harsh measures. But
they neglect to give the exact chronology of the affair, which indicates
that they were the first to adopt harsh measures, and that Korean
violence was in retaliation for their unnecessarily stern suppression of
what probably would have remained a bloodless demonstration. Thus all
the complaints, dissatisfactions, and grievances that had been repressed
within the breasts of the people of Cho-sen for ten long years broke out
at last like the cataract through a broken dike.

Those not friendly to them say that the Japanese police are cowardly as
well as bullies, citing such examples as a group of Americans being
mobbed only a few yards from one of the innumerable police stations in
Seoul during our stay there, without a single white uniform appearing on
the scene. Since the establishment of civil government some Koreans have
been made gendarmes and otherwise given positions of authority, but as
so often happens in such cases, many of them are more cruel to their
fellow-nationals, and more itching with curiosity as to the doings of
foreigners, than the Japanese themselves. Up to the time of the “Mansei”
movement the Japanese scorned to study Korean and tried to force the
Koreans to learn Japanese instead, again aping the Germans in Poland.
But they have learned the disadvantages of using Korean interpreters and
depending on native stool-pigeons for information, so that now they
offer five yen a month in addition to the regular salary of those who
have a workable knowledge of the native tongue.

The Japanese learned considerable from the uprising of 1919, but they
still have something to learn. There are officials yet who advocate
fines and flogging for Koreans who refuse to hoist the flag of Japan on
national holidays. A modicum of common sense should teach any people
that a national flag is a symbol of patriotism the display of which
should be only an expression of free will, that patriotism can never be
forced into the hearts of a people, and that any false show of it is
much worse than worthless. Even shops which close as a sign of protest
against certain Japanese doings are compelled by the police to open
their doors. When the warship _Mutsu_ anchored in the harbor of
Chemulpo, the port for Seoul, every visitor who went on board was
compelled to salute the common sailor on sentry duty at the gang-plank,
who barked like an enraged bulldog at any one who did not perform the
ceremony with the deepest solemnity. Until they cure themselves, or are
cured, of this ridiculously Prussian point of view on matters pertaining
to their national life naturally the Japanese will not be able to see
that it is silly to speak of the “wickedness” of trying to change, or
even of talking of changing, a given form of government, that as a
matter of fact any form of government is no more sacred than an old pair
of shoes that has served the wearer moderately well.


We of the West should not forget, however, that the “white peril” has
been a much more actual thing to the Japanese than the “yellow peril”
ever was to us. Korea was not only a convenient spring-board for Russia
and the whole white world behind her, but it was a greater source of
danger to Japanese health than Cuba in its most yellow-feverish days
ever was to us. Old residents paint a distressing picture of
pre-Japanese Seoul—narrow streets plowed up into bullock-cart ruts, no
general means of transportation except one’s own feet, however deep the
mud, corpses of those dying of cholera left before any “rich” man’s
house, forcing him to bury them. The Korean royal family was “liberally
provided for” and left in possession of their palaces and their titles
in perpetuity on condition that they would not interfere in any way with
the new Government or the people of the peninsula. The sop of titles of
nobility was thrown to influential Koreans who were likely to make
trouble, and seventy-six new peers stepped forth from their mud huts.
The Japanese claim that they spend ten million dollars a year on the
occupation of Korea, that with its need of schools, roads, trees,
sanitation, and many other things the peninsula is a great burden to
them. “Though it is treason to say so now,” a high-placed Japanese in
Seoul assured me, “Korea will eventually get her independence, as soon
as she can stand on her own feet and protect herself—and us—from the
north.” Possibly this was mere prattle meant to throw me off the scent,
but I have met some Japanese intelligent enough sincerely to believe in
this eventual solution.

The American and European merchants in Korea think that the Japanese did
on the whole better than any one else could have done in handling the
situation, and that the Koreans cannot possibly govern themselves. So,
for that matter, do most of the missionaries. Russia would have forced
the Greek church upon the people, they say, but would have left the
lowest form of inefficient and unsanitary burlesque on government. They
would virtually have encouraged the persistence of ignorance and filth
that made the Hermit Kingdom in every sense a stench to the nostrils of
the world and a land of but two classes of people, the robbers and the
robbed. “If Japan were to say to us to-morrow, ‘Here’s your country; run
it yourselves,’” said a man who was trained to become prime minister
under the old régime, “there are not bright men enough in it to form a
cabinet.” The people have sometimes been made to suffer, the merchants
go on, in such matters, for instance, as the taking of their land to
build roads—for in old Korea as in China to-day highways were mere
trespassers on private domain; but on the whole Japan has been no
rougher than the United States or England in the countries they have
taken over.

The agitation of Koreans for independence, the foreign laymen in the
peninsula claim, emanates from self-seekers in foreign lands, and from
the young students of mission schools, “especially American mission
schools”; and the two “provisional governments,” one in the United
States, and one, which has been in existence since the annexation, in
Shanghai, do not at all represent the wishes of the Korean people as a
whole. As it is, they are ground between the two millstones of the
Japanese on the spot and these exiled governments, which send agents to
make life miserable for those who fear one or both of them may some day
come into power. Even the old politicians and office-holders are
content, if we are to believe the men of commerce, now that even the
Japanese have discovered that few military chiefs are of a type to make
successful colonial governors, and that their subordinates, especially
of the lower ranks, are almost always tactless, to say the least. But
business men have a tendency the world over to praise anything that
tends to keep “business as usual,” and one will probably come nearest
the truth by striking a balance between their impressions and those of
the missionaries, crediting the latter with somewhat more sincere,
because less self-seeking, motives.

Whatever his personal opinion on the usefulness of foreign missions, no
one with his eyes half open can set foot in Cho-sen without being
impressed by the Christian influence, or at least by the number of
missionaries, converts, and churches. He may be highly amused at the
many subdivisions of that faith, by reason not merely of minor matters
of creed and national lines but of such political cleavages as that
caused by our Civil War, so nearly obliterated at home, which bewilder
the natives like a countryman in a department-store with the wide
choices of salvation offered them by—to mention only some of the
American varieties—the “Northern” Presbyterians and the “Southern”
Presbyterians, the “Northern” and the “Southern” Methodists, the Kansas
Baptists and the Oklahoma High Rollers, for all I know, all guaranteed
to give equal satisfaction. But the very intensity with which native
converts regard these arbitrary lines of division, much slighter among
the missionaries themselves, and the care which “Bible women” and
country pastors take to keep their charges from wandering into any
adjoining heretical sheepfold, is an evidence of the genuineness of
their new beliefs.

Whether or not Christianity is the one and only true faith, it seems to
be an established fact that it thrives under persecution. Protestant
mission work began in China in 1808, in Japan in 1859, but not until
about 1888 in Korea; yet there is to-day only a scattering of native
Christians in the two former countries as compared with the hordes of
them in Korea. Many towns, even Ping Yang, second city of the peninsula,
are almost more Christian than “pagan”; and the missionary boast that
Korea will be a Christian land within a generation or two does not sound
so wild as many another statement that drifts to the ear of the
naturally skeptical wanderer. There is some evidence to show that this
rapid progress is considerably due to those very Japanese who are least
eager for the Christian faith to spread. The law of Japan and Korea
grants absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, but even the
passing layman can plainly detect something very close to persecution of
Christians by some of the Japanese authorities in the peninsula, though
it be only unconscious and unintentional, which it probably is not.
While the Catholics have been there much longer, and have often carried
things with a high hand, it is the Protestants in particular, and
especially the American missionaries, who seem to have won most of the
Japanese ill will. This I believe to be almost more because of the fact
that they are Americans than because they are missionaries. As Americans
they just naturally resent the lack of human liberty, of
“self-determination,” to use the catchword of the hour, which Japanese
rule in Korea means. The opposite point of view is bred in their bones.
Though they never opened their lips on the subject, their mere
unconscious attitude, their negative lack of approval of the existing
state of things politically, cannot but seem to the Koreans an approval
of their own opposition to the Japanese. Obviously, the study of
American history, even of American literature, in the mission schools
adds to the discontent of young Koreans with the present status of what
was once their own country, even though the teachers lean over backward
in the effort not to mix academic and political matters. In fact, while
the missionaries might deny it, it may be that the Koreans are rallying
in increasing numbers about the American sponsored churches as much
under the mistaken impression that the Americans are secretly
sympathetic to the throwing off of the alien yoke, even by violence if
necessary, as from the conviction that the American brands of salvation
are the only sure passwords at the celestial gates.

At any rate, the Japanese seem to have concluded that American
missionaries were behind the independence movement of 1919, and that
they are still not to be entirely trusted. Now, I am as certain as I am
of anything in this uncertain world that not a single American
missionary was in the conspiracy of the “Mansei” demonstration. A very
few may have known something about it, at least have felt in the air
that something was coming; but it was no business of theirs to turn
tattletales and run to warn a Government which had usurped since most of
them came to Korea and had not treated them with any notable kindness,
besides having what should have been an ample supply of its own spies to
pick up such information. But the Japanese have not our way of thinking.
They are ready enough to have the missionaries render unto Cæsar what
belongs to him by keeping out of politics, but at the same time they
seem to expect them to lend a hand to the extent of passing on to the
authorities any hints or rumors that may be of use to them.


However, the independence demonstration and the unwise acts it brought
in its train have trailed off into history. The more intelligent
Japanese officials seem to have seen the light and acquitted the
American missionaries of any active and conscious part in it, and the
new governor-general and his immediate aids even sometimes call them
into conference to get their point of view on subjects in which they are
involved. But there is still an undercurrent of something akin to
persecution of the American churches. As in the case of the persistent
rumors of police floggings in spite of the new law forbidding them, it
is impossible to make certain whether this is due to deliberate
disobedience of orders by recalcitrant subordinates, to secret
instructions at variance with those made public, or to pure stupidity,
of which the Japanese have their liberal quota. In every mission town
there is a detective in charge of matters pertaining to missionaries. He
attends all services, comes hotfooting it whenever a foreigner stops
even for lunch at a mission, demanding information concerning him back
to the _n_th degree of absurdity, asks the future plans of the church
almost daily, and other stupid and impertinent questions. In some
districts the police still literally hound the church—demand lists of
all contributors, send spies to stand at the church door and take note
of every Korean who enters, burst noisily in during prayer, order new
women converts not to attend services. Even the missionaries strike one
as being rather afraid of the police, though this may merely be due to
their strenuous efforts to avoid giving further offense and to come more
than half-way toward established friendship with the political
authorities; it can easily be imagined how native pastors and the simple
converts are affected by a brutal attitude.

[Illustration:

  A chicken peddler in Seoul
]

[Illustration:

  A full load
]

[Illustration:

  The plowman homeward wends his weary way—in Korean fashion, always
    carrying the plow and driving his unburdened ox or bull before him;
    one of the most common sights of Korea
]

[Illustration:

  The biblical “watch-tower in a cucumber patch” is in evidence all over
    Korea in the summer, when crops begin to ripen. Whole families often
    sleep in them during this season, when they spring up all over the
    country, and often afford the only cool breeze
]

Christian students in government schools often report that they have
secretly been ordered to quit the church. There seems to be little doubt
that the Japanese foster the student strikes which are increasingly
becoming the bane of mission schools, now with demands for a Korean
principal in place of an American who has grown gray in that position,
now that no teacher be hired who has not been educated in Japan or
Korea, or that there shall be no studying of the Bible in school—almost
prima facie evidence of Japanese influence. All this cuts both ways in
separating the Koreans and the foreigners. When the strikes reach the
point of demanding that laboratory or library equipment be improved,
notwithstanding that every tack in the school wall is due to American
charity toward the strikers, the ordinary human being finds himself
wishing that the missionaries would forget their unnatural patience and
boot the strikers down the front steps. Permits are required for
everything under the sun—to be pastor, to build a new church, even to
solicit contributions to mission hospitals. The Japanese meddle with
hospitals, schools, and churches in ways which even they could not
possibly believe are excusable. The missionaries have to submit to their
dictation as to curriculum; they even have to make their school year
conform to the Japanese custom and teach in July. Perhaps the greatest
hardship the missionaries have to endure is the constant dread that
their sick children will be carried off to Japanese isolation wards, on
the pretext that contagious diseases cannot be properly isolated in
mission hospitals, and there virtually killed by being given only
Japanese food, lack of beds, and treatment, while the parents may not
even be allowed to see them.

All books by foreigners must be fully _printed_ before being submitted
to the police censor, who will not look at manuscript. Three days before
publication two copies of the finished book must be in his hands, and if
_any_ of the contents is considered objectionable the whole edition is
confiscated. Christian schools are often called out to meet officials on
Sunday, or teacher’s examinations are given on that day with a frequency
that could scarcely be coincidence. The requirement that all children in
government schools shall bow down before a picture of the mikado in an
attitude of worship is of course a constant thorn in the side of the
Christians. The authorities claim that American mission students have no
discipline, which is probably true from the Japanese point of view, in
that they are not told just what they should think and do on every
possible subject and occasion. In their published maps of Korean towns
the Japanese rarely give any signs of the existence of Christian
establishments, though these are often many years old and the most
prominent institutions in the place. On the other hand, when their
travels take them out of their own orbit the missionaries almost always
go to Korean hotels instead of patronizing the foreign ones under
Japanese management, but old custom and the high prices of the latter
could easily account for this without including a suggestion of pique.

Personally I came to the conclusion that, while both are in evidence, it
is the thick-headedness of the rank-and-file Japanese more than
deliberate persecution which causes the continued friction between the
two peoples who are doing the most for the regeneration of Korea. I
might cite a typical case in point. Over near Gensan on the east coast
the missionaries have a private summer resort, half a hundred houses and
a beach, all enclosed within purchased grounds. But as the Japanese are
very insistent in matters which they conceive to involve the equality of
their race to the rest of the world, they refuse to let the missionaries
keep the townspeople off their beach. Now, the bathing demeanor of the
Japanese, innocent and proper though it may be to those who like it, is
decidedly not suited to a place where American women and children come
to spend their summers. So by dint of coaxing and explaining their own
peculiar point of view, the Americans got the authorities at Gensan to
post a notice that no one should bathe on the missionary beach unless
arrayed in proper swimming costume. The Japanese of course are
notoriously law-abiding. One afternoon when I found time to join my
family on that beach a big limousine stood at the edge of the sand, and
several dignified middle-aged men who might have been bankers or lawyers
from the city were disporting themselves in perfectly respectable
bathing-suits. But when I chanced to glance about a little later, one of
them stood within ten feet of us, stripped stark naked as he calmly and
leisurely changed from swimming to street costume, and two others were
in the act of disrobing for the same purpose. I feel sure that they had
no intention whatever of being offensive toward the dozen or more
American women about them; probably their limited minds really thought
that they were complying with both the letter and the spirit of the
posted order and the desires of those who inspired it by wearing bathing
costumes while in the water, and getting into and out of them on the
open beach. When I addressed them with an unmissionary vehemence that
might have landed me in a police station if they had chosen to make the
most of it, they apologized hastily for the unwitting offense and
hurried off to the privacy of the limousine. The Japanese in Korea are
spending large sums in the effort to make certain of the beaches of the
peninsula popular with foreigners, and quite likely some of these
bankerly-looking gentlemen were involved in the scheme; but none of them
still have any clear conception, probably, of why no beach can ever be
popular with foreigners as long as Japanese also have the right of
admission to it.

Missionaries after all are only human beings, as they themselves are the
first to admit, and we do not expect the supernatural of them even in
such a matter as meekly accepting the abuse of what they more or less
regard as a usurping and alien political power over a people the
benefiting of whom they consider their life-work. Many of the Americans
in the mission field have been in Korea far longer than the Japanese.
Some have lived there so long, according to those foreigners of another
class who see them as dangers to their precious “business as usual,”
that “they think they own the country and can countenance no changes in
it, not even improvements. They used to do exactly as they liked, and
they hate the least suggestion of coercion.” We should remember that the
missionaries had the advantages of extraterritoriality in Korea before
the Japanese came, and they cannot but resent the loss of it, the
submitting to alien rulers whose ideas of everything, from housing to
justice, are so widely different from their own. Moreover, though they
readily admit that the Japanese are doing many things for the good of
the peninsula, they see them primarily as men with an ax to grind.

It would be strange, if it were not long since commonplace, to see how
sharp national lines remain even among men who think they are working
above nationalities, how completely even men of strong ideals succumb to
their environment. The American missionaries in Japan say that there is
some reason for the Japanese to be suspicious of the American
missionaries in Korea. They agree with the officials there, who contend
that those destined for mission work in the Korean field should first
have a year in Japan, that they may judge more fairly the Japanese
national point of view. Even those in Korea, after ten to forty years’
residence there, cannot agree on many of the points involved, so how can
a mere passer-by be expected to get at the exact truth of the matter? He
can merely decide that there is some reason on both sides, with perhaps
a private opinion as to which one is most inclined to tamper with the
scales, and let it go at that. Friction is gradually decreasing, as the
Japanese and Americans become more able to talk together—generally in
Korean; and as there is no doubt that Japan has the good of Cho-sen and
its people at heart—as an integral part of the Japanese Empire—constant
improvement may confidently be expected.




                               CHAPTER IV
                    OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN CHO-SEN


Perhaps it is because I was properly “Japalacked” that I was able to
wander at will about Korea by train, steamer, Ford, rickshaw, and on
foot without the annoyance of that constant police supervision and the
incessant showing of my passport of which many other travelers have
complained. Once, long ago, when the Japanese were at war with Russia, I
was arrested forty-eight times during thirty-six days of wandering
through Japan, and while the experience was much more amusing than
serious, there was nothing to be gained by repeating it. So I took the
trouble this time to satisfy Japanese inquisitiveness at headquarters
beforehand, and while I may have been, and probably was, under more or
less surveillance during my six weeks in Korea, I am sure that many of
my jaunts were known so shortly in advance even to myself that no
detective could have kept constant track of me. Certainly no visible
attempt was made to keep me from going when and where I chose, and
talking with whomever I wished.

A missionary Ford carried me off once to the gaunt hills to the east of
Seoul. Even the “great roads” in the interior of Korea are much like the
_caminos reales_ of Spanish America—“great” or “royal” only in the name
they bear. In places there are what the Japanese call “highways,” but
even these seldom have bridges worthy the name, some being mere
sod-covered logs, others dirt-and-branch foundations under concrete, or
nothing at all but the crudest of ferries. In the rainy season whole
treeless hillsides wash away and force traveling missionaries to sell
their Fords and walk home. Though the weather of Korea is on the whole
much better than that of Japan, the floods of summer are naturally
severe in a mountainous and deforested country. In Seoul it rained
incessantly day after day during much of July and August, sometimes with
barely half an hour of cloudy clearness from dawn till dark. Many
villages and some thirty miles of railroad were under water, and
countless bridges were made at least temporarily impassable. Men waded
waist-deep in the flooded rice-fields, raking out the duckweed with
which these were covered, and which would choke the rice when the water
subsided. Clothing and shoes molded overnight. In other parts of the
country, such as Ping Yang district, there was less rain than the
peasants asked for, though the almost tropical heat was everywhere and
incessantly in evidence.

Even one of the most fair-minded of guide-book writers speaks of the
Koreans as “incredibly lazy”—proof that he saw much more of the old
capital and its vacant-minded _yangbans_ than of the country districts.
If he had ever toiled for a day in the blazing rice-fields, even driven
a bull knee-deep in mud through them, or carried a “jiggy” load along
the narrow paths between them, he might have been of a different
opinion. In a land where agriculture is the national industry, where
four-fifths of the population still remain living among and tilling the
hills of their forefathers, their horizon bounded by their own narrow
valley and the nearest market town, there can scarcely be general
indolence. The Koreans in the mass are not lazy; but life means to them
something more than incessant exertion merely for exertion’s sake, and
they amble along even at work as if there were never any hurry to do
anything or get anywhere, quite the antithesis of the busy little
Japanese. With some such foot-note as this to one accusation against
them, it is easy to agree with the man who put it so well, that the
Koreans “are garrulous yet inarticulate, stolid yet excitable, frugal
yet improvident, lazy yet lashed by necessity to strenuous efforts.” A
childlike people on the whole, one is likely to conclude from weeks of
wandering among them, happy-go-lucky, with little tendency of laying up
for a rainy day, a trait in which they are widely at variance with their
present rulers.

In June the peasants were still spreading over the fields the decomposed
oak-leaves used as fertilizer, but by early July the transplanting of
rice began, soon to be followed by the weeding. Gangs pull up the
closely grown seedlings and tie them in bundles, which they throw out
across the fields to be planted with an expertness which reminds one
that their national pastime, at least in pre-Japanese days, was
stone-throwing. The earth-laden roots being much the heavier end, the
bundles unfailingly land upright just where the thrower chooses to place
them. A line of six to a dozen men and women move slowly across each
flooded field, replanting the grasses one by one, and everywhere the
green, low, flat country is dotted with hundreds of near-white figures
rooting in the soft, flooded earth. That no space may be wasted, beans
are often planted on the tops of the dikes between the paddy-fields.
Frogs sing their lugubrious chorus far and wide, little realizing the
unwisdom of betraying themselves to the beautiful ibis which feed upon
them. At weeding-time whole villages join together in great gangs, with
drums, fifes, brass cans, and all manner of native noise-producers, to
make a festival of the task, singing as they weed. The men, stripped to
the waist and burned a permanent brown, display leathery skins that
glisten red-brown in the sunshine, like a well polished russet shoe. Yet
many a peasant uses a yellow fan as he works. Where irrigation calls for
the lifting of water from a ditch to the fields, a man leisurely swings
all day long an enormous wooden spoon suspended in a little framework.
If the work calls for shoveling, one man holds the handle of the
implement and two or three others lift it by the ropes attached to the
shaft, precisely like the people of the Lebanon far across on the
opposite edge of Asia. The Korean is famed for his kindness to his
bulls, almost his only draft-animals now that his savage little stallion
ponies have become so scarce, and it is the commonest of sights to meet
a peasant lugging his wooden plow on his own broad back while the bull
strolls lazily homeward before him.

Korea is a land of villages, not of cities, nor yet of isolated peasant
houses, so that the broad flooded country is usually unbroken clear to
the foot-hills of distant ranges, unless a town, its thatched roofs
slicked down to the women’s hair, intervenes. Here stands a stone
monument with a roof over it to commemorate the wife who died of grief
for her departed husband, or at least refused resolutely to remarry, a
noble example, by Oriental standards, to all her sex. Farther on several
upright granite slabs flanking the road announce themselves as erected
by grateful citizens in honor of departed magistrates, though the
deep-cut Chinese characters upon them usually express anything but the
real public sentiment toward these village looters. Babies suckling like
shotes mothers stretched out on the floors of open houses, babies eating
great green cucumbers, skin and all, babies wailing as one seldom hears
them in Japan, are among the most constant details of any Korean village
landscape. Among the fixed customs of the country is the burning off of
the hair over the soft spot of an infant’s head, and most Koreans
preserve this little round bald place throughout their lives.

In July lettuce and green onions are everywhere, adding a still greener
tinge to the landscape. Men sleep anywhere in the middle of the day, on
the narrow paddy dikes, at the roadside, in the road itself, naked to
the waist but with their ridiculous horsehair hats still in place. You
will find them still working at dusk, however, and before the mists
begin to rise under the morning sun. Koreans of the masses never seem to
sleep, or to eat, all at once. The children have no fixed hours of going
to bed, nor beds to go to for that matter, so that they grow up able to
doze off anywhere at any time. Like the Japanese, the race shows the
effects of poor beds and piecemeal, catch-as-catch-can slumber. One by
one each member of the family lies down, still fully clothed, on the
brown-paper floor of the house as the whim strikes him, and drifts away
into more or less sound slumber, while all the domestic life steps in
and out among and over the sleepers. No matter at what hour of the night
one passes through a village some of its people will be squatting on
their porches or chattering inside. As crops approach the ripening
stage, little watch-towers, like thatched dove-cotes, rise high on their
pole legs all over the country, and by night he who comes strolling
along almost any road will hear some or all the family within beating
the little elevated shack with a stick or singing some weird old song as
a protection against the myriad evil spirits which roam the darkness.

I have said that the national pastime of Korea was—for it seems now
almost to have died out—the throwing of stones. In Cho-sen this game
more or less took the place of jiu-jitsu in Japan, and in the olden days
whole villages lined up on opposite sides, led by their chief bullies
and most expert throwers, the women often piling up stones within easy
reach of the warriors, and the festivities did not end until several
were badly injured, if not actually killed. Koreans still have the
reputation of being the most accurate stone-throwers in the world, as
more than one unwelcome stranger has learned to his dismay during some
dispute with a group of villagers. Under the influence of both Japanese
and American residents this faculty is being turned to another account,
and Korean baseball teams have already beaten more than once the best
aggregations which our countrymen in the peninsula can muster.


One has moments of doubt in Korea about the accuracy of the “survival of
the fittest” theory. The Koreans are superior to their rulers in mental
quickness, certainly in physique, and probably in some moral qualities.
This straighter, stronger-looking race seem big men beside the pushing
little dwarfs who have subjected them—though I found that the largest
native socks and shoes were nearly two inches too short for my own by no
means oversize Caucasian foot. That they are brighter, or at least of
swifter mental processes, than the Japanese, I am personally convinced
by numerous little episodes within my own experience. There was the
guide I had in the Diamond Mountains, for instance, only to cite one of
many similar examples. He was just an ordinary _jiggy-coom_, a porter
with the Korean carry-all on his back; yet though neither of us knew a
word of the same language, we had not the least difficulty in exchanging
all the thoughts we needed to during a four-day journey, by signs and
gestures. I have yet to see the Japanese who would not have failed
dismally under similar circumstances, and not merely because gestures
mean nothing to the people of Japan. We arrived one evening at a
temple-housed hotel run by the government railways, and the Japanese in
charge, though he had much more education than my guide, and spoke
considerable more or less English, displayed his racial density to such
a degree that I was forced to call in the Korean carrier as an
interpreter. Entirely in the language of signs and a few monosyllabic
place-names he caught the idea perfectly, and passed it on, in one tenth
the time I had already spent trying to drive it through the skull of the
son of Nippon.

But while many Koreans possess an alert mentality, this is often offset
by superstitions, prejudices, conceit, and the lack of initiative and
perseverance. They seem to have been slaves to clan or village opinion
for so long that they can seldom assert themselves individually. They
learn elementary things quickly, but they are prone to run out of steam
in the higher reaches. One gets the impression that they have less
self-control, that they are undisciplined, both by training and
temperament, compared to the Japanese. Unlike the Chinese, they will
fight upon slight provocation, which may be another proof of a lack of
self-control as well as of manliness. Such things as school strikes
against missionaries who have given them long and unselfish service to
the full extent of their resources indicate but little sense of
gratitude. Even their most friendly foreign teachers admit that almost
any of them will cheat at examinations if given the opportunity. Their
cruelty, or at least indifference to the suffering of others, is perhaps
as much an Oriental as merely a Korean trait. In the village just over
the hills from Seoul near which we made our Korean headquarters an old
man was found ill and half starved in a straw hut in the outskirts. If
the foreign gentry who pass that way almost every day take no notice of
him, the villagers evidently asked themselves, why should we? But the
first information the foreigners had of the invalid or his condition was
when our host happened one day to see him lying all but naked beside a
muddy stream, apparently trying to drink, his skin mere parchment
stretched tightly over his bones. The American gave the villagers a note
to the mission hospital and paid some of them to carry the old man there
on an improvised stretcher. Next morning nothing had been done. Called
to account, the villagers explained that they had decided not to take
him to the hospital, because he would only die soon anyway, and if they
buried him themselves it would cost less, they thought, than if the
hospital did so and then made the village pay for it.

It seems to be Japanese policy to keep deformity out of sight, but
Korean instinct and custom work to the same end. The native teachers of
a mission school vociferously objected to admitting a particularly
brilliant candidate—because he had only one eye! “If this thing goes
on,” one of the teachers raged, “we’ll be nothing but a collection of
cripples,” and to illustrate the point he sprang up and humped himself
across the floor like a paralytic, with the dramatic effect at which the
Koreans are adepts. Whatever his opinion of the Japanese in that
respect, no one would accuse the Koreans of having no sense of humor,
though they are much more solemn of demeanor than the Chinese. An
American resident who carries a massive old watch that once belonged to
his grandfather drew it out one day as he was leaving a railway
station—whereupon a Korean boy wearing the _jiggy_ of the porter’s
calling promptly backed up to the watch and solemnly asked if he should
transport it. There is less curiosity, or at least less child- or
monkey-like inquisitiveness about the Koreans than their immediate
neighbors either to the east or west display, more personal dignity, one
feels, and the stranger does not collect a following half as easily as
even in Japan. It is true, however, that villagers poke holes in the
paper walls of any inn-room housing foreigners, and missionary ladies
are obliged to carry a complete curtain-room with them on their travels
in the interior. Superstitions are still rife, for all the outside
influence, and some of them take quaint forms. As in Haiti, it is a
common thing to have a pedestrian dash across the road in front of a
moving automobile just as it seems to be upon him, the idea being to get
rid of the evil spirit which dogs his heels like his shadow, either by
having it crushed beneath the wheels or attaching itself to the
motorist. In fact, there are many little suggestions of the black man’s
republic of the West Indies about Korea—Napoleon beards, little pipes,
thatched market-stalls and the tiny transactions they are willing to
make, the custom of sleeping peacefully at the roadside or in the
roadway wherever the whim overtakes them, the same swing of the women
carrying burdens on their heads, a similar carelessness about exposure
of the person.

It is still an ordinary experience for a Korean bride to discover when
she enters her future home that she is only her husband’s “Number 3”
wife—yet all the children she may bear him are considered as belonging
to Wife Number 1. Nine-tenths of the suspensions from the church, at
least among Protestant converts, are for concubinage; most of the rest
are for marrying “heathen.” I have already mentioned that the
missionaries insist that Korean women are very modest, particularly as
compared to their Japanese sisters. They seem not to consider the public
display of breasts immodest, for missionaries, just like ordinary
people, appear to get used to things which must at first have struck
them as “dreadful.” They do not like to have them photographed, however;
people at home would “misunderstand.” Women still come to church
flaunting this open proof of motherhood, just as men do in their
horsehair hats. Yet when Japanese women came into public baths already
occupied by Korean men there was so much talk that the authorities were
forced to modify a time-honored custom of Japan and order a division of
the tubs by sexes. Less than two decades ago no Korean woman of the
better class appeared on the streets even of Seoul in the daytime, and
servant-girls compelled to do so covered their faces. After ten at night
no men were expected to be abroad, for then the women, usually in sedan
chairs, with lantern-bearers and followers, came out to pay their calls.
In those days young men never smoked in the presence of their elders—at
least of the male persuasion. No decent woman could read, but only
sorceresses and _keesang_, the geisha of Korea. To-day things are so
changed in some circles that the sewing-woman of a missionary family
sent her girls to school first, saying that the boys could take care of
themselves; with the result that her daughter became the wife of a
vice-consul in Manchuria while her son was still a _jiggy-coom_, waiting
at the station for a job of carrying. Points of view differ, of course,
and what we of the West consider quite proper may strike the Korean as
highly immodest, as well as vice versa. I remember once coming upon a
group of Korean servants in a foreign house all gazing with great
curiosity at the cover of one of our cheap high-priced magazines,
decorated with a silly, but from our point of view harmless, picture,
after the stereotyped manner of our “popular” illustrators, of a boy and
girl kissing. The servant who had worked longest for foreigners was
explaining to his scandalized fellows that they often did that, and held
hands, too—which last dreadful vice he demonstrated by taking a hand of
one of the others, by the wrist!

One should keep in mind, in considering the recent swift changes in
Korea, that it was closed to the outside world much longer, tighter, and
later than Japan. Yet the quaint old scholar’s cap is now as rare as the
old learning. The new generation seems to have lost the poise of the
old, and so far to have gotten nothing in its place. The rather flippant
youths of the new schools cannot read the classics—for there is a
splendid old Korean literature which is forbidden by the Japanese, so
that the younger generation is growing up without it—and thus far they
are not at home in the modern world that has so suddenly burst upon the
ancient peninsula. One of the demands of the thirty-three men who signed
the Korean “declaration of independence” a few years ago—the finest
types of Koreans, according to the missionaries, and the first of whom
were just being released, yellow and thin, when we were in the
country—was the freedom to study things Korean, including their history.
The idea of an education as the road to a government job and a lifetime
of loafing still carries over from the days that are gone. Four fifths
of the population is still reported illiterate, too, and even of those
eager to go to school hardly one in three can get inside one. The rest
can go to—well, to a Korean school of the old type, for instance. Frowsy
old men keep them privately, and a dozen or a score of boys come at
dawn, seven days a week, to squat on the floor of some dark and
miserable little room in a back alley, their slippers in a row along the
porch, and rock back and forth all day long shouting incessantly in what
would be a chorus if it were not also a chaos of individual noises more
often without than with meaning. Not until night falls do they unfold
their legs and stumble homeward, and all the day through, as they
“study,” the “teacher” in his special form of horsehair hat dozes on his
knees at the head of the room, and flies beyond computation in numbers
flit hour after hour from boy to boy. The Japanese officials of Korea
pay a bounty on flies by the pint, but they do not seem to have done
much toward wiping out their breeding-places. Yet, one recalls, while
gazing in upon one of these old-fashioned schools, much of the
civilization of Japan came from Korea—its culture, writing, Buddhism,
pottery—and its smallpox.

A Korean church service, too, is a sight worth going to church to see.
There are no seats, except perhaps a bench along one of the walls near
the pulpit, for the missionaries. All others sit or squat on the floor,
covered with straw matting, all in white except some of the smaller
children, mainly dressed in pink. Many of the men still wear topknots,
and some their “fly-trap” hats, for by Korean standards it is impolite
to take these off except in one unmentionable place, where it is
imperative. The sunburned breasts of women are also somewhat in
evidence, though the great majority of the average congregation have
adopted Western styles now in both these particulars. There may be a
rare man in foreign dress, but even the native pastors almost all wisely
cling to the flowing native garb of snow-white grass-cloth, so much more
comfortable and becoming to Koreans. The men squat on one side, the
women on the other, with the children in front between them, and seldom
do they rise at all during the service, but merely bow their heads to
the floor to pray. Now and again they sing one of our old familiar hymn
tunes, with Korean words, in loud, metallic voices. Dozens of children
of from two to six wriggle and talk and race about. From time to time a
“Bible woman” squirms out of her place, picks up a few of the eel-like
urchins, and returns them to their respective mothers, ordering them to
be nursed forthwith, then wriggles back into her place again. There may
be quiet during the infant dinner-hour, but the whole act is sure to be
repeated several times before the service is over and the snow-white
throng pours out between two unnecessarily stern-faced, sharp-eyed men
in plain clothes whose habitat is the police station.

There can be no doubt of the many difficulties of mission work in a
country where everything is so different from the home-land that an
expression sounding almost exactly like “Come on!” means “Stop!” Among
the dreadful stories one hears of missionary hardships is that of a man
still in the field, who in his early days wished to preach a sermon on
the text “_Tam naji mara_,” which is Korean for “Thou shalt not covet.”
But as his command of the language was still somewhat faulty, he made
the slight error of giving the text as “_Dam naji mara_.” Now while
“_tam_” means “to covet,” “_dam_” means “to sweat,” and when the long
service was over a little old Korean lady came up to say timidly to the
youthful pastor, “I loved your sermon, dear teacher, but please tell me,
how can we help sweating when it is so hot?”


Northward from Seoul by the railways which, broken only at the Straits
of Tsushima, reach from Tokyo to Peking and beyond, lies much the same
Korea as to the southward. Kaijo, or Song-do, reminds one that the
ancient rulers of Cho-sen knew how to pick beautiful mountain sites for
their capitals, for the landscape there rivals that about Seoul, alias
Keijo. The first unification of the whole peninsula took place under the
Korai—hence the name the West still uses—dynasty, which made its
headquarters at Song-do and ruled for more than four centuries. When it
was overthrown by one of the king’s generals, just a hundred years
before the discovery of America, a new capital was established at Seoul
and an ancient name for the country was restored—“Ch’ao Hsien,” roughly
the “Land of Morning Calm.” The Chinese still call it Koli. Remnants of
the groundwork of what must have been imposing buildings lie scattered
to the west of the present Kaijo, and a great wall still climbs along
the side of the mountain range that shuts it in. But the Song-do of
to-day is little more than a large and very compact vista of smooth
thatched roofs close beside the railway but an appreciable distance from
the station. It has an American mission school famous for the ginghams
made by students earning their way—un-Oriental as that may sound—in a
factory in charge of a man from South Carolina; and some of the old
customs have survived longer than in Seoul, the muffling from head to
heels in a white sheet, for instance, of some of the women who glide
through the narrow, unpaved streets.

Then, too, Kaijo is the center of the _gin-seng_ industry of Korea. The
root of this plant is credited with miraculous curative powers by the
credulous Orientals and reaches prices verging on the fabulous. Cases
are scarcely rare of wealthy invalids, particularly Chinese, paying as
much as two hundred dollars for a single root no larger than a little
forked carrot at most three inches long, though it is the wild
mountain-growing species of this originally Manchurian weed that reaches
such heights; the cultivated variety is much less esteemed. Throughout
the Far East there is hardly a native drug-shop without its carefully
hidden supply of this precious tonic, which is said to have some real
value for old and weak persons, at least of the Orient; even Chinese
physicians admit that it is too heating for Westerners, already too hot
by temperament, according to their view. No doubt its celebrity is
largely due, like that of many another commodity, to its absurdly high
price. One might fancy that the growing of _gin-seng_ would fit the
Korean temperament, for it takes seven years to mature, after which the
land must lie fallow, or at least free from the same crop, an equal
length of time. The fern-like plant dies in the sun; so for a
considerable distance along the way through Song-do district there are
big brown patches on the landscape which on closer inspection prove to
be fields of _gin-seng_ in rows of little beds, each protected by reed
or woven-leaf mats forming a north wall and inclining slightly to the
south. Here, under the watchful eye of the government monopoly bureau,
this delicate aristocrat of the vegetable kingdom is tended with far
greater care than the babies of Korea, and at last is hidden away in the
form of yellow-brown dried roots in the safest places known to native
drug-venders.

Farther north are red uplands waving with corn and millet, and at some
of the stations mammoth bales of silk cocoons, the worms within which
are doomed to die a wriggling death in boiling water as their precious
houses are disentangled into skeins in the thatched huts among which
they will be scattered, the monopolistic eye of the alien government
upon them also. Heijo, which to Koreans and missionaries is Ping Yang,
has a somewhat less picturesque location than its two principal
successors as capitals, and it bristles now with smoking factory
chimneys. Indeed, it is quickly evident that this second city of the
peninsula is more industrious than Seoul. Knitting-machines clash
incessantly in hundreds of huts; _yangbans_ and high hats and spotless
white garments seem conspicuously rare to the traveler still having the
capital in mind, and everywhere are evidences that here life has not
been for centuries a holiday broken only by occasional languishing in
government offices. Then, too, the eighteen thousand Chinese with which
official statistics credit Korea are somewhat concentrated in Ping Yang
and the north, and the Celestial adds to the industrious aspect of any
land. These bigger and more rational-looking men do much of the hard
work of Korea, such as stone-cutting and the building either of
Christian schools or temples to the ancient gods. The latter seem to be
losing some of their popularity in Ping Yang, for Christians are so
numerous that the clatter of bells for Wednesday night prayer-meetings
is as wide-spread as the sermons of Korean preachers are endless. Yet it
is barely fifty years since Ping Yang went down to the river in a body
and killed the foreigners who had dared to come in a Chinese junk into
the Forbidden Kingdom.

In this metropolis of the north even topknots are rare and clipped heads
the rule. It seems to be inevitable with the coming of Christianity to
lose the picturesque; but usually the crasser superstitions go with it,
and one should not, perhaps, regret the passing of anything which takes
these also. Besides, there remain the roofs peculiar to Ping Yang and
its region, with their high-flaring corners made of six to eight
superimposed tiles, now required by law in place of combustible thatch;
and the complicated cobweb of streets in the Korean section still teems
with the ancient weazel-hair brushes working from ink-slabs and sounds
with the busy, insistent, incessant _rat-a-tat_ of ironing.

It is striking how completely Korean Cho-sen remains to its very
borders. Even in Yuki, where the coasting-steamer that brought me down
from Vladivostok stopped to load logs, town and people were quite the
same in appearance, manner, and customs as in Seoul or Fusan—and Japan
had just as firm a grip. One might have suspected, from the long array
of flags out through the little frontier village, that nearly all the
inhabitants were Japanese, but it turned out that all shops, in honor of
some mikado-ordained holiday, had been required to put up the rising—or
is it the setting?—sun.

Seishin, a more important port farther southward along the coast, is
picturesquely placed among foot-hills, and even has a railway, though
this begins miles away behind it. There are no rickshaws for weak-legged
passengers either, though little hand-run flat-cars operate on a tiny
track, the spinning along on which on the edge of the bay by moonlight
is delightful. Few thatched roofs are to be seen along the isolated
little segment of the Korean Railways between Seishin and the garrisoned
border town of Kainei, but tiled, Chinese-looking houses set down almost
out of sight in patches of corn, and many mountains and tunnels, though
also some fair valleys. Big chimneys made of hollowed logs of wood
sprayed at the top by the fire that sometimes reaches them stand high
above every mud-stuccoed dwelling in this region. Even there the
landscape is almost treeless, except for a certain growth of small
evergreens in patches here and there, though it is not far beyond to the
great forests of the upper Yalu. Among them rises the rarely uncovered
head of the Ever-White Mountain, and there are genuine tigers of Bengal
and other game worthy the best sportsman’s skill in the wooded labyrinth
of mountains about it. Kainei itself is quite a large town with many
Japanese, thanks largely to the great barracks that seemed to swarm with
soldiers. Part of an unambitious wall crawling along the foot of the
hills not far north of it marks the ancient boundary between Korea and
Manchuria, and in this midsummer season the town was hot beyond
description in its pocket among the mountains. There were many little
straw-built watch-towers standing stork-legged at the edges of the
ripening crops, and up a hillside at the edge of town was a pathetic
little Shinto shrine trying to force its way into the life of the
people.


[Illustration:

  A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper in his high hat
    at the rear
]

[Illustration:

  The interior of a native Korean school of the old type,—dark, dirty,
    swarming with flies, and loud with a constant chorus
]

[Illustration:

  In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea
]

[Illustration:

  The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean cooking
]

Much of the east coast of Korea is a mountainous wilderness, culminating
in one truly Alpine cluster which the Japanese, quite justly, are
striving to make better known to the outside world. If there is anywhere
in eastern Asia a more marvelous bit of scenery, or a finer place in
which to wander away a few summer days or weeks, than Kongo-san,
beginning to be known among foreigners as the Diamond Mountains, I have
overlooked it. One might enthuse for pages over the cathedral spires,
the colossal cliffs, the magnificent evergreen forests clinging by
incredible footholds to the gray rock even of mighty precipices, and a
hundred other unnamed beauties of this compact little scenic paradise
without giving more than a faint hint of the charms it encloses.

From Gensan, railway terminus of the branch northeastward from Seoul and
principal port on the east coast, a small steamer hobbles southward for
half a day to a blistering little town called Chozen, swaps passengers
with a diminutive wharf, and hurries away again as if the evil spirits
of the mountains were after it. One can walk, rickshaw, or Ford it to
Onseiri, five miles inland, where the Japanese have built a modern hotel
lacking nothing but freedom from Japanese prices, and where there are
several Korean inns which house virtually all visitors. Or, one may
leave the train from Seoul long before reaching Gensan, and cover the
eighty-eight miles from Heiko to Choan-ji Temple, one of the buildings
of which the same Japanese have made over into a pleasant little
hostelry, by a highway that will carry even full-grown automobiles
whenever the rainy season does not suddenly and bodily wipe out great
sections of it. For that matter there are sixty-four miles of a road
similar in capacity and subject to the same lapses along a beautiful
coast-line from Gensan to Onseiri direct. Everything so far mentioned,
however, functions only in the summer season, for from October onward
Kongo-san is snow-bound and its monks and simple mountaineers drift back
into the bucolic existence they and their forerunners enjoyed for
centuries before the noisy, hurrying outside world discovered their
enchanted retreat.

If the Diamond Mountains were in China, chair-bearers would humor the
lazy in their indolence and carry them around the circuit for a most
inadequate compensation. Fortunately the Koreans are not so ready to
take up the burdens of others, with the result that Kongo-san is spared
the sight of the mere tourist, incapable of depending for a few days on
his own legs and head. A _jiggy-coom_, of whose intelligence I have
already spoken elsewhere, and whose sturdiness, unfailing good cheer,
and knowledge of the mountain paths were on a par with his other good
qualities, kept my indispensable belongings within constant reach in
spite of the swift pace circumstances forced me to set; otherwise my own
feet paid the toll for whatever my eyes feasted upon. In fact, we made
the circuit in three days, and saw in four everything that other
visitors have considered worth making an exertion to see, which is
reputed to be a record. But I admit this not in pride, but in
contrition, for not to linger, to stroll, to camp for weeks hither and
yon among the towering peaks, beside the torrential ravines, away in the
scented recesses of the virgin forests of Kongo-san is to commit a
sacrilege and to deny oneself one of the good things of life.

There are trails that pant upward for hours more steeply than any
stairway built by man, revealing constantly changing vistas of
fantastically carved rock pinnacles, of combinations of mountain and
forest rarely seen even in the Alps, and, high enough up, glimpses of
the sea itself, down into which Kongo-san comes tumbling in mighty
cliffs, sheer as the walls of sky-scrapers. There are trails that wander
hour after hour down great rock gorges where streams too clear to be
described in words leap from pool to blue-green pool, and where the
world rears up on either side so swiftly that only an eagle could escape
from the ravine except by its natural exit. There are places which only
the feet of intrepid and ardent lovers of nature have ever trodden, or,
what is still better, ever will, and pinnacles of sharpened rock from
the all but unattainable points of which myriads of others like them,
yet each utterly different, stretch away in an endless forest of white
granite spires among which sunshine and rain and the often swirling
mists make new beauties each more beautiful than the last.

But we are wasting ink. The most expert weaver of words could not spin a
pattern that would be more than a faint and caricature-like resemblance
to the reality, even in some of the milder corners and aspects of the
Diamond Mountains. Let us acknowledge plain impossibility at once
therefore and see what hints can be conveyed by the matter-of-fact
pigments at our disposal.

It is about fifty miles around the base of Kongo-san and the whole
playground of nature covers only an area of seventy-five square miles,
but not even in the Andes has the builder of mountains so nearly outdone
himself within so limited a compass. A range over which no one has yet
found a way divides this into what is called the Inner and the Outer
Kongo, each with its endless variety of peerless scenic features. In
places the trails crawl along the face of granite precipices by
causeways or stairs of logs laid corduroy fashion and held in place by
big iron spikes driven into the solid rock. In others there are huge
chains by which to drag oneself to the top of some all but inaccessible
summit that repays a hundredfold all the exertion of reaching it. Twice
we had to wade and swim Bambakudo (the “Cañon of Myriad Cascades”) where
man-built aids of chiseled rock or chained logs failed us, and where no
human legs would have been frog-like enough to carry us from boulder to
boulder across the foaming stream. To see the best of the region needs
often hands as well as feet, and there are many times when the agility
and steel nerves of the steeple-jack and the endurance of the Marathon
runner are indispensable to the man who cannot bear the shame of turning
back from an attempted undertaking.

If its delicious sylvan isolation and its marvelous scenery were all
Kongo-san had to offer, it would be well worthy of world-wide fame; but
to these are added about twoscore of Buddhist temples and monasteries so
old and so withdrawn from the world that they alone would be worth
climbing far to see. Ever since the introduction of Buddhism into Korea,
some four centuries after Christ, this chaotic cluster of peaks and
abysses has been a kind of holy land of that faith. Converted kings
outdid each other in aiding the priests and monks who retired to this
secluded region, sending workmen and sculptors to build them temples and
cloisters in many and strange places, to chisel images of Buddha in
isolated gorges on the faces of immense cliffs, ordering the laymen
roundabout the mountains to furnish the recluses sustenance in
perpetuity. Tradition has it that there were at one time a hundred and
eight separate religious establishments scattered among these compact
mountains; but it came to be the kingly custom toward the end of the
fifteenth century to persecute Buddhism, and many of the retreats were
burned or fell into ruin, while the rest cut themselves off from the
outside world as completely as possible. After they were rediscovered,
so to speak, some thirty years ago by, strangely enough, an English
woman, their almost utter solitude of centuries began to be more and
more broken by visitors of the nature-loving rather than the purely
pious turn of mind.

The largest of the temples of Kongo-san is Yu-jom-sa, in which we spent
the night following the perpendicular climb into the Inner Kongo, and it
is quite typical of the others. A log bridge led across the acrobatic
stream we had been trailing from near the summit, to a cluster of a
dozen or more buildings, widely varying in size but all in the rather
gaudy yet not unpleasing flare-roofed style common to Korean temples,
and more or less so to those of Japan and China. Built of wood
throughout, they had a dark and venerable aspect, even though they are
credited since their establishment with having been destroyed more than
forty times by fire—an extremely common affliction to the monkish
residents of Kongo-san. Of the multicolored bogies and painted wooden
gods within the temples, of the colorful wall scenes which give these
background, even of the dainty pagoda rising slenderly as high as the
highest roof, with tinkling little bells at each corner of its many
stories, I need say nothing in particular, for these are things to be
found in any Korean sanctuary. What was less familiar were the great
kitchens from which the big establishment and its visitors are fed, or
the wooden trough that brings the finest of mountain water down from
miles away to a series of huge hollowed logs ranged closely side by side
on the slightly sloping space between the two clusters of buildings.
Those who wished to drink dipped with a quaint little wooden dipper from
the upper logs, those supplying the kitchen took water from a little
farther down; hands and faces were washed lower still, and finally came
the reservoirs in which kitchen utensils and the like might be rinsed.
To say that these descending orders of use were strictly obeyed either
by visitors or the monks themselves, however, would be to overdraw any
Korean picture.

Most of the temples and monasteries of Kongo-san supply food, and many
of them sleeping-quarters, to all who apply for them, as there are
neither inns nor the suggestion of shops or laymen venders in the
mountains. A novice met us at the temple end of the bridge and assigned
me a room, quite bare until it came time for boys to bring the little
table on which I was served in a squatting position, but with the usual
brown-paper floor of Korean dwellings. Cleanliness, at least as far as
anything came to my eyes, was quite general. We had arrived before
sunset, and there was time to see something of the daily life of the
place before it retired early for the night. Big piles of cord-wood and
brush in back courts testified to quite different weather than this
delightful August evening at many hundred feet elevation. Numbers of the
younger inmates were playing a medieval kind of cross between tennis and
handball when we came; on the edge of the graveled temple terrace that
served as court were two crude gymnastic turning-bars on which some of
the priests and novices did tolerably difficult feats. A roar of
laughter went up when, having been jokingly invited to join in this
sport, I had almost to duck my head to pass under the bars that most of
the others could only reach by jumping. They trotted out the tallest man
in the establishment, and roared again when he proved to be several
inches shorter than I; and I am sure I lost the reputation for veracity
among them because I asserted that, as people of my country go, I am not
particularly tall. There were many boys about the place, but I saw no
signs of women, though the recluses of Kongo-san are reputed to obey
their vows of celibacy much more in the breach than in the observance.
The yellow robe which makes the Buddhist priest so picturesque a figure
in some other lands had no counterpart here, at least in their outdoor,
every-day wear. They wore almost the ordinary Korean male costume, in
most cases of sackcloth, like men in mourning, though there were some
white and others with a bluish tint. Heads of course were cropped, and
there were no head-dresses of any kind in evidence.

[Illustration:

  One of the monks of Yu-jom-sa
]

[Illustration:

  This great cliff-carved Buddha, fifty feet high and thirty broad, was
    done by Chinese artists centuries ago. Note my carrier, a full-sized
    man, squatting at the lower left-hand corner
]

[Illustration:

  The carved Buddhas of Sam-pul-gam, at the entrance to the gorge of the
    Inner Kongo, were chiseled by a famous Korean monk five hundred
    years ago
]

[Illustration:

  The camera can at best give only a suggestion of the sheer white rock
    walls of Shin Man-mul-cho, perhaps the most marvelous bit of scenery
    in the Far East
]

The booming of a great bell struck by the end of a suspended log called
for gayer and more elaborate garments in which monks and novices sat and
rocked as they chanted through the evening service on the papered floors
of several of the main buildings. Meanwhile I had been called back to my
room and served supper. There must have been at least twenty courses,
or, rather, different dishes, to the meal, including no meat, but with
more examples of the really excellent performances of the Korean cook
than I had ever tasted elsewhere. Even tea was served, though up to
quite recent years Koreans never drank it. Best of all, the attendants
and idlers did not come to sit and watch me eat, like some wild animal
in a cage, but withdrew when I had been served and did not intrude again
until I lighted my evening cigar. Then a group of us strolled down to
the bridge across the brawling stony river and chatted in the language
of signs until night blotted out the evergreen wooded mountains that
pile up close on every hand above this delightful refuge from the silly
babble of the world.

It is true that a quartet of Japanese noisily smoked and gambled most of
the night away on the other side of a thin partition, but these are
afflictions against which Koreans have no effective weapons. My
attendants actually left the door open all night; but, oh, the
unspeakable hardness of a Korean floor serving as a bed! Breakfast was
almost as generous as the evening meal, yet as I recall it I paid, at a
roundabout suggestion from my hosts, only two or three _yen_ for the
full accommodations of myself and guide.

Sometime during that morning we came upon the mightiest of the carved
Buddhas in the Diamond Mountains, in a wild and utterly uninhabited
ravine through which we were descending from another slowly attained
summit covered with reeking wet half-jungle. The image was cut in deep
relief on the face of a cliff, and is so mammoth that my companion,
squatting at a corner of it, looks like a fly-speck on the picture I
took. At noon we were the guests of the score of monks of Makayun-an,
the largest of the cloisters, as Yu-jom-sa is of the temples. A useless,
perhaps, but certainly a gentle life these sturdy white-clad fellows
with the shaven heads lead at the sheer foot of one of the most
perpendicular peaks of the Inner Kongo. There are other cloisters far
more inaccessible, some which almost never see visitors. One, I recall,
on that afternoon down the magnificent Gorge of the Thousand Cascades,
was set so sheer on the vertical mountain-side that a post, which seemed
to be of iron and was surely a hundred feet long, under a corner of the
building was all that kept it from pitching headlong into the abyss
along which we scrambled our way far below.

I have said enough, no doubt, but no visitor to the Diamond Mountains
should hurry back to drab reality until he has climbed by finger-nails
and eyelids into that maze of white granite crags, like a hundred
gigantic Woolworth Buildings designed by no earthly architect, which the
Koreans call Shin Man-mul-cho. It rained more or less all the time we
were risking our lives and all but bursting our lungs to reach even some
of the slighter elevations of this fairy-land, but it would have been a
strange offshoot of the human race who would have considered a mere
soaking and the day’s toil of a galley-slave a high price to pay for the
sights that were conferred upon us. My coolie carrier himself, though he
had been there more than once before, was as averse to turning back,
even long after it would have been wisdom to do so, as was the
bedraggled and ragged Westerner who accompanied him.

Then, if there is time enough left after throwing away the tatters to
which any proper excursion into Kongo-san will reduce the stoutest
garments endurable there in summer, and the substitution of something
less exposing, one should have a glimpse of the Sea Kongo, where islands
that are like peaks of the fantastic mountains farther inland dot the
route over which ply in the summer season crude conveyances that in real
life are fishing-boats.




                               CHAPTER V
                         UP AND DOWN MANCHURIA


The change from Korea to China is not merely abrupt, it is
instantaneous. In the exact middle of the big bridge over the Yalu,
across which rickshaws trot and pedestrians of all degrees shuttle in
two constant, almost silent-footed streams on either side of rumbling
trains, stand a Japanese guard and a Chinese soldier, as strikingly
unlike as two men of the same profession and rather similar background
could well be; and they are typical of the wide differences in customs
and costumes, in all the details, if not the essentials, of life on the
two shores of the famous river. White gives way to blue denim as the
garb of crowds and individuals—for in China, as in Japan, the former is
the color of mourning. Pigtails take the place of topknots; tiny bound
feet, which the traveler perhaps has never before seen, instantly become
general among women of all ages and classes; uncovered breasts die out
as suddenly as does the silly horsehair pretense of a hat. Instead of
stallions there are geldings; wheelbarrows and oscillating
shoulder-poles replace the back-rack known as a _jiggy_; the Chinese
sense of humor, or racial cheerfulness, comes at once to the fore—there
was more laughing in an hour in Antung than in a day in Korea or a week
in Japan. One could not but be struck by the size of the Chinese as
compared even with the Koreans, to say nothing of the dwarfish Japanese,
and by their more common-sense air and dress—and at the same time by the
horrible sloughs of mud that passed for streets, the diseased beggars
wallowing up and down them, the truly putrid conditions of life in the
native city.

There is a paved and well built Japanese fore-city about the railway
station, but even this was essentially Chinese in its human aspects, in
spite of the big mat-covered arena that had been hastily thrown up to
house the paunchy second-rate Japanese wrestlers who strutted the
streets in loin-cloths and fluttering kimonos. The low and ancient
“victorias,” that rattled to and from the station, jerked rather than
drawn by an emaciated horse or two streaked with mud and perspiration,
and loaded to the gunwales often with a full dozen Chinese besides the
heartless driver, seemed strangely in keeping with the north bank of the
Yalu. All trains halt for an hour or more at Antung for the lenient
examination of baggage, so that there is time to see all this, as well
as the great log rafts floating down the river as its upper reaches are
denuded and their forests turned into Chinese coffins. Nor will it be an
unusual experience if the traveler is approached by a Japanese gendarme
asking to see his passport, to which the proper reply of course is as
gentle a reminder as is consistent with the brazen courtesy and one’s
individual temperament that China has not yet been internationally
recognized as a Japanese colony.

A few miles northward a serrated range rises close on the right, and
there are other groups of hills on the way to Mukden, two or three of
them strikingly crowned by ancient temples. But broad rolling fields of
corn and millet and _kaoliang_ are the chief impression of this ten-hour
journey. There is an atmosphere reminiscent of pioneer America in these
broad reaches of Manchuria, so unlike the little diked and flooded
paddy-fields of Korea and Japan. Only rarely is there a human being in
sight, now and then a lone man in a pigtail and blue denim hoeing corn,
or plowing with a thin red ox or a cow. The few houses are as miserable
as the huts of Korea, otherwise quite different, being plain and square,
thatched with corn- or _kaoliang_-stalks instead of the hair-smooth
rice-straw, and without a suggestion of the picturesque about them. In
the midsummer season the landscape is a deep, almost unbroken green, for
the few houses are so low that they are all but hidden among the tall
crops, and there is the slightly denser green of scrub timber on the
constant succession of fair-sized hills. Willows abound; in fact, it
would not be difficult to imagine oneself in the hillier parts of
Pennsylvania, did not the visibly splendid fertility of the country
contrast so strongly with the lack of real houses or any indication of
prosperity and comfort. At length high terraced hills become more
populous; then the country grows deadly flat, with the soya-bean, king
of Manchurian products, lording it over all other crops as one
approaches Mukden.

The Russian name for the capital of China’s “Eastern Three Provinces”
bids fair to persist in Western speech, though to the Japanese it is
Hoten and the Chinese themselves now call it Feng-tien. That constant
fight for a livelihood, for bare escape from starvation, which becomes
in time an accepted feature of life in China, is in evidence even this
far north and east, for all the spaciousness of Manchuria. There is a
swarming of rickshaws like men set on the mark ready to race to any exit
where there is the shadow of a promised fare, blocking the way if one
attempts to set out on foot, trailing the stroller until walking ceases
to be a pleasure. Carriages with a suggestion of Russian ancestry
completely surround the man who gives the slightest hint that he may at
some time want one, and escape is hardly possible without the vigorous
wielding of at least as deadly a weapon as a cane, which leaves the
average American handicapped. Both rickshaw-men and drivers are deathly
afraid of even the most insignificant Japanese bell-boy, however, and as
there is no way of alighting in Mukden except from the west without
passing through a cordon of these, assistance may be had against the
first fierce onslaught of the over-numerous means of transportation.
There are rows of “Peking carts” also, ready to crowd half a dozen hardy
and unhurried travelers beneath their blue-denim hoods, and finally, if
one chances to be as fond of local odors as of local color, there are
the horse-cars, which may conceivably strike some of the more aged
visitors from the Occident as vaguely familiar. Just how many years back
it is that these same cars jogged up and down Third Avenue in medieval
New York I have not the requisite data to say, but they spent quite a
number of them earning their livelihood in Tokyo, and there are rumors
that their jaunt into the Orient has not yet reached its termination.

There is almost nothing Chinese, except these things and those who
patronize them, about the red-brick Japanese city with its wide, often
well paved streets in diagonal patterns, its typically Japanese
monuments and its little khaki-clad gendarmes in blood-red cap-bands,
where the traveler by train usually alights in Mukden. But Feng-tien
proper is quite thoroughly Chinese, when one does at last reach it by
one of the many available but all leisurely means of transportation.
There is not merely a massive inner wall surrounding what was the
capital of the Manchus before they spread over China and took up their
headquarters in Peking, but a mud wall of careless and irregular shape
encloses the entire city, down to the last suburb hovel, less as a
protection against earthly enemies than to shut out those omnipresent
evil spirits of the fervid Chinese imagination. Inside, there is what
Spanish Americans would call _mucho movimiento_, interminable movement,
a dodging to and fro of more rickshaws than there are taxicabs in New
York, a constant passing of myriads of men and boys, even of women and
girls, these often in the fantastic Manchu head-dress, an ever moving
multitude on business, pleasure, or nothing whatever bent. Shops
offering everything from steamed bread to rolls of copper coins, from
red paper banners to pulverized deerhorns, line the way thickly, in
dense succession. Venders of anything which native Mukden is in the
habit of consuming, or of keeping unconsumed, weave their way in and out
of the throngs, the muddy side streets, the tight little alleyways,
announcing their wares by strange cries or mechanical noises that have
come to be accepted for what they purport to be. Yet for all the bustle
there is an atmosphere of Chinese calm. Shopkeepers may be eager for
trade, but they will not be hurried out of a fitting deportment merely
to please clients from the breathless West; hawkers move through the
streets and carry on their bargaining as if the commodity we know as
time had no appreciable value to them, though they keep industriously at
their allotted task of announcing and disposing of as many of their
wares as the fates decree. Above all the katydids or crickets singing in
their crude little woven-reed cages suspended before house- and
shop-door give a sense of bucolic calm that neutralizes any hint of
haste in the incessant swarming to and fro of every type of Chinese.

Hawkers of this curious breed of Chinese singing-bird wander all the
streets of Feng-tien, a score or more of the little cages at the ends of
their shoulder-poles, one or two of the green insects, resembling
“grasshoppers,” in each cage, and beside them sprigs of grass to feed
upon until their support devolves upon a purchaser. We bought one for
the diminutive member of our family, cage and all for twenty coppers,
which seemed to be about a nickel, though it goes without saying that
both as strangers and foreigners we were no doubt grossly swindled. Nor
would the captive sing for us, at least long enough to be worth the
price, during the day or two we kept him, gay and melodious as he and
his companions were in Chinese captivity. Possibly he missed the
mellifluous odors of the native city and was drooping with homesickness.
When his little alien owner set him free in the park of the Japanese
city, there was no great hope that he would enjoy his liberty long, for
Chinese urchins were slinking about with a furtive air and an alert
demeanor which boded ill for singing insects—unless, as we half
suspected, those of China prefer to hang before a shop and chant keepers
and clients into harmonious understanding.

The mere “sights” of Mukden in the tourist sense all date back at least
three hundred years. There is the Manchu palace within the real city
wall, its many structures still impressive in their roofs of imperial
yellow tiles for all the dust-covered wrecks they are fast becoming
under caretakers interested only in the size of their gratuities. An
hour’s churning by Mukden’s Russian type of carriage over what the
Chinese regard as a road is not too high a price to pay for a stroll
through the capacious grounds of the Pei-ling, or Northern Tombs, where
the second and last emperor to occupy the palaces in the city lies with
his consort under the usual artificial hillock behind elaborate
structures roofed also in imperial yellow. For though one is sure to see
as many tombs of the famous and infamous in China as cathedrals in
Europe, this is by no means the least imposing of them. It takes a bit
more courage to jolt out to Tung-ling, the Eastern Mausoleum, a
generation older and twice as far away; but there pine-clad hills and
rather gentle yet impressive scenery make up for the somewhat less
expansive tombs. Then, too, those whose interests are not entirely in
the past may wish to run out on the branch line to Fushun, where the
Japanese are taking out—by the use of economical Chinese muscle—vast
quantities of coal from an open cut that goes down into the earth in
steps, like a dry-dock prepared for some mammoth ship many times larger
than any sea has ever floated.

It was at Mukden that we first came into personal contact with the
swarms of soldiers—“coolies in uniform” might be a more exact term—with
which all China is cursed under its putative republican régime. Chang
Tso-lin, the war lord of Manchuria, had just been thwarted in his plan
to get control of Peking, and his troops in their muddy-gray cotton
uniforms were still pouring back into the city by the train-load.
Wagon-trains of ammunition, useful another year, were rumbling through
the narrow streets, hauled by dust-caked mules. Troops were stowed away
everywhere, in every big yard or semi-public compound, in unsuspected
corners, in barracks outside the town. Nowhere could one open the eyes
without seeing soldiers, lounging in unmilitary attitude before guarded
gates, lolling about the streets and bazaars with the air of conquerors
to whom nothing could be denied, drawn in endless files through the
Japanese city on their way to the railway station stretched out at ease
in rickshaws among their bed-stuffed possessions and grasping in one
hand the rifle with the butt of which the great majority of them
probably paid the perspiring coolies so incessantly trotting back and
forth with them. How much more picturesque life would be with us if our
soldiers mobilized in taxicabs, and booted the driver out of the way if
he dared to call attention to the taximeter.

Scholarly-looking little Chang Tso-lin, in his ugly French-château style
of dwelling that seems so inexcusable an intruder among the graceful
palaces of China, is an enigma, at least to those who have merely met
rather than learned to know him. How this outwardly almost insignificant
man can hold a great territory in the hollow of his hand, baffling all
the cross-currents of intrigue which sweep incessantly up and down the
“Eastern Three Provinces,” was a query worth pondering. Virtually a
bandit in his younger days, then a lieutenant in the Japanese army
during the war with Russia, Chang gathered somewhere the power to rule
which made him an autocrat over his own people and won him even among
many of the foreigners who breathe the Manchurian atmosphere the
reputation of being the “strong man” of China. His methods are drastic
and prompt; he is said to depend more on intuition, on “hunches,” than
on ordered reflection. Keys to the leg-irons of serious criminals he
kept in his own possession, so that they could not buy off in the
time-honored Chinese fashion. Just before we reached Mukden two of his
generals had been detected in the not unprecedented Chinese feat of
putting into their own pockets a few cents a day from each soldier’s
pay. Chang had them up on the carpet only after he had undeniable proof
of their guilt, and there was nothing left for them to do but to confess
and plead for mercy. A curt order to have them taken to the
execution-ground beyond the outer city wall closed the incident. On the
same day two common soldiers who had indulged in looting in outlying
districts were found in the possession of the extraordinary sum of five
hundred dollars each, and for three days their bodies were left lying
out in front of the Chinese railway station as a hint to others whose
plans might be taking similar shape. Cynics, and those foreign residents
whose pet among the “strong men” of China is some one else, lay such
personal disasters to the simple fact that Chang himself did not get his
share of the “squeeze,” but the consensus of opinion seemed to be
otherwise.

[Illustration:

  Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu
    from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their
    crippled feet
]

[Illustration:

  The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once
    the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East
]

[Illustration:

  A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the Russians at Port
    Arthur. Hundreds of such war memorials are preserved by the Japanese
    on the sites of their first victory over the white race
]

[Illustration:

  The empty Manchu throne of Mukden
]

The centuries-old Chinese method of execution by the lopping off of
heads seems almost to have died out in modern militaristic China, at
least in the north, along with such punishments as the slicing or the
boxing up of those who win official displeasure. As condemned men cross
the bridge to the execution-ground at Mukden, they are politely asked
whether they wish to take morphine. Most of them “save face” by refusing
it and assuming an outward air of bravery and indifference, perhaps even
of gaiety. Sometimes as many as a score kneel on the ground together,
their arms tied behind them. A soldier, who gets two “Mex” dollars for
each man he despatches, walks down the line and kills as many as he
chooses, and when he tires of the sport another soldier quickly takes
his place. There are stories of men quarreling violently because the
first one killed more than his share. The rifle barrel is placed behind
the ear of each victim in prompt succession, the other kneeling men
gazing up the line to see when their turn is coming, sometimes even
laughing aloud at a bad shot, and as each man falls on his face from the
force of the discharge a guard yanks the body out straight and cuts off
the leg-irons. One might as well be in a barber-shop so far as any
atmosphere of life and death, as we of the West understand it, goes at
these frequent execution-parties at Feng-tien.

It must take a certain nerve-control to serve under the “war lord of
Manchuria.” Hardly an hour after the two generals so radically cured of
grafting had joined their ancestors, another general was asked to step
into an automobile and go out to the execution-grounds with two American
visitors. There was something about his manner which suggested that the
general was under some great strain, but his companions, familiar with
despotic rulers only in popular fiction, did not suspect until they
reached their destination just why it was so obviously an effort for him
to keep his attention on a subject, or even to swallow. But when he saw
that there were no armed soldiers on hand to receive him, and that he
had really been sent for no other purpose than to act as guide for the
visitors, he thawed out so thoroughly that the foreigners carried off a
false impression of the expansiveness which a Chinese gentleman displays
to casual acquaintances.

Chang himself is evidently not without certain misgivings of a personal
nature. When another American, armed with a motion-picture outfit and
full credentials, was introduced into the war lord’s residence by one of
his most trusted officials, General Chang the younger, his son and
commander-in-chief of his armies, came to look things over in person,
and even then the father cautiously examined the camera when he
appeared, and a dozen of his personal body-guard—to which, rumor has it,
no one is eligible who has not killed at least ten men—stood behind the
camera-man with rifles loosely slung in the crook of their elbows during
the filming. Yet the younger general reads, and to a certain extent
speaks, English; his wife wears over her ears the hair-puffs of the
Western “flapper”; a graduate of Columbia University is the official
interpreter, several Chinese graduates of West Point serve under him,
and the general’s favorite car comes from Michigan’s best automobile
factory—where it was fitted with machine-gun emplacements and straps to
keep the guards on the running-boards from changing their minds in times
of danger.

I passed through Mukden four times before my journeys in as many
directions from that focal point of Manchuria ended, and often had news
from there after we moved on, for the doings of Chang Tso-lin were
always of interest to the rest of China. To all intents and purposes
this forceful little Chinese had become the absolute ruler of what was
the home-land of the Manchus before they usurped the throne at Peking,
completely reversing the rôles of the two peoples as they were played in
1644. The influx of Chinese after that date, when the Great Wall ceased
to be a barrier between the overcrowded regions inside it and the vast
open spaces of the nomad herdsmen beyond, gradually turned these into
tilled fields where cultivation had hitherto been as strictly prohibited
as had Chinese immigration, and finally swamped the thinly inhabited
region entirely. The Manchus conquered China, and China began again in
her time-honored way to swallow up the conquerors, until to-day there is
no such thing as a Manchu nation, hardly a spoken remnant of the
sonorous Manchu language, no one resembling the fierce warriors and
hardy horsemen who put an end to the Ming dynasty such a little while
ago. For it is barely three centuries since the chief of the “Eastern
Tartars” commanded several learned persons of his nation to design a
system of writing Manchu, upon the model of that of the Mongols, and not
until two decades later that his successor ascended the dragon throne.
To-day one meets individuals all over China who consider themselves
Manchus, but they are hardly in any way distinguishable from the Chinese
among whom they have been completely assimilated. One may travel the
length and breadth of Manchuria now without realizing that he is not in
China “proper,” and particularly since the rise of its present Chinese
dictator it is much more fittingly known by its Chinese name of “Eastern
Three Provinces.”

Virtually, if not openly, independent under his rule, that vast fertile
region may possibly have a new future that will make it worthy of still
another name, devoid of any suggestion of dependency. Mukden has its own
foreign office; the incomes from the national salt monopoly and the
customs, from that portion of the railway to Peking which lies north of
the Great Wall, and from other similar sources flow directly into
Chang’s treasury. The latest report is that he is making a good and,
within Chinese limits, honest use of them. Mukden threatens to blossom
out soon in widened and paved streets, to increase her school
facilities, to send the old horse-cars off again on their wanderings and
become the third city of China with electric tramways. Incidentally
there is talk of a system of conscription to give Chang’s armies the
full supply of hardy young men which this great granary of them under
his command is capable of supplying, which will be a line of demarcation
indeed from the haphazard, voluntary enlistments so long and fixedly in
vogue in China “proper.” There are those who believe that provincial
autonomy in place of the tightly centralized form of government of
imperial days is not merely the visible development in modern
“republican” China but the best thing that could happen to the colossal
old empire, and these are watching with interest what they hope is the
advancement of Manchuria under its approximately independent rule. But
political changes are often swift in what was for so many centuries the
unchangeable Middle Kingdom, and which still calls itself by the old
name, so that it would be worse than boldness to prophesy whether
another year will find Chang Tso-lin the undisputed sovereign of a
progressive and well administered Northeastern China or merely another
of those innumerable eliminated politicians fattening into dotage over
their ill gotten gains in the safety-zones commonly known as foreign
concessions.


As the traveler races north or southward from Mukden by the excellent
expresses of the South Manchurian Railway, well ballasted and much of it
already double-tracked, through towns lighted by electricity and as
spick and span as Japanese rule can make them, it is hard to realize
that when the present century began the home-land of the Manchus was
almost unknown to the outside world in anything but name. Back behind
these modern railway cities bulk the old walled towns of China, and in
the never distant background the mere passenger glimpses the primitive
methods of transportation and of life in general that are in such sharp
contrast to his immediate surroundings, fitted with almost everything
that civilization has mechanically to offer. In the summer season
_kaoliang_, a species of what our own South knows as sorghum and which
bears a considerable resemblance to the Kaffir-corn widely cultivated in
Haiti, covers the earth with its deep green to the height of a
horseman’s head, often as far as the eye can see for hours at a time—and
makes magnificent hiding for bandits. The flatness of Manchuria at
Mukden and to the north is made up for by the splendid range of
mountains that follows the railway not far off on the left all the way
to Dairen, great tumbled hills in which the mere tramper or the seeker
after old temples and ancient monasteries finds himself equally
rewarded. But it was still my lot for a time longer to stick rather
closely to the lines of modern travel and to commonplace, if
comfortable, modern cities.

Dairen, which the Japanese have made of the Russian Dalny in the leased
portion of the Liaotung Peninsula that fell to them as the spoils of
war, has all the un-Chinese characteristics of such cities, to enumerate
which would merely be to describe in detail any one of a hundred great
ports and railway termini in Europe or, with certain modifications,
North America. May not therefore the broad macadamed streets, the big
brick and stone buildings, the great breakwaters, the mammoth cranes on
the docks, and all the rest of the signs of what we call progress, so
admirable but so unpicturesque, be taken for granted? We liked Port
Arthur, which the Japanese have redubbed Ryojun, better. There life was
more leisurely; old buildings constructed by the Russians, streets that
broke out every little while into grass- and even weed-grown open
spaces, the spaciousness of a place which never grew to be the large
busy city its founders planned, gave it something of the atmosphere of
an old town of England, or of our South, somewhat off the track of
present-day hasty and bustling activity. Ryojun is the seat of
government of the Japanese leased territory, while Dairen is merely its
metropolis. The old Port Arthur and the new are separated by a rivulet
emptying into the splendid landlocked port, and by some hills, of which
there are more than the eye can count rolling and piling away across all
the landscape of the region. These are by far the most conspicuous
features of Port Arthur and vicinity, for there is scarcely a knoll
among them that does not bear on its summit a monument. Whether it is
merely an unconscious manifestation of their military spirit, strong and
continual as far back as history can trace them, or a deliberate
parading of their victory over a branch of the white man’s world, the
Japanese have marked every spot where a handful of their countrymen fell
and have preserved the ruins of every fort out of which the Russian
defenders were bombarded, so that the hilly landscape of all the region
is littered with mementos to the god of war. Nor is his day over in Port
Arthur, for a garrison commander sits ever on the alert against kodaking
tourists who would profane his stone-built playthings overlooking the
bay. Both at Port Arthur and at Dairen there are beaches that might
become the international resorts the Japanese are striving to make them,
could their sponsors ever learn that the rest of the world is not so
enamoured of the dwarfish Nipponese form in the nude as they seem
themselves to be.

[Illustration:

  A Manchu woman in her national head-dress, bargaining with a street
    vender of Mukden for a cup of tea
]

[Illustration:

  The Russian so loves a uniform, even after the land it represents has
    gone to pot, that even school-boys in Vladivostok usually wear
    them,—red bands, khaki, black trousers, purple epaulets
]

[Illustration:

  A common sight in Harbin,—a Russian refugee, in this case a blind boy,
    begging in the street of passing Chinese
]

[Illustration:

  A Russian in Harbin—evidently not a Bolshevik or he would be living in
    affluence in Russia
]

Northward from Mukden there are also many reminders of Japanese military
prowess, besides the railway itself. Here the line was being
double-tracked, perhaps because the diversion of shipping, by fair means
and foul, from Vladivostok to Dairen was proving too much for it. The
Chinese workmen lived in semi-caves and reed-mat huts, and left a bush
or a small tree at the top of a slim pyramid of earth here and there to
show how deep they had dug for the new grading. Dense green hills and
the unpicturesque, widely scattered huts of Manchuria broke the general
landscape of endless fields of beans closely planted, with _kaoliang_
and millet, wheat and corn, demanding their share of the broad open
country. Cattle, horses, mules, and donkeys were plentiful, and ungainly
black pigs more so. Every little while we passed a large walled town of
which we in the West know not even the name, and somewhere not far from
each of them was a new Japanese section including the railway station
and rows of trainmen’s houses, perhaps schools and a hospital. But for
all the advantages showered upon them the migrating Japanese plainly
could not compete hand to hand with the Chinese pouring up from the
crowded provinces across the Gulf of Chihli. They kept shop, ran the
railroad, filled all the higher positions in the enterprises, such as
mining, milling, and electric lighting, in which they are engaged, but
as actual producers from the soil itself, of overwhelming importance in
spacious, fertile, still rather thinly populated Manchuria, they were
visibly incapacitated.




                               CHAPTER VI
                       THROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA


The changes which burst suddenly upon the traveler at Changchun would be
startling if he were not almost certain to be prepared for them. Unless
his memory is short or his age brief he can scarcely be unaware of the
fact that the Treaty of Portsmouth on our own New England coast made
Changchun the meeting-place of that portion of the Chinese Eastern
Railway which remained to the Russians after their trouncing, and that
long section of it which their conquerors have made over into the South
Manchurian Railway. One steps from what is essentially an American
express-train upon the station platform, and from that into an
express-train that is European down to its most insignificant details.
Cars of the “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits” offer him the
comfort of their separate compartments, brilliantly lighted by frosted
bulbs, furnished even with thermometers, roomy with the five-foot gage
of Russian railways, on which trains use the right- rather than the
left-hand track. The heavy-stacked engine is as different from the one
across the platform still panting from its race northward as the densely
bearded Russian trainmen are from the alert little brown men of the same
calling. Suddenly there were Russians everywhere, and by no means all of
them were of a type to make one unduly proud of the white race; some
indeed were roustabouts and station hangers-on living by petty graft
upon uninformed travelers, such as the latter are never subjected to on
the Japanese railways of Manchuria. There was such a mixture of Chinese,
Japanese, and Russians at Changchun that one could only surmise who was
really in control. It was a Russian who asked me for my passport—and who
raised his hat, bowed low, and retired with an almost subservient “Thank
you” when I answered that I was American. Booted and spurred Russians in
khaki, in woolen trousers and cotton smocks, in the best they could do
in the way of an individual uniform, their waists compressed to maidenly
slenderness by tight belts, strutted the platforms in long swords with
an air that said plainly that they would far rather die than have to
work and not be able to strut about in uniform, boots, spurs, and sword.
European civilians of both sexes, tow-headed women and children, mere
Russian farmers, leaned on station barriers or made their way to and
from the third-class coaches. One type in particular was very
familiar,—the half-subservient, half-cocky, always vulgar Russian Jew,
much assured of himself now, since the new turn things have taken in
Russia, but still more or less openly despised by the non-Jewish
Russians. In our car was one of the most offensive of these fellows,
head of the opium ring of Harbin, who acted as if he had purchased the
earth from its original owners and was making it a personal plaything.

The train made incredibly long stops at every station, but excellent
speed between them, though it burned wood and thereby saved us from soot
and cinders. I had a sense of being in an utterly foreign land, many
times more so than among the Japanese. For one thing station names were
in Chinese and Russian, equally illegible to those of us who recognize a
word only in Roman letters, while from Yokohama to Changchun even the
most insignificant stopping-place announces itself in English. Hitherto
at least the head trainman was almost certain to have a smattering of my
tongue; at worst I could produce a few short but highly valuable phrases
of Japanese; but these black-bearded fellows were separated from me by
an utterly impenetrable linguistic wall. They might quite as well have
been Hottentots or Zulus as far as any possibility of communicating with
them either by spoken or written word went. Perhaps it was mainly this
sense of strangeness that made the air seem surcharged with something
ominous, something akin to hopeless political conditions.

But through it all the endless plains of corn and beans, millet and
wheat, beautiful in their deep green, spread as far as the eye could
reach in every direction, hour after hour, all afternoon long. The
plodding Chinese peasant, who is the mudsill of all the struggles of
rival empires to control this vast rich territory, was still toiling
here and there when the sun touched the flat western horizon. But at
frequent intervals Russian boys in soldierly caps came running out of
yellow brick farm-houses surrounded by a kind of Chinese wall. Many more
of them lived in villages, some of which might have been lifted bodily
out of European Russia. At these, Chinese and tow-headed venders
appeared on the off side of stations, until they were chased away by
policemen, offering live chickens, ducks, eggs by the basketful. A
wonderful land, Manchuria, whether for cultivating or merely for the
grazing of stock; no wonder crowded Japan covets this broad, half-wasted
region, yet she has already shown that she would exploit rather than
people it.

Rain was pouring when we reached Harbin, and seemed to have been for
weeks. At least never in all my wanderings have I floundered through
worse sloughs of mud than in the _droshke_ which lost itself in the inky
blackness and the downpour in what looked for a time like a vain attempt
to get me from the station to a hotel. By morning light there seemed no
particular reason for this, for though every street was covered at least
with slime, there were enough of them roughly stone-paved to carry all
the _droshkes_ with which Harbin swarms. Perhaps it was merely an
example of the impracticability of the Russians, of which I was to hear
so many more before I moved on.

At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself
back in Europe. Unless his geography is proof against such deceptions,
he might easily believe that he had crossed the line into Russia and
brought up in one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture,
customs, inhabitants are all on the Russian model. Instead of rickshaws
there are two types of carriages,—the _droshke_, of barouche effect,
drawn in most cases by two horses, the shaft animal under a great arched
pole and the off one with its head tied down to a level with its knees
and twisted well to the outside, thanks to some time-honored Russian
idea of style or efficiency; then there is the _amerikanka_. The
“American woman,” as foreign residents facetiously translate the word,
is a two-wheeled cart with a plain open box on top, on a corner of which
sits the driver, apparently wholly inured to the jouncing with every
step of the horse and every unevenness of the road which the passenger
or two beside him seldom gives evidence of enjoying. But the
_amerikanka_ is ridiculously cheap by Western standards, and the Russian
who manipulates it is almost sure to be cheery and pleasant, filled with
naïve tales of what is and what he believes is going on inside Russia
proper, if one chances to have a companion who can act as interpreter,
and in any case a relief merely as a Caucasian after months among
squint-eyed Orientals. Already, however, the motor-buses which probably
have by this time driven most of the leisurely Russian wielders of
horse-whips out of business had begun to appear on the streets of
Harbin.

The houses have double windows, with a space of two or three feet
between the panes of glass; and great cylindrical stoves built into the
walls from floor to ceiling, preferably in a corner where they can bulge
into two, and even four, rooms, are almost as universal as in Russia. In
a July heat which left one drenched after a short stroll, even by
moonlight, and which made the briefest interview in any of Harbin’s
dungeon-like, double-walled offices a kind of “third degree,” it was
hard to believe these evidences of long winters during which, barely
four months thence, it would often be forty below zero and the wearing
of furs indispensable. To its residents and to most of its visitors
Harbin, all Manchuria in fact, is a land of snow and ice and bitter
gales; to me, who happened to be there in the very climax of the brief
summer, it will always bring back memories of a climate compared to
which that of the tropics is mild and invigorating. Nor can I remember
meeting in all Japan such battalions of flies as helped to make life
miserable in summer-time Harbin, with its brief nights and its
interminable days.


I know at last why one’s hat is always snatched from him when he enters
a Russian-Jewish restaurant in New York. In Russia, and equally in
Harbin, it is an inexcusable discourtesy to go into an office, even for
the briefest instant, wearing, or carrying, hat or overcoat. There are
always flunkies waiting to take them away from you outside the door, and
obviously they expect to be remembered when you leave. I am overcome
with grief to think that, in my appalling ignorance, I so long fancied
one of the least beloved customs of our metropolis a mere scheme to
extort tips, instead of a transplanted refinement from urbane Russia.
Equally Russian is the Harbin practice of shaking hands with the entire
personnel, from proprietor to errand-boy, of any shop one enters,
however slight the purchase one has in view. Indeed, the more genuinely
well bred shake hands all around again before they leave.

Several gaudy blue, green, and gold churches of the Russian Orthodox
faith rise in fantastic domes and puffed-out, cross-surmounted spires
above the general level of Harbin, and religious ceremonies imported
direct from pre-Bolshevik Moscow may be seen any day in the week.
Funerals, for instance, were of more than daily occurrence. Most often
they were those of impoverished refugees, and were brief and
inconspicuous; but there were frequent processions of the elaborate,
typically Russian character. I passed two such within half an hour one
noonday. The first was of the wife of the Russian station-master. He had
discharged a Chinese employee for negligence and “squeeze,” and the
latter had returned to kill him, his bullet accidentally striking the
wife instead. The second was of the head of the Harbin _Gymnasium_, or
upper school, once a colonel and a man of great wealth in Russia, now so
impoverished that his wife and children, on foot behind the hearse, as
is the Russian custom, were almost in rags and virtually barefoot.
Mummers in fantastic costumes, including long, light-colored robes,
walked before and on either side of the deceased, who were carried in
canopied vehicles gay beyond anything western Europe or the New World
has to offer the dead, even the horses draped from ears to fetlocks in
flowing white coverlets fancifully embroidered. But the most surprising,
not to say repulsive, Russian feature of the ceremony was the public
display of the corpse. In each case the heavy lid of the coffin was laid
diagonally off to one side, and during all the miles from church to
cemetery, with several stops for the burning of incense and priestly
blessings on the way, the yellow face of the departed rolled from side
to side as the open hearse jolted over the stony pavements.

It is an old saying that to scratch a Russian is to find a Tartar, but I
had taken this to be a mere figure of speech until I came to Harbin and
northern Manchuria, where the European and the Asiatic Orientals live
side by side. The Chinese and the Russians, one quickly realized there,
understand each other better than we of the real West can ever hope to
understand either. They have the same complicated Oriental way of
thinking, a similar point of view in such matters as “squeeze,” not very
dissimilar business methods. In a Russian department-store of Harbin the
purchaser gets two checks, one of which he pays at the desk under the
personal eye of the owner or manager, getting the other stamped and
presenting it, not to the clerk who served him, but to another so far
away that collusion between them would be difficult, before he is
finally handed his purchase. The mere loss of time on both sides no more
worries the Russian than it would the Chinese. At every turn I found
myself startled to recognize as another Russian trait what I had fancied
was characteristic merely of eastern Asia. Every important house in
Harbin had its private policeman, usually a Russian ex-soldier, and
wherever one attempted to enter a gate watchmen and domestic hangers-on
sprang up from all sides as thickly as at the entrance to a Chinese
residence or _yamen_. Perhaps the greatest surprise was the discovery
that the Russian uses the abacus or swan-pan for doing his arithmetic,
just like the people of Japan, Korea, and China, except that with him
the contrivance is much larger, as if his heavier fingers needed wooden
balls worthy of their strength. Mental arithmetic seemed to be as
impossible to him as to a Chinese shopkeeper or to the subjects of the
mikado. On my first visit to a dining-car on the C. E. R., it being two
or three hours before dinner-time, I had merely a glass of tea and some
Russian form of pastry. The bill of fare announced these as costing 15
and 45 _sen_ respectively—Japanese money is most widely used now in the
Russianized zone of Manchuria. The ikon-faced man at his desk in a
corner of the car, his mammoth black beard looking like a wig that had
fallen from its place on his utterly hairless head, solemnly picked up
his counting-board, rattled the balls back and forth for a full minute,
and finally wrote down with an air of intellectual triumph the total of
the two items on my check before him. No Westerner can ever hope to
sandwich himself in between two peoples who prefer the abacus to pencil
and paper for their arithmetical problems.

Yet the Russians are white men, and thereby hang certain problems that
are sure to thrust themselves upon the visitor to northern Manchuria in
the present days of Russian upheaval. It was a distinct pleasure to find
myself again where Westerners were not incessantly stared at, even
though it was useless to attempt to speak a word with men and women who
would have looked perfectly at home on the streets of any large American
city. But it was quite otherwise suddenly to realize that some of the
weaknesses of our Western civilization are much more conspicuous, or at
least more public, than similar flaws in Oriental society. Neither China
nor Japan are model lands in many respects, but during all the time I
had spent in the Far East I had not seen a fraction of the open
indecency, the unashamed vulgarity, the deliberate flaunting of sexual
wares that raged in the several conspicuous café singing-halls of
Harbin. It was almost a shock even to see white women again in any
number; to find them dressing and behaving as no Japanese geisha, no
singsong-girl of Korea or China, would ever think of doing outside her
semi-domestic circle, was more impressive, more suggestive of the vices
of our civilization, than the average of us would have called to his
attention during a lifetime of Western residence. The contrast, added to
a little knowledge of the point of view of the Oriental as to the proper
place of the sex appeal in life, made such things stand out with the
vividness of electric sign-boards. As Westerners we might understand
that Harbin, under undefined economic conditions and somewhat chaotic
government, with overturned Russia pouring its vices and its hungers
down into it, was not a normal sample of the West; to the occasional
fat, smug Chinese visitors to these blatant places, and through them to
thousands of their race, such parading of our vices could do more to
give a false impression of Western life and the Western character than a
thousand decent Occidentals, working for years to no other purpose,
could correct.

Two decades ago, while I was wandering across Asia during the
Japanese-Russian War, an English-speaking Hindu expressed to me his
great astonishment that the white world should permit the yellow race to
show its superiority over even what seemed just then the most widely
disliked branch of the Caucasian family. He realized what at least the
untraveled bulk of the Occident does not to this day, that every sign of
weakness in any white nation, almost in any white individual, is
immediately applied by the average Oriental mind to the whole white
race. The effect of Japan’s victory over Russia, working like a leaven
through the masses of Asia for a score of years, was quite apparent in
certain general changes of attitude toward Westerners, some of them
fortunate, many of them quite the contrary. Now, with the second
catastrophe of Russia flooding Asia with new examples of Caucasian
weaknesses, of white men reduced to a lower level than Asia had ever
before seen them, one could not but feel that it behooves the Western
world in general to look to the impression Russians in China are making
for the Caucasian family as a whole, and to know what their treatment is
at the hands of the Chinese. For while we may recognize the Russian as
essentially an Oriental, really more closely allied to the Chinese than
to ourselves, the latter thinks of him entirely as a Westerner, typical
in his faults and his weaknesses of that other side of the earth toward
which the Oriental attitude is of growing importance. I do not know
whether or not the continued supremacy of the white race is best for the
world at large; but I have rather strong personal opinions on that
subject, and those who are like-minded would do well to look into the
question of the present-day conditions of Russians in China, where at
least the respect on which much of that supremacy depends is being
gradually eaten away.


Along all the principal thoroughfares of Harbin squatted scores of white
beggars, women and children among them, appealing to Chinese as well as
to European passers-by. In the market-places of this and of other towns
along the C. E. R. I saw many a Russian covered with filth, sores, and a
few tattered rags, a noisome receptacle of some kind in his hands,
wandering from stall to stall pleading with the sardonic Chinese keepers
to give him a half-rotten tomato or a putrid piece of meat. Barefooted
refugee children roamed the streets, picking up whatever they could
find, including some of the nastiest of Chinese habits. Former officers
of the czar, and wives who were once the grace of any drawing-room,
speaking French with a faultless accent, lived in miserable pens with
only ragged cloth partitions between them and their teeming neighbors,
eating the poorest of Chinese coolie food, some of them unable to go out
unless they went barefoot. In the so-called thieves’ market every
conceivable kind of junk, from useful kitchen utensils to useless
bric-à-brac of Russian ancestry, was offered for sale; any morning one
might see several hundred Russian men and women shuttling to and fro
there, trying to sell an odd pair of boots, an all but worn-out garment,
a child’s toy, for the price of a handful of potatoes or a measure of
_kaoliang_, or attempting to exchange something they had at last found
they could do without for something their fellow refugees still had that
seemed to them indispensable.

The few Americans in Harbin at least were doing what they could to
relieve the needy Russians. But it was an even more complicated task
than we of the West would suppose, for here again the essential
Orientalism of the victims came out. Young men with fine faces, on which
the signs of semi-starvation were in plain evidence, would come
imploring any kind of assistance, any position that would give them
enough to buy bread. “Why,” they would cry, as if they were going the
utmost limit in describing their horrible state, “I will even work with
my hands!” But this was merely bluff; nothing could make your typical
Russian of the class which Bolshevism chased out of the country debase
himself to any such degree as that, starve, beg, or steal though he
must. With a plethora of hungry, yet still sturdy, Russians of both
sexes all about them, it was almost impossible for the American
residents to get servants, unless they took Chinese from the native
city. They could get innumerable teachers of Russian, almost none of
whom had any conception of how to teach, nor the persistence, patience,
and punctuality which that calling requires; but when it came to washing
dishes and mopping floors chances went begging in the very houses which
were being bombarded with frantic appeals for help against incipient
starvation. It was not merely that these former well-to-do did not know
how to work; they would do anything rather than learn.

Fifteen boys who worked their way across Siberia and were found jobs by
the Y. M. C. A. secretary of Harbin all ran away very shortly afterward,
taking with them money or clothing, or both, belonging to their
employers. One went home all the way across Siberia again to find his
mother, discovered no trace of her, was caught by the “Red” army, and
finally turned up in Harbin once more with frozen feet and looking like
an old man, though he was only seventeen. This same secretary had
countless appeals for help and at the same time a job of pumping water
at his own house, but he was never able to make the two meet. Time after
time he offered some hungry young Russian this task, which meant less
than two hours’ work a day, at any time of the day that the worker might
choose, the salary to be all the food he could eat and $7.50 “Mex” a
month—a very liberal offer in China, even for high-priced Harbin.
Invariably each applicant for aid bowed low at this offer, assured the
secretary that he had saved his life, thanked him in the deepest Russian
manner possible, which might include the kissing of the benefactor’s
hands—and invariably never turned up again. One case was so obviously
deserving that the secretary dug a good suit of clothes out of the
bottom of his trunk, had it dry-cleaned, and gave it to the poor fellow,
along with the pumping job, from which he discharged the Chinese boy who
had recently been filling it very satisfactorily—and the next day, when
his water ran out, he found that the man and the suit had gone to
Vladivostok.

American representatives of such organizations as the Red Cross, who
were spending money and energy for the betterment of Russian refugees in
Harbin, Kirin, and other towns of northern Manchuria, could not get a
man among all the big sturdy fellows they were feeding to build a brick
stove, to patch a roof, or to dig a trench for their own benefit;
Chinese laborers had to be called in to do all such “work with the
hands.” Indeed, the refugees expected their benefactors to hire servants
to sweep out and keep in order the buildings that had been found for
them. There were some well-to-do Russians in Harbin—more C. E. R.
officials than there were positions for them to fill lived there in
style, and a few families had escaped from Russia early enough to have
been able to bring much of their wealth with them, not to mention others
who had long been in business in Manchuria. But these were the last
people in Harbin to help their unfortunate compatriots. They might
flaunt their own comfort and extravagance in the lean faces of the
unfortunate; they were even known to “squeeze” some of the poor devils
among the refugees of the working-class who found and accepted work; but
they were as Oriental as the Chinese in looking callously on while their
own people starved about them, or were succored by men from across the
sea.

For a time the Y. M. C. A. secretary helped young Russians to immigrate
to the United States under the guise of students, there being some
special ruling for these in spite of the new immigration restrictions;
but so many of them turned out to be men who had helped to start the
revolution in Russia and hoped to do the same in America that the plan
proved to be unwise. Those who succeeded in finding tasks to the liking
of the hand-sparing fugitives had their own troubles. “Hire a Russian
and you have to hire another man to watch him,” was the consensus of
opinion among all who had had that experience. Russian ideas of honesty
were frankly Oriental; moreover they were idealists, dreamers, with no
business sense, no conception of economics or economies, no “go,” not a
practical trait in their whole make-up, unless they had some German,
Swedish, or French blood in their veins, which the few enterprising ones
in Harbin did. For all that they were a most likable people, childlike
in their manners as well as their irresponsibility, with nothing of the
surliness of the Japanese, nor of the Chinese love of ridicule. They
gave one the feeling that they were not fitted to cope with the
practical every-day world, that they should not be wandering about it
without guardians and advisers. One soon ceased to wonder that the trade
of Harbin was almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews and the
Chinese; a few days in northern Manchuria were enough to explain why the
Jews are so powerful and so hated in Russia, why it has been considered
necessary to curb them, almost enough to make clear the incredible
success of Bolshevism over common sense.

Distinctly a chip of the degenerate old régime was Harbin, inhabited
mainly by people whom nothing would drive to manual labor but who were
quite ready to spread intrigue and false propaganda against the new
rulers in their native land. The Bolsheviks, it seems generally
admitted, are at least sincere, wildly impractical as they are in their
ideas of human society; these refugees of Harbin, one felt, would be
just as bad as ever if once they got back into power, would have learned
nothing whatever, thanks to their incapability, their temperamental
ineptitude, from their bitter experiences. “Propaganda aside,” said
foreign residents who were in a position to know, and who certainly were
not friendly to the new order in Russia, “if the bulk of the Russian
people were able to vote between the old régime and the present one they
would choose the latter as the least of two evils”; and any one who has
made even a brief stay in the Russian metropolis of China would probably
be inclined to agree with that statement.

The night life of Harbin, even passing over the vicious part of it, was
in great contrast to that of Japan and the adjoining lands I had so far
visited. Whatever else they might have to do without, the Russian exiles
plainly did not propose to deny themselves the gay times, the mingling
together in social concourse, the rivalry of dress and public
squandering of money, the joys of good music, which had been so
important a part of their life at home. Countless anecdotes floated
about Harbin of refugees dressing like lords though they had not a crust
left at home, of selling necessary things, even of spending money that
had been given to keep them from starvation, to get raiment in which
they were not ashamed to appear in the frequent social gatherings. In
the park of the Railway Club, to which members and their families were
admitted free and passing strangers at a goodly price of admission,
there was an immense crowd on the evening I spent there, as there is
almost any night of the week, so purely European a crowd that it took a
distinct mental exertion to realize that one was still in China. Yet in
all the big audience that stood and strolled about the huge shell-shaped
sounding-board, from within the mouth of which a large orchestra gave an
all-Tchaikowsky program that would have been loudly applauded by music
lovers anywhere, there was scarcely a visible sign of straitened
circumstances, to say nothing of poverty. Ladies as well gowned as at
the Paris races strolled with men faultlessly garbed, by European
standards, who swung their “sticks” with the haughty grace of
aristocrats to whom the lack of an adequate income had never so much as
occurred. Men and women sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the club
paid their checks and tipped their waiters with as lavish an air as if
the World War had never happened. Not a few men were in a kind of
combination smock and uniform, with collars buttoning high about the
neck; but these looked as much like an exuberance of fashion as like
subterfuges to save shirts or cover the lack of them, just as their
tightly belted waists were more of a fad than an open admission of the
meagerness of their suppers.

It was like such a concert in a Spanish-American plaza, yet in many ways
different. The hearers stood during the numbers and walked between them,
reversing the usual practice south of the Rio Grande. There was endless
hand-shaking; beards were not conspicuously numerous and even mustaches
were little in fashion, at least among the younger men, but closely
clipped, even shaved, heads seemed to be as much the style as among the
modern Chinese, who, now that they are doing away with the pigtail, are
doing so with such a vengeance that their scalps show white through the
bristles. Short hair was not uncommon among the women, too, though less
as a fashion, it was said, than because so many had had typhus during
their fugitive days. It was strange to see the women all wearing hats,
quite aside from the fact that they were almost all new ones; it was
strange to see women openly treated with respect, for that matter, and
walking arm in arm with their men; strangest of all was the queer
feeling of mingling again with thousands of white people, after months
of never having seen more than a dozen of them together. Not a few of
the girls and young women were more than good-looking, in form as well
as face, a fact which many of them seemed to take care not to conceal,
for some of the newest dresses were startlingly thin, and rolled
stockings barely covering the ankle were almost the rule among the
younger set. But Russians do not appear to be prudish about the display
of the human form; during July and August great numbers of both sexes,
quite of the decent class, bathe together perfectly naked in the muddy
water of Harbin’s uninspiring river.

I was introduced to princesses in simple but very appropriate garb, to
people with strange and with sad stories, to men who had run away from
Russia and left their wives to follow—if they could—to women who had
performed incredible feats and suffered unbelievable hardships to escape
from the blighted land or to join such unworthy husbands, and who in
some cases still retained their striking beauty and in many their
Russian charm. Yet numerous as were the fine faces in the crowd, it
hardly needed the experience of foreign residents to call attention to
the fact that in so many instances these looked proud and impractical
and—well, inefficient in the matter-of-fact things of life. Now and then
there passed through the throng that made respectful way for them old
generals still wearing their uniforms, blazing from shoulder to shoulder
with decorations, and the same haughty expression of men expecting
instant obedience as in their bygone days of power and emoluments. I
could not quite get the point of view on some Russian prejudices. Not
one of that race with whom I spoke during my journey through northern
Manchuria lost an opportunity to curse the Jews, whom they always spoke
of as synonymous with the new régime in their native land. Yet the
leader of this orchestra was a Jew, and he not only got wild applause at
the end of almost every number, even from men who left off vilifying his
people just long enough to add to it in the heartiest fashion, but when
he raised his baton to start the first number the almost entirely
Russian orchestra had given him a “rouser” instead, a sudden burst of
music entirely different from what they were about to play, which is
considered in Russian musical circles the highest honor that can be paid
a musical director.

Harbin consists of four towns, each with its individual name. There is
the old one where the Russians first settled when they built the Chinese
Eastern Railway, now almost deserted but for tillers of the surrounding
fields, a makeshift home for orphan refugees, and the like. In Pristan,
popularly called “Jew-town,” most of the business is carried on, as well
as the far-famed singing-halls. Up the hill from this and separated from
it by an open space in which Chinese executions take place is the more
commodious railroad town, with important offices, the better-class
residences, the garish Russian Orthodox churches which rise like
unnaturally gorgeous flowers above the rather drab general level.
Lastly, there is Fu-chia-tien, the Chinese city, a mile or more away
from the others, as completely Chinese as if there had never been a
Russian within a thousand versts of the place. There are many rickshaws
in Fu-chia-tien, but not one in all the other three towns, and rarely
indeed does a foreigner ride in one, though they are more comfortable on
the horrible streets than the _droshke_, and certainly more so than the
excruciating “American women.” The severed heads of bandits hung in
cages on several street corners in Chinese Harbin, and many other such
touching little details showed that the town clung strictly to its own
ways in spite of the many foreign examples so close at hand.

Until the debacle of the czarist régime in Russia, the three Russian
towns of Harbin were entirely under their own rule. Even now, since they
have formally taken over the jurisdiction of them, the Chinese still let
the Russians largely alone in their municipal affairs, but they are more
and more prone to “butt in” and gratuitously assert their authority,
just as they have in the Chinese Eastern Railway. This now has a Chinese
as well as a Russian president and the whole category of Chinese
officials down to the last clerk, in addition to Russian duplicates of
the same in the greatly over-staffed offices. Some say the Russian
railway officials are deliberately selling out to the Chinese; others
claim that they are running this important link in world communication
into wreckage and bankruptcy while they and the Bolsheviks quarrel, on
paper and at a distance, as to whether it belongs to the Russian
Government or merely to the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Meanwhile it staggers
along under its top-heavy double staff, paying salaries to Chinese who
do nothing and to many Russians who do not do much. The latter, old
officials cut off for years now from higher authority, avow that they
are merely administering the line for the benefit of the czarist régime
that appointed them, until such time as this shall recover its rightful
place in the world, but in practice they act as if the C. E. R. were the
private property of the little clique of reactionary Russians who hold
the power and wealth of Harbin. How public-spirited these are is
suggested by such actions as their refusing to transport, except at full
rates, food and clothing furnished by the Red Cross for the relief of
their compatriots in the various towns of northern Manchuria.


At Versailles in 1919 and again at the Washington Conference two years
later the Chinese delegates demanded the abrogation of extraterritorial
jurisdiction in China, as a derogation of her sovereign status as a
nation. The request was denied, but at the second gathering it was
decided to appoint a commission to examine on the spot the assertion of
the delegates that the administration of justice in the former Celestial
Empire has so far improved that foreign jurisdiction may safely be
abolished. Since then certain occurrences in China which have not been
testimonials in her favor have caused the commission indefinitely to
postpone its coming; but in the meanwhile there is considerable evidence
at hand in the treatment of the Russians by the Chinese since the former
were deprived of their extraterritorial status.

It is probably not necessary to explain that extraterritoriality, as it
is familiarly called, consists, briefly, in the right—or is it
privilege?—of foreigners in China to be tried only by their own consuls
or judges, under the laws of their own countries. Eighty years ago,
closely following the Treaty of Nanking, which ended one of her “opium
wars” with China, England forced this concession upon the Chinese
Government, the Americans and the French quickly followed suit, and soon
there were very few foreign residents indeed who were not protected by
treaty from Chinese courts and prisons. This state of affairs remained
unbroken until about the time of the Washington Conference, when China
took advantage of conditions in Russia to repudiate her treaty with the
czarist Government, and the many thousands of Russians in China suddenly
found themselves on a par, legally, with the Chinese themselves. A new
treaty between China and Germany, in which the latter either
inadvertently or purposely left out any mention of extraterritoriality,
and lack of treaties with some of the other countries on which China
declared war at the behest of the Allies has left Germans, Austrians,
Bulgarians, and some other nationalities in the same boat with the
Russians.

Since then life has not been quite the same in Harbin and the other
Russian towns of northern Manchuria. On one hand the change has caused
some just retribution. In the olden days Russians kicked the Chinese
about almost at will; now when a Chinese carriage driver in Harbin gets
a good excuse and opportunity, Russian heads are likely to suffer.
Russian railway-men used to throw Chinese passengers back into third
class or out on the platform, if they felt in the mood, even though they
held first-class tickets; now the minions of Chang Tso-lin suddenly levy
a new tax and Chinese soldiers go out and “beat up” Russian farmers to
such an extent in some cases that ships lie waiting for cargo in Dairen
while crops rot in the fields. Unfortunately things do not often stop
with mere retribution. The Chinese along the C. E. R. seem sometimes to
go out of their way to be insolent toward any Westerner, to jostle and
to annoy him without cause; taxes have been levied on the property of
foreigners other than Russian, and men arrested in spite of treaties of
extraterritoriality still in existence. An Italian woman who complained
that her purse had been stolen by a Chinese pickpocket was taken to jail
along with the thief, as openly as was a Russian who tried to get back
his fur coat, and the latter at least was imprisoned for weeks. You
cannot expect the garden variety of Chinese soldier or policeman to
recognize a difference in foreigners, and in a town where 98 per cent of
these are Russians we others have to watch our steps. Perhaps this
inability of their Chinese comrades to distinguish between foreigners
without and those still with extraterritorial status is the reason that
there are Russian police in Harbin, splashing through its mud in their
heavy boots as if they still had the czar’s authority behind them—until
the passing of some supercilious Chinese official causes them to snap to
attention and salute.

[Illustration:

  The grain of the _kaoliang_, one of the most important crops of North
    China. It grows from ten to fifteen feet high and makes the finest
    of hiding-places for bandits
]

[Illustration:

  A daily sight in Vladivostok,—a group of youths suspected of opinions
    contrary to those of the Government, rounded up and trotted off to
    prison
]

[Illustration:

  A refugee Russian priest, of whom there were many in Harbin
]

[Illustration:

  Types of this kind swarm along the Chinese Eastern Railway of
    Manchuria, many of them volunteers in the Chinese army or railway
    police
]

Many examples of Chinese oppression of the Russians were common
knowledge in Harbin, some of them more serious than others. A young
Russian member of the Y. M. C. A. who was putting the shot in a park of
the residence town was arrested by the Chinese on the charge of having a
bomb in his possession. He spent some hours in jail, finally to be
released on bail, the police confiscating what the judge agreed with
them was an explosive agent of destruction. The association secretary
had to threaten to refer the matter to the American consul before the
“bomb” was returned, and when I left Harbin the charge against the
“bomb-thrower” had not been dismissed. Then there was the sad case of
another member aspiring to athletic prowess, who, in throwing the
javelin, hit a dog, though that was complicated by the fact that the
injured animal was of Japanese nationality, which made the affair much
more serious. Chang and his retainers may have a justifiable scorn for
those of us whose governments so habitually turn the other cheek of late
in cases of Chinese aggression, but there are several thousand good
reasons, all splendidly armed and equipped and right on the spot, why he
should respect Japan’s wishes, even if his former lieutenancy and
certain allegations of secret allegiances still frequently heard have no
weight with him.

These instances, I admit, are not such as nations should go to war over,
but they are just as good examples as are many far more serious ones,
which any foreign resident of Harbin can cite, of how misunderstandings
alone, if there were the very best will and desire to be just, would
make it impossible for foreigners to get justice in China once their
extraterritorial privileges were taken away from them. Nor was it a
particularly agreeable sight to see a line of Russian men and women
waiting for hours, if not for days, the good pleasure of haughty Chinese
officials and their gutter-snipe-like underlings in order to get
passports to go to another town, or out of the country. The court-room I
visited in Harbin was an ordinary brick and plaster building, but
chasers of evil spirits climbed its eaves, and dragons sat on the roof,
their antennæ waving in the wind. Many Russians were gathered, including
a huge lawyer in robes who suggested _Gulliver_ in fear of his life when
he bowed and smirked before the diminutive almond-eyed officials. In
theory court opened at ten, but there had been fireworks in the Chinese
town the night before and his honor was still being patiently awaited at
noon. Out in front of the court was a string of bill-boards on which
cases were posted in tissue-paper sheets covered with Chinese
characters, reminding one that an interpreter to explain what the police
had against one would be indispensable under lost extraterritoriality.

The judge did come at last, a boyish-looking fellow who sat in splendid,
not to say haughty, isolation in his high chair, singsonging something
now and then in a half-audible falsetto, and still more often hawking
and spitting on the floor, though there were signs all over the
court-room forbidding it. On the desk before him was one tissue-paper
_bordereau_, as the French, who use similar loosely bound collections of
papers, would call it; but there were no signs of law-books, and the
judge seemed to get his precedents, and his opinions, too, one
suspected, from the not too immaculate clerks and hangers-on who
frequently came up to whisper in his ear. Meanwhile a gray-bearded
Russian was standing respectfully before him at the rail, droning on and
on in his own tongue some sort of complaint, testimony, or defense. The
case was not a very serious one, it seemed, there being a mere matter of
two or three hundred dollars “Mex” involved; but without going any
farther into details, let me put it briefly that, though there was in
evidence all the machinery of justice which a visiting commission would
wish to see, I should very much have regretted the necessity of
expecting justice from this soggy-eyed Celestial youth, bending his ear
to this and that whisper from his unkempt, shifty-looking attendants.

I visited also the big prison down in Pristan, built by the Russians but
now taken over by the Chinese. There were two hundred and seventy-seven
Russian prisoners and one German in it, a dozen of them women, among
whom was a Jewish member of that sex who had lived for years in “Noo
Yoik,” and spoke her fluent English accordingly. The same rules governed
the prison as under the Russians, but orders from higher up now came
from Chinese, and inmates put their hope, in cases where they had any
left, in Chinese courts and officials. Some of the guards were still
Russian, but the majority were not, and the sight of white men, clanking
with enormous chains, chased about the yard while they cleaned out
toilets and did similar menial tasks, by Chinese jailers who openly
enjoyed their discomfiture, would not have added to the joy of white
nations. Nearly all the prisoners, however, were in groups of six to a
dozen in large cells that could be dimly seen through a small slit in
each door. Living conditions were those of the old type of Russian
prisons, with immense locks, and very thick walls that made the July
heat furnace-like; the food was mainly _kaoliang_ and other cheap,
coarse grains; there were no shops, or regular work of any kind, and
only half an hour’s exercise a day in the open air was allowed, even “in
principle.” There were, of course, desperate criminals among the rather
pasty-faced but generally big brawny men who peered out the door-slits
with expressions uncannily like caged lions and tigers, and from these
China must protect herself and those who dwell within her borders. But
my American missionary companion, who had lived for some time in Harbin
and spoke Russian, knew personally of several men for whose innocence
the whole Caucasian community could vouch, who were there merely out of
Chinese spite and whose trials had been, or would be, if they ever took
place, worse than travesties on justice. The worst hardship of all,
according to the misguided lady from “Noo Yoik,” was that no one had the
least inkling, nor any possible way of finding out, when the Chinese
might deign to bring a prisoner to court and air the charges against
him.

Terms up to forty years were inflicted, but “long-timers” had the
privilege, at least in theory, of being transferred to the “model
prison” in Peking. Thus far no Russians had been executed, “because of
the impression this might make among foreign nations,” according to an
official Chinese statement. Of course once those nations give up their
extraterritorial rights it will not so much matter what impression is
made. Not long after our visit, however, when a thin and
effeminate-looking little Russian charged with half a dozen murders in
the pursuance of his calling as highway robber, and with whom I talked
“high-brow stuff” in his tiny private cell, walked calmly out of the
court-room and killed two or three of the policemen who pursued him, the
announcement was made that in his case at least, if he were ever
retaken, this policy would be rescinded. There is little doubt that this
particular “bad man” should be done away with; but when Chinese soldiers
get to shooting white men as one of their regular duties, what little
prestige our race retains in China will soon evaporate. For what those
many untraveled Westerners who feel that China should have complete
sovereignty within her borders do not realize is the primitive mentality
of the Chinese masses, which includes the soldiers, in such matters as
the natural fights of others and the assumption of a low estate in those
who are not outwardly honored and protected.

Though it is trespassing on the future to mention it here, I visited,
months later, that “model prison” of Peking. It is just that, a well
built, splendidly arranged penitentiary on the most modern, wheel-shaped
lines, out in the southwest corner of the Chinese city. The new section
recently built for foreigners—which had room for four times as many
inmates as had so far been collected—was quite all it should be, with
hot and cold baths, reasonable provisions for heating in winter, a
kitchen of its own where foreign food was prepared. The workshops of the
entire institution were large, airy, and light; there was a Russian as
well as a Chinese chapel in which Taoist, Confucianist, Mohammedan,
Christian, even Y. M. C. A. speakers appeared on Sundays; the régime of
the place was considerate and enlightened; as a prison, in fact, it
should make such a place as Sing Sing faint with shame. I saw other
“model prisons” in China, notably that in the capital of Shansi, which
has never had a representative from the outside world except a Turk who
was caught peddling opium pills. But these few praiseworthy institutions
in the more enlightened centers, and toward which the eyes of an
investigating commission would, of course, be carefully directed, are as
nothing compared to the unspeakable holes all over China into which
prisoners are thrown, and where foreigners also would have the privilege
of moldering away while provincial authorities slept, if
extraterritoriality were abolished.

There is no Chinese code of laws; the fate of most prisoners depends on
the often poor judgment, the mood of the moment, the devious political
machinations, of the judge himself, not to mention wide-spread bribery
and Oriental intricacies of which even old residents have only an
inkling. Two separate codes, for foreigners and Chinese, would certainly
have to be introduced before extraterritoriality could be surrendered.
You cannot justly shoot or lop off the head of a Westerner for stealing
a suit of clothes or a sack of grain, however necessary such drastic
measures may be among a people desperate with habitual semi-starvation
and so inured to hardships that ordinary punishments mean nothing, any
more than you can justly arrest a foreign merchant because his overcoat
has been stolen, and keep him in jail for weeks as a witness. In Chinese
jurisprudence torture is a recognized procedure, and false confessions
forced thereby are considered legal proof of guilt. Every prisoner is
presumed to be guilty, and must prove his innocence, rather than be
convicted by the prosecution, no strange point of view to Latin races,
but a topsyturvy one to Anglo-Saxons. Not the least disagreeable of
Chinese practices is the “doctrine of responsibility,” which means that
in any group, be it village, family, crew, or, if the present status
were changed, assemblage of foreigners, some one must be punished for
the misdeeds of any individual member of it, so that a perfectly
innocent head may be lopped off to save the trouble of hunting out the
real criminal. Even though the Chinese were to do their best to treat
foreign prisoners justly, the very differences in point of view, in
customs, in diet even, would make it impossible. The East and the West
are so unlike that an American could die of Chinese food and living
conditions while his jailers were priding themselves, in their ignorance
of other lands, on giving him the best the world affords. Of course
Japan is an example of the abolishing of extraterritoriality; but even
there the foreigner by no means gets Western justice, and for all the
virtues and likable qualities of the Celestial and the often
disagreeable traits of the Nipponese, government in Japan is ideal
compared to the corrupt, chaotic travesty on it which rules China.

[Illustration:

  One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray, with green domes
    and golden crosses, with much gaudy trimming
]

[Illustration:

  A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down upon
]

[Illustration:

  Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks in the
    “thieves’” market of Harbin—when they catch any one who can afford
    to be blacked
]

[Illustration:

  Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok, selling
    second-hand hardware of every description, suggest why the factories
    and trains of Bolshevik Russia have difficulty in running
]


I traveled from end to end of the Chinese Eastern Railway, including the
extension of it from Pogranichnaya to Vladivostok, through what was
once, like Korea, Chinese territory. Endless steppes, flat as a floor,
covered as far as the eye could see with coarse grass, here and there
being hayed, was the general aspect north of the Sungari. Great herds of
cattle and sheep, carts drawn by six or eight horses over roads which in
the rainy season could not have been passable at all, millions of acres
of potential wheat-fields, a great granary of everything, including
sturdy youths for Chang Tso-lin’s armies, formed the outstanding
features of Hai-lung-chiang, northernmost and largest of China’s
provinces. South-bound freight-trains were not only crowded with Chinese
soldiers, gambling amid the chaotic messiness that surrounded them in
their roofed cars, but the uncovered flat-cars loaded with their
paraphernalia, with car-wheels and rusted machinery, were crowded with
Russian women and children sleeping on makeshift nests in sunshine or
heavy rain. There were cattle-cars with barefooted Russian men tending
them, little European box-cars fitted up as homes, sometimes with a
still aristocratic-looking young woman suckling a babe in the center of
it, impertinent Chinese soldiers looking on. There is no way of
computing how many pretty Russian girls, with nothing to live on but the
sale of their charms, there were along the C. E. R. from Manchuli to
Vladivostok, like the little end of the funnel down through which the
miseries of Russia had been oozing for years.

For all the rumors of degeneration of that line, however, the through
express was an excellent train, though even more leisurely than that on
the branch from Harbin southward, halting interminably at every station,
apparently to let the crew talk to the girls who decorated every
platform. It had all the comforts of compartment-divided sleeping-cars,
with Russian attendants; the dining-car, with its ikon and its abacus,
had a boarding-house table the entire length of it, and comely young
Russian waitresses, who rolled their socks.

When I awoke in the morning beyond Tsitsihar, the landscape was silvery
with white birches. Large and often pretty towns appeared every now and
then among the low green hills or on the broad prairies of this most
arctic of the “Eastern Three Provinces,” decidedly Russian towns, with
wide unpaved streets, discordantly colored half-Oriental churches of the
Greek Orthodox faith rising high above all else, against backgrounds
that gave above all a sense of vast, wide-open spaces. The Russians have
about twelve square miles at each station, and a strip of territory on
either side of the railway, where they can rent land for about eighty
years, as against only eighteen for foreigners in the rest of China,
where none but Chinese can own land, with certain exceptions in favor of
missionaries. There were far more Russians than Chinese at the stations
of these frontier towns, reminiscent of those of the Dakotas, where
every one came down to see the daily train go through. Most of the
peasant women were barefoot; in town the girls all rolled their
stockings, or went without them entirely. But huge bearskin coats and
big fur caps hung out on lines, airing. Hot water was furnished at all
the important stations, and bushels of eggs, all manner of food,
especially just at this season most magnificent raspberries, were for
sale by robust Russian women, often in a substantial booth built for the
purpose. But long lines of Chinese soldiers with drawn bayonets still
slouched along every platform, besides no end of Russians in uniforms of
every swaggering description, as if the dregs of a dozen routed armies
had been scattered along the line. Many of these strutting fellows wore
swords, and some carried firearms, members evidently of some sort of
local or railway police, as the unarmed majority were probably men who
had no other garments left. The constant swashbuckling, the incessant
parading of deadly weapons, got on the nerves; quite aside from the
decided economic loss of so many men withdrawn from production, there
was an ominous something about these thousands of young fellows, who had
not been old enough to get into the war, now strutting about in its
aftermath as if looking for a chance to make up for lost opportunities.
The Russians saluted all Chinese officials, even those in civilian
dress, raising their hats to them obsequiously if they themselves were
not in uniform. At one station a drunken Russian went around forcing
Chinese ragamuffins to shake hands with him.

All northern Manchuria was much troubled by bandits, _hung-hu-tze_, or
“red beards,” they were called, who had devastated far and wide, even
attacking the trains and station towns. There were at least a few
renegade Russians among some of the bands. The public shooting of
_hung-hu-tze_, in an open space between Pristan and the railway town,
was one of the frequent sights of Harbin. But the real curse of
Manchuria, as we were to find it of almost all China, were the soldiers.
The bandits often paid for what they took, but the soldiers looted
openly and carried off their plunder by the train-load within plain
sight of every one. When they wished to move, away from the railroad,
they forced farmers to let their crops go to waste and furnish them
transportation for ten-day journeys, feeding the drivers and their
animals along the way, but leaving them to find their way home as best
they could. If there were no other carts to be had at the end of the ten
days, the old ones must go on, twenty, thirty days, and even more. One
man I heard of had been away a year, and still could not get back. A few
hundred hand-picked, well paid soldiers, perhaps with a few Russians
among them to give them starch, could, according to competent opinion,
put a stop to banditry in Manchuria. But such coolies in uniform as
swarm up and down the C. E. R. accomplish nothing to that end, even when
they are not in actual collusion with the bandits. The _hung-hu-tze_
rout whole barracks of them, and prey on the Chinese and the Russian
population alike. Yet the Government clings to the fiction that they
afford sufficient protection, and will not allow the Russians to go
armed, unless they hold some kind of military position under the
Chinese. Soldiers and bandits alike abuse all the inhabitants of
northern Manchuria, except the Japanese, who have their own troops on
the spot.

Manchuli, on the edge of Siberia and almost on the fiftieth parallel, is
a large, prairie-like town of much more Russian than Chinese aspect.
Many of its houses are built of logs, yet are not unhomelike; sod hovels
like caves half below and half above ground shelter some of the
population, among which were many down-and-outs. Cossacks in their big
caps, with curiously liquid eyes, roam the wide, if dusty, streets.
Russians and Chinese sit joking together; both ride the small sturdy
horses of the region; many of the Chinese wear the long, soft, black
boots so general among their neighbors, but there seemed to be very few
mixtures of the two races. Sturdy fellows indeed were these bearded
Caucasian farmers from the north and west, but for that matter the
far-northern Chinese, with enough to eat and room to live in, are big
and strong, too, real pioneers, used to a different environment than are
their overcrowded compatriots farther south, in touch with and more
sympathetic toward European civilization. Now and again one of the
Chinese spoke to me in Russian and, when I could not answer, announced
to his companions that I was a _yang gwei_, though without any thought
of insult in the term, Russians evidently being so numerous and familiar
that they are no longer ranked as “foreign devils.” A market-place of
scores of makeshift shanties was stocked with enough second-hand
hardware to supply half Manchuria. Like those in Harbin and, I found
later, Vladivostok, these marts were crammed with everything from
railroad equipment to hinges, from factory machinery to crooked nails,
all more or less rusted, broken, and out of order. It was as if every
Russian who had fled before the “Reds” had torn loose and brought with
him anything he could lay his hands on, and here was another explanation
of why the factories and trains of Soviet Russia have difficulty in
running.

From Manchuli one can easily look across into Bolshevik territory; but
that was not China, and the traveler must turn back somewhere. An
ancient engine and the most rattletrap collection of cars that ever
masqueraded under the name of train was preparing to set out for Chita,
wretched-looking women and gaunt, hungry babies among the passengers who
occupied the dirty, miserably dilapidated compartments that were lighted
only by the candles travelers brought with them. Even those of us for
whom hardships have a certain zest could hardly regret that the way lay
back the comfortable way we had come.


From Mukden on to Peking one has a feeling of being in the real China at
last. Silver dollars take the place of convenient bank-notes; the
chaotic rough and tumble of Chinese crowds unchecked by foreign
discipline pervades stations and trains, both swarming with unsoldierly
men and boys in faded, ill fitting, gray cotton uniforms, who pack even
the dining-car to impassability; here and there a bullet-hole through
wall or window of the stuffy coupés into which the half-breed
American-European cars, with certain curious native characteristics, are
divided reminds one of recent history in the once Celestial Empire.
Endless fields, enormous seas, of _kaoliang_, enough to hide all the
bandits in China, flank the way. For that matter the towns as well as
brigands hide in it, for the slightly oval-roofed houses of stone and
baked mud are barely as high as this tall grain, and as the roofs
themselves are often covered with grass, places of considerable size
easily escape the eye entirely. In other seasons it is quite different,
for once they are denuded the fields are mere wind-swept stretches of
bare earth protesting against the habitual scarcity of moisture in North
China by sending frequent swirling clouds of dust to envelop any one and
anything within reach. Walled towns far from the stations that serve
them, iron-riveted cart-wheels hub-deep in the “roads” through which
rural transportation laboriously flounders its way, Chinese in long
cloaks, almost universally denim-blue in color, naked children and
ragged, diseased adults begging abjectly wherever the train halts, were
but a few of the details that somehow we had always associated with
China. Even the towns hidden in the grain seemed to be overrun with
soldiers, yet about all pretentious properties were big stone walls that
suggested bandits in perpetuity. All these things we saw hazily, through
a veil, as it were, for some pseudo-genius has had the unhappy thought
of lining nearly all the railways of China with willow-trees, which
flash constantly past with exasperating persistence, combining with the
inadequate little windows of the stuffy compartments still further to
reduce the visibility.

At Shanhaikwan, where the Great Wall clambers down to the sea at last,
weary with its three thousand miles over the mountains, soldiers were
much less numerous than in towns not so important to the north and south
of it. For the warring factions had declared a neutral zone on either
side of the colossal ancient rampart, which had become again, after
nearly three centuries of no real importance, the dividing-line between
what threatens to be an independent Manchuria and China proper. On the
beach at Shanhaikwan, or neighboring Pei-tai-ho, where half the foreign
residents of North China spend the summer, with turbaned Hindus, white
and black soldiers of France, an Italian gunboat, and other reminders of
their protective home governments to discount rumors of being in danger,
the heat was still too scorching to make an immediate entry into still
hotter Peking inviting, though August was well on the wane. Even a week
later, when much of the landscape was flooded with the brief rainy
season, a cool breath of air night or day was as rare as a Chinese field
without a grave. Within the Great Wall, beyond which seems to be
considered outer darkness for such purposes, these bare, untended
mounds, without even the grass which beautifies those of Korea, dotted
the country like spatters of raindrops on a placid yellow sea. As we
neared Taku, at the mouth of the river that gives Tientsin its
importance and all but washes the walls of Peking, higher, newer conical
heaps of earth suggested that many men of importance, or wealth, had
recently been buried there. But these turned out to be salt-fields,
where the surface soil of a great sea-flooded region is thrown up in
mounds and rectangular heaps which gradually wash down from earthy brown
to the white piles that are sacred to the government salt monopoly.

The traveler who lets his friends rush him about the foreign concession
of Tientsin by trolley or automobile will get an impression of a
comfortable Western community in an Oriental land, but he will carry off
very little idea of the real China, or even of the real Tientsin, which
is a swarming Chinese city, none the less so for having had its wall
reduced to a street of boulevard width as a punishment for the Boxer
uprising. To those for whom commerce and modern efficiency are
everything of importance, the Concession at Tientsin is of more
consequence than a whole province of interior China, but I found myself
more interested in any one of the ten Mohammedan mosques within the
native city, or in the former home of Li Hung-chang, now a tomb in which
he is worshiped by his descendants quite like any other prominent bygone
Chinese from Confucius to Yuan Shih-kai, than in the whole length of
Victoria Road.

A foreign concession in China, while it serves its purpose of making
life more livable and business more possible to the foreign merchants
who inhabit it, is altogether too convenient a refuge for the Chinese
crooks who choose to make it one. How many of China’s ex-ministers of
finance or of communications, how many former office-holders of every
graft-collecting grade, have retired to the protection of foreign
jurisdiction at Tientsin alone, living in luxury on their loot of
office, and how much of this might have been recovered by the Chinese
people to whom it rightfully belongs were there no such safety-zones of
easy access, is suggested by the magnificent establishments many of
these rogues maintain there. Yet the gaunt human horses who toil past
them tugging at heavy carts piled high with imports and exports get
barely six cents a day in our money, which they wolf in scanty,
unwholesome food copper by copper as fast as their tally-sticks amount
to one. As mere passers-by we could not but be thankful that, after a
brief following of the example of other nations, the United States
decided that concessions on Chinese soil were not in keeping with our
national policy. The Russians and the Germans and the Austrians have
lost theirs now, as they have their extraterritoriality, and it would
not be strange if this recovery of sovereignty taken from them for the
misdeeds of the Boxers gives hope to the people of China of chasing us
all out before the century has grown much older. Where a bare score of
Italians can hold a large tract of Chinese territory under their
jurisdiction, trafficking in arms and munitions from it with the various
factions that are doing their best to make China a continual
battle-field, and selling at almost any price they wish to ask what is
virtually the protection of their flag to Chinese rascals, it is not to
be wondered at if enmity toward “foreign devils” in general does not
show rapid strides toward oblivion. Jealousies among the various
nationalities which still keep their holdings also make a queer story.
Thus as many police forces and fire departments are maintained as there
are concessions, and one miserable little bridge connects the principal
foreign quarter with the rest of China, when getting together would make
really efficient substitutions. Tientsin is perhaps a pleasant
dwelling-place for those who like it, but we left it without regret one
morning soon after our arrival and by noon were rumbling along under the
massive walls of Peking, which was to be our home for the unprecedented
length of nine months that will not soon be forgotten.




                              CHAPTER VII
                        SPEEDING ACROSS THE GOBI


In September, when the _kaoliang_ has ripened to its purple-red, there
is added beauty to the eight-hour climb from Peking, by leisurely
Chinese train, through Nankow Pass and the Great Wall, to Kalgan. Beyond
that treeless, mountain-girdled city the railway turns sharply westward,
timidly keeping within the outer spur of China’s mammoth rampart, and
the traveler to the vast open world to the north must abandon it for a
more courageous form of transportation.

Down to the very doors of to-day the camel caravan, drifting along for
six weeks or two months, was the swiftest thing from Kalgan to Urga,
capital of Outer Mongolia, seven hundred miles away, unless it was
sometimes outsped by the forced relays of the Imperial Chinese Post. But
the ratio between time and distance has of late undergone violent
changes, even in such far-off stretches of the globe. Little more than a
decade back mankind was astonished to hear that a venturesome motor-car
had fought its way from Peking to Paris; five or six years ago men of
more commercial turn of mind took to following this pioneer of swiftness
across the Gobi; and to-day it is a rare week that does not see several
automobiles, always with room for one more passenger, climb out of
Kalgan on their way to Urga.

How some of these ever reach their destination is one of the innumerable
mysteries of the Orient. Our own expedition seemed risky enough, yet it
was a mere parlor-game compared to those we met or overtook along the
way. In the first place there were but four of us—the Russian Jewish
fur-merchant from Tientsin who owned the car, his chauffeur of similar
origin, and we two wandering Americans whom chance had momentarily
thrown together in the intricate byways of the earth. What with our
necessary baggage, the food and beds and arctic garments it would have
been foolhardy to reduce, and the cases of gasolene that completed the
ramparts which made each ascent to our seats a mountaineering feat, I at
least fancied we were heavily laden. Yet we passed on the trail cars
with eight or nine Chinese passengers, and on a memorable morning one
with eleven, besides all manner of baggage, winter garments, and
paraphernalia, somehow packed away in them. They were often old and
crippled cars, too, and no wonder, while our own was fresh from the
factory, with two gasolene-tanks, a host of reinforcements and
accessories, and the right-handed drive befitting left-handed China.
Like all those engaged in the Kalgan-to-Urga traffic, it came from
Detroit, though not of the breed one first thinks of in that connection,
but from the second most popular motor tribe of that habitat. Those who
should know say that this is the only car sturdy and at the same time
economical enough to endure life on the Gobi Desert.

[Illustration:

  The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil ten or more hours a day
    for twenty coppers, about six cents in our money
]

[Illustration:

  Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no automobile can climb
    to the great Mongolian plateau unassisted
]

[Illustration:

  Some of the camel caravans we passed on the Gobi seemed endless. This
    one had thirty dozen loaded camels and more than a dozen outriders
]

[Illustration:

  But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing home-made two-wheeled
    carts, often with a flag, sometimes the stars and stripes, flying at
    the head
]

We honked and snorted and sirened our way through the narrow, dust-deep,
crowded streets of Kalgan, as automobiles must in any genuine Chinese
city, now blocked completely by the deliberate foot-going traffic, now
by languid trains of ox-carts, and always quickly surrounded by gaping
and grinning Chinese, to whom a foreigner seems always to remain a rare
bird, however many of him may be seen daily. Twice we were halted at
ancient city gates by policemen with fixed bayonets. They were somewhat
more deferential to us, and more easily satisfied with the credentials
we chose to show, than toward our two companions with their big red
_huchao_, large as a newspaper page, by means of which the local _yamen_
had given them permission for their journey. Russians are subject now to
Chinese law, and Americans are not, which at times makes a world of
difference. Yet it was at one of these same gates that an American
resident of Kalgan was killed by one of these same guards not long
afterward for refusing to submit to an illegal decree of the local
overlord.

For about two hours beyond the outer gate we climbed a stony river-bed,
wide enough to have carried a stream with ships on its bosom, but merely
crisscrossed by a narrow brook bringing down silt from the treeless
mountains above. The city abandoned us with reluctance, struggling along
for a way in closely crowded shops and dwellings, then straggling more
and more until it dwindled to a single row of mud houses on either side,
finally to little clusters of huts strung together like loose strings of
beads, and breaking up at last into isolated hamlets dug back cave-like
into the cliffs of dry fantastic hills that rose yellow-brown above and
beyond us. The unpromising route was dense with traffic,—long trains of
camels haughtily treading past, strings of ox-carts with the solid,
heavily riveted wheels indigenous to China, patient-faced mules and
donkeys carefully picking their way through acres of tumbled stones,
throngs of cheery, unbelligerent Chinese in blue denims, mingled here
and there with a more hardy, weather-beaten, hard-faced Mongol, a stray
soldier perhaps, with an ancient gun slung over his sheepskin-clad
shoulder, or a robust lama in filthy quilted garments that had once been
red or yellow. Whenever some of the many obstacles brought us
momentarily to a halt these religious tramps came to beg the half-smoked
cigarette from between our lips, to feel the car all over, as if it were
some new breed of horse, and to hint that a dollar or a dime or a few
coppers or even some remnants of food would be more or less gratefully
accepted.

Where the waterless river tumbles down from the high plateau across
which lies nearly all the route to Urga, the slope is too swift even for
the sturdiest of motors, wherefore the adaptable Chinese villagers have
found a new source of income. Before this steeper section was reached,
Chinese along the way began to wave appeals at us, to point out their
lean and hungry mules and horses, in some cases even to climb up over
our baggage rampart with harnesses in their hands, begging the job of
hauling us to the top. Three horses, a mule, and a donkey were at length
engaged, after the bargaining indispensable to both races concerned in
the transaction, hitched with long rope traces to the front axle of our
now silent car, and for more than an hour they toiled upward under the
discouragement of three shrieking Chinese drivers and their cracking
whips, at a pace which that one of us who chose to walk easily
outdistanced.

From the chaos of broken rocks where the animals were allowed to abandon
us stretched a tumbled brown world not unlike the upper reaches of the
Andes. Of road in the Western sense there had been none from the start;
there was even less now. Across pell-mell hillocks with rarely a yard of
level space between them, among rocks of every jagged and broken form,
we plowed for the rest of the morning. Cattle—curiously
effeminate-looking cattle, with long ungraceful horns—flocks of sheep
and goats intermingled, files of camels under varying cargo, here and
there a cluster of black pigs rooting more or less in vain, marked a
trail that might otherwise have been less easy to follow. Men in
cotton-padded clothing and sheepskins plodded beside their animals, or
tramped alone with a worn and faded roll of bed and belongings on their
backs; cheery, amused, seldom-washed people smiled at us over the mud
walls of their compounds; for some time big ruined towers of what was,
or was to have been, another Great Wall, stood at brief intervals along
the crest of the bare, yellow-brown ridge beside us. Then came rolling
stretches of grain, principally oats, most of it already harvested by
the sickle and carry-on-the-back method, for all the vastness of the
cultivation, and lying in carefully spaced bundles in the fields where
it fell, or set up in long rows of closely crowded shocks near the
hard-earth threshing floors.

Bit by bit even this cultivation grew rare and scattered, and finally
died out entirely. By the time the speedometer registered eighty miles
from Kalgan we were spinning along, often at thirty miles an hour,
across high, brown, grass-covered plains, still somewhat uneven, but
with little more than a suggestion of hilliness remaining. Flocks of
sheep far off on the sloping sides of the horizon looked like patches of
daisies; veritable gusts of gray-blue birds of stately flight,
suggestive both of cranes and of wild geese, rose in deliberate haste
before us and floated away to the rear in a vain effort to outdistance
us. Almost frequently we passed long camel caravans, broken up into
sections of a dozen animals each, tied together by a sort of wooden
marlinespike thrust through their noses beneath the nostrils and
attached by a cord to the pack of the animal ahead, the first of each
dozen led by a well padded, skin-wrapped man who was more often Chinese
than Mongol. Some of these camel-trains seemed endless, with dozen after
dozen of the leisurely, soft-footed animals slowly turning their heads
to gaze, with a disdainful curiosity that suggested a world-weary
professor looking out from beneath his spectacles at incorrigible
mankind, upon this strange and impatiently hasty rival that sped
breathlessly past them. Now and again a beast shuffled sidewise away
from us, uttering that absurd little falsetto squeak which is the
camel’s inadequate means of protest at a cruel world; but most of them
refused to be startled into undignified activity by any such ridiculous
apparition. Once on the journey I counted a caravan bound for Urga which
stretched from horizon to horizon across the brown undulating world; and
there were thirty dozen camels bearing cargo, and a score of outriders
to keep the expedition in order.


We spent the night in a Chinese inn, mud-built and isolated, with the
usual stone _kang_, heatable and mat-covered, as bed and only
furnishing. It might have been quiet and restful but for over-zealous
watch-dogs and the arrival long after dark and the departure long before
dawn of two dilapidated cars with seventeen chattering Chinese
passengers. We, too, were off well before daylight, a half-moon lighting
the way as we spun across rolling, utterly treeless country with nothing
but short, scanty grass giving a touch of life to the brown-green
landscape over which a cloudless sun at length poured its molten gold.
Even the confirmed tramp would have found this an unendurable journey on
foot; a motor-car in its prime was scarcely swift enough to avoid
monotony, to come often enough on flashes of interest to keep the senses
from sinking into slothfulness. Pedestrians and lone travelers had long
since disappeared; safety, both from possible violence and from
starvation, demanded banding together, and some form of mount. The big
shaggy black dogs of Mongolia, filthy in diet as those of Central and
South America, but several times more savage, roamed wild across the
plains. A woman abroad at sunrise, gathering the offal left by a camping
camel-train and tossing it with a bamboo pitchfork over her shoulder
into a basket on her back, was the only sign of life for several miles.
Such fuel, like the llama droppings of the Andean highlands, is all that
is to be had in this barren region.

There were striking reminders of the aborigines of the Andes among the
scattered inhabitants of this high plateau. Mongols, distinctive in
face, dress, manner, and physique from the Chinese, had the same broad,
stolid features to be found along the spine of South America, though
they were much more bold and independent of bearing, as if they had
never been cowed by alien races. The interiors of their rare clusters of
two or three huts recalled the Andes, too—the bare earth for floor, a
dozen woolly sheepskins as beds, an extra pair of boots, a couple of
aged pots as total belongings. Instead of heaped-up cobblestones without
mortar, however, these _yourts_ were made of thick rugs of felt fastened
about a light wooden framework into a perfectly round dwelling perhaps
ten feet in diameter, the door, invariably facing the south, so low that
a man could barely enter upright on his knees. Inside, at least under
the wheel-like apex-support of the round and sloping roof, even we
Americans could sometimes stand erect—by peering out through the opening
for the escape of smoke and the entrance of air in pleasant daytime
weather, left by turning back the uppermost strip of felt. At one such
tent, where we halted to satisfy a thirsty radiator, only a soil-matted
old woman appeared and took to feeling along the ground about it for the
vessel that lay in plain sight. She was stone-blind, it turned out, yet
to all appearances quite satisfied with life as she knew it, with only
her miserable _yourt_ and an uninviting water-hole a few rods away. The
Mongol is still a true nomad herdsman, and his round, gray-white
dwellings are easily transportable, so that when one little hollow in
the plain dries up he has only to pack his house and wander along.

[Illustration:

  The Mongol would not be himself without his horse, though to us this
    would usually seem only a pony
]

[Illustration:

  Mongol authorities examining our papers, which Vilner is showing, at
    Ude. Robes blue, purple, dull red, etc. Biggest Chinaman on left
]

[Illustration:

  A group of Mongols and stray Chinese watching our arrival at the first
    yamen of Urga
]

Once every two or three hours we passed a cluster of three or four of
these low, movable homes, always at a considerable distance off the
trail. There was still no road, yet we made good speed almost steadily.
Besides the often dim traces of other travelers there was the guidance
of a line of telegraph-poles, carrying two wires but as yet no messages.
In the days before the World War word could be flashed by this route
from Paris to Peking, even from London to Shanghai, in three minutes;
but retreating armies must have fuel even in a treeless desert. Mixed
flocks of sheep and goats, slate-colored goats mingled with those
fat-tailed sheep of Asia which waddled so ludicrously as they scampered
away from us, still found sustenance here and there under the protection
of a mounted shepherd or two. It was still too early autumn for wolves,
but bands of antelopes, like big pretty rabbits, loping gracefully yet
swiftly across the rolling plains, became more and more frequent and
immense as we sped northwestward. Before the journey ended, great lines
of these, like brown-gray heat-waves, sometimes undulated along the
whole horizon, and more than one herd of fifty to a hundred, startled by
the sudden appearance of our snorting black monster, all but ran
themselves off their legs in a mad dash to cross the trail in front of
us, instead of speeding away out of danger.

It was about noon of the second day that we gradually entered the real
Gobi Desert. Yet it was not a desert in the Sahara sense, of mere
shifting sand, but of hard sand and gravel mixed with clay, always
covered at least with the thinnest of grass, and often with tufts of a
grass-bushy sort, enough to keep even a desert from shifting and
blowing. Thus far the weather had been cool but glorious; but no sooner
had we come to the Gobi, where, as any teacher of geography can tell
you, it never rains, than the sky roofed itself over completely with
gray-black clouds and rain forced us to halt and contrive some means of
raising the top over our ramparts of baggage. Skeletons of cattle,
particularly of camels, became more than frequent, blanching into dust
closely beside the trail just where the end of their life’s labors had
overtaken them. Buzzards that looked more like eagles vied with the wild
black dogs in disposing quickly of the carcasses. Nor were the modern
rivals of the camel free from a like fate. Several skeletons of
automobiles caught our eye, and they were always scattered piece by
piece for some distance, as if they had disintegrated at full speed, or
their bones, too, had been picked clean and dragged hither and yon by
those savage dogs that roam the Mongolian plains. Floor-flat and wide as
it is, and almost as free from the “other fellow” as from “traffic
cops,” this natural speedway of the Gobi has had a number of fatal
automobile accidents.

Unlike the Sahara, it is not merely the camel that can cross the Gobi.
Mules and horses make the journey, and the miles-long camel caravans
were rivaled by endless strings of ox-carts, the crudest of two-wheeled
contrivances, plodding along across the dry, brown world as if all sense
of time or destination had long since been cast aside as worthless
paraphernalia. Often, especially in the cold early mornings, we passed
caravans camped out, perhaps for a day or two, while their weary animals
browsed the stingy hillsides. A denim-blue tent backed by scores or
hundreds of bales of hides or wool, if the expedition was China-bound,
or boxes of food, cloth, liquor, and oil products, if Urga was its
destination, with perhaps more uptilted two-wheeled carts than could
have been counted during one of our average halts, usually completed
such a picture as we came upon it. At the sound of our unmuffled engine
tent-doors became alive with gaping, bullet-headed Mongols, lower orders
of whom, or their Chinese counterparts, came to life from beneath what
had seemed to be mere bundles of felt rags and sheepskins on the cold
hard ground, while the horses tethered about the camp with three feet
hobbled together after the Mongol fashion made frantic and often
successful efforts to escape from this new terror descending upon them.
The horses of the Gobi have not yet learned to behold the automobile
with equanimity, and our passing often sent great herds of Mongolian
ponies sweeping away in chaotic masses across the plains in a stampede
which the dozen outriders were powerless to stem.

Twice during the second day we made out large compact clusters of white
buildings on the flank of distant ridges along the horizon—lamaseries in
which scores of Mongol monks pass their days in anything but monasterial
austerity. Once, when we had seen no other living thing for hours, an
old Mongol came loping across the desert on a camel in the teeth of the
cold, raging wind, a picturesque figure in the still almost bright-red
quilted cloak reaching to his ankles, and his pagoda-shaped fur cap.
When we called to him he halted and pulled sharply at the reins attached
to the perforated nose of his beast, which thereupon knelt in
instalments, front, back, then front again, and rose to follow his
dismounted master over to us. Our Russian companions, who managed to
make themselves understood in any language, though actually speaking
none but their own, passed the time of day in Mongol, the one important
word of which seems to be _buyna_, corresponding to the French _il y a_,
but greatly outdoing it in service. The leathery face of the old man was
like a boot that had lain out in the elements for years; the two teeth
he showed suggested the fangs of a wolf; but his smile was as kindly as
that of an Iowa farmer, and while his thankfulness for a cigarette was
very briefly expressed, as becomes a nomad scorning or unaware of the
formalities of a politer world, there was something distinctly manly in
his every movement from the time we first saw him until he mounted his
kneeling camel again and rode away into the vastness of the desert. For
hours afterward there was nothing to catch the attention, unless it was
the compatriot beside me. He was one of those American wanderers in the
Orient who have never recrossed the Pacific since coming out to help
pacify the Philippines a generation ago, and he still preferred a horse
and “buggy” to these new-fangled things fed by gasolene; he had not yet
heard of scores of facts and inventions which have become ancient
history to us at home; and he passed his idle hours in humming the songs
that were popular in our land twenty years back.

At length we ran out from under the great motionless canopy of clouds
into brilliant sunshine again, though even there the racing wind was
almost bitter cold. The Gobi, as I have said, is no Sahara, yet it was
beautiful in its many moods as the sea, stretching away in tawny browns
or cold bluish grays to infinity, or to scampering lines of antelope
along the far horizon. Beyond the mud-walled compound enclosing the
telegraph station of Ehr-lien the smooth, grass-tufted desert gave way
to a savage country of protruding rock-heaps, peaked heaps of blackish
stone outcropping everywhere, as if nature, too, built prayer-piles,
like the pious Mongols, who litter their landscapes with conical piles
of stones wherever they are available, as appeals to the supernatural
powers.


Nightfall found us midway between two mud-walled telegraph stations, and
shelter from the raging wind and the penetrating night air of a more
than four-thousand-foot elevation was highly desirable. Two
weather-blackened _yourts_ broke the immensity about us, far off to the
right. One does not need to look for side-roads on the Gobi; we made a
bee-line for them across the plain. But the unsoaped occupants were not
willing to double up in one tent and rent us the other, for which I was
duly grateful when I had caught a glimpse inside the pen that might have
been assigned to us. Several miles farther on, a larger group of nomad
dwellings appeared, this time to the left across more broken country. By
the time we had struggled near to the settlement we were surrounded by
Mongols and black dogs, several horses had broken their tethers and were
already mere specks on the horizon, and even the camels reclining about
the _yourts_ had risen to protest in their ridiculously childish
falsetto against this unauthorized disturbance. This time there were
half a dozen tents, in much better repair and more nearly resembling
human dwellings. Moreover here there was a man of importance to receive
us. He was a lama, as his close-cropped head and a kind of bath-robe
gown, thickly quilted and still dully red for all its unwashed age, told
us; for the Mongol layman wears a cue and more masculine garments, wore
a cue in fact centuries before this girlish head-dress was imposed upon
the Chinese by their nomad conquerors. But it required the linguistic
lore of our Russian companions to learn that he was also a princeling, a
kind of tribal ruler of a neighboring region, who had come on a visit to
his friend, the family head of this cluster of huts. He was a big brawny
man, rather handsome in his own racial style, with a wide, frank, fairly
intelligent face, pitted with smallpox. We were invited to enter his own
hut, which was round and low and made of thick gray felt, like all those
on the Gobi; but the earth floor was also carpeted with felt mats, and
about the circular walls were several small chests and other simple
articles of household use, not to mention saddles and bridles. The lama
gave orders briefly and to the point, more like a commander than a
guest. A sort of iron basket on legs was set up in the middle of the
tent, filled, by hand, with dried camel-dung, and was soon blazing so
merrily that the bitter night wind outside was more endurable than the
temperature inside the tent. I know no fuel which outdoes that of the
Gobi in quickness and intensity of heat. The Mongols, however, seemed to
be impervious to it. Though inured for many generations to the bitter
cold of their plateau, they crowded into the hut without removing a
single one of their heavy garments, tightly closed the little low door,
and squatted about the roasting iron cage with every evidence of keen
enjoyment. There is but slight differentiation by sex in Mongol dress,
and the men and women alike wore heavy, ungraceful trousers, huge high
boots of soft, pliable, black leather with pointed turned-up toes, and a
thick quilted garment covering all else from neck to calves, not to
mention uncouth fur head-dresses. Even in these desert _yourts_ the
reddish faces and garments of the women are often set off by elaborate
and fanciful hair-dress and other ornaments; but if these existed here
they had been laid away, and the very girls stalked about in their
oversize sock-stuffed boots like lumber-jacks in midwinter.

Mongol tea was prepared over the fire-cage and served us in brass bowls;
but as the resident of Mongolia puts his salt in his tea rather than on
his food, and has other un-Western notions of how it should be
concocted, I did not insist on having my bowl refilled. I found my mind
frequently harking back to such nights as this on the high Andean
plateaus of South America, though there the travel itself had been quite
different. Here was the same bare, vegetationless earth round about, the
same complete ignorance of, or interest in, cleanliness, similar
crowded, comfortless huts, and much the same attitude toward life as
among the Indians of the Andes. But these plateau-dwellers were far more
hospitable, cheery of manner, and with a live human curiosity which,
though it caused them to finger monkey-like any of our possessions they
could reach, had a more agreeable effect on the spirits than the sullen
dullness of their American prototypes. Now and again, when they became
over-troublesome, the lama ordered them outside with a commanding voice
and manner which usually was effective at the third or fourth
repetition. Yet he, too, was not lacking in fingering curiosity, of a
slightly more controllable nature. While we ate we passed out samples of
our strange foreign food to the gaping, over-clad semicircle about us.
One of my canned cherries, dropped into a gnarled Mongol palm, created a
considerable commotion. What was it; and was it safe in a Mongol
stomach, even though this other kind of man ate it without misgiving? It
passed from hand to hand around the circle, each evidently expressing
his opinion of the risk involved, and the consensus seemed to be that it
was up to the original recipient to make the venture. He licked
cautiously at the fruit for some time after it had been returned to the
furrowed hollow of his hand. At length, reassured by the two Russians
and urged on by the lama, he bit gingerly into it—and half sprang to his
feet with the shock it seemed to give his tongue. More reassurance
finally induced him to eat it, and all went well until the stone
betrayed its existence, whereupon there was an instant demand to know
whether the presence of that foreign substance was normal, or whether
his evil spirit was playing new and perhaps destructive tricks upon him.
Considering the quantity of foreign substance the average Mongol absorbs
with his meals, there seemed to be something absurdly incongruous about
this lengthy performance. But then, we of the uninstructed West know
little of the myriad methods the teeming evil spirits of the Orient
devise to trap their victims.

A bit of chocolate caused less flurry, though the semicircle around
which it disappeared unanimously pronounced it too sweet to be
agreeable. A cube of sugar was not a total stranger, and each of the
gathering asked the privilege of letting one melt on his tongue. When it
came to meat, even from tins, there was no mystery left; mutton and beef
form the almost exclusive diet of the Mongols, except for milk and
cheese in summer, and their salted tea. Not only are they true nomads,
but their pseudo-Buddhist religion teaches that it is wicked—or shall we
say dangerous?—to till the soil.

Though there is little formality in Mongol intercourse, I inadvertently
made one _faux pas_ during the evening. Among those who crowded into the
overheated hut was what I at first took to be a handsome youth, but who
turned out to be, under the heavy, sexless garments of Mongolia, a girl,
perhaps of seventeen. When I offered her a tidbit of some sort, she
shrank back without accepting it, while the rest of the semicircle
looked at me with an expression of mingled wonder and resentment, and a
moment later she slipped out through the tightly closed, knee-high door
into the night. I should, it seemed, have been more indirect in my
methods, handing the donation to the old woman or to one of the men of
the family, and hinting that they might pass it on. As it was, I had
evidently boldly made an advance, and that publicly, similar to handing
my door-key to a chance lady acquaintance in the West. The girl
returned, later on, and indirectly accepted a few knick-knacks, but it
was evident as long as I remained that I was a man on whom it behooved
parents and husbands to keep a watchful eye.

The tin cans we emptied were, of course, considered great prizes, to be
quarreled over and at length allotted by the lama. The old woman begged
us to open others and somehow dispose of the food in them, in order that
she might still further increase her stock of kitchen utensils. Her
curiosity seemed to have reached almost a morbid growth, for though we
or the lama drove her several times out of the hut, she was evidently
bent on watching these curious beings from another world disrobe. A
ragged old man who proved to be the tribal shepherd was equally hard to
banish, though for a different reason. He had been accustomed to sleep
in the hut we occupied, and he resisted as long as he dared, and quite
justly, the demand of the lama that he sleep outside. The lama won in
the end, of course, and the shepherd curled up grumblingly in a nest of
quilted rags and sheepskins along the outer wall, where his deep bark
resounded in the desert stillness all through the night. Heavy colds
seem to be quite as common among these permanent denizens of the plateau
as they were universal with the four of us. The fire-cage was carried
outside, but the thick heat remained, in spite of which the lama called
to a boy to pull the topmost layer of felt down over the opening left in
the top of _yourts_ by day, hermetically sealing the place. But he was
right; before morning we would have resented a pinhole in the felt
walls. I had indulged in the luxury of bringing an army cot with me,
which excited not only the wonder but the admiration of our host. The
inventiveness which had produced such a contraption seemed less
surprising to him than the courage I displayed in using it; he, said the
lama, would be certain to fall off it in the night and seriously injure
himself. Instead he stripped to the waist and lay down on a bundle of
blankets and skins along the wall, pulling a rough cover of camel’s hair
over him. But this was not until the formalities of his calling had been
fulfilled. As we were turning in, he called once more to the boy
outside, who soon appeared with two brass disks, loosely tied together.
The lama squatted on his haunches, clashed the disks once together with
a resounding clang, then mumbled for several minutes through his
prayers. Then he sat for some time staring from one to the other of us,
as if wondering what breed of men were these, who dared lie down for the
night without having propitiated the evil spirits which ride the
darkness, until at length he blew out the floating-wick lamp and lay
down.


We were glad, indeed, to see the sun again next morning, when at last it
burst up like the exhaust from a puddling furnace over the low, level
horizon. Already we had bumped our way back to the “highway,” as worthy
of the name as the _caminos reales_, the “royal roads,” of South America
are of theirs, and had sped some distance along it. The eyes suffered
most in this glaring light and the incessant strong head wind from which
nothing short of entirely wrapping up the head could protect them. The
constant bumping and tossing made up for any lack of exercise. Among
myriad rock-heaps, natural and prayerful, we crossed the frontier
between Inner and Outer Mongolia, marked merely by two huger stone-heaps
on either side of the there sunken trail, the summits connected by a
wire from which hung tattered bits of cloth prayers and various mementos
of the pious, culminating in a weather-beaten straw hat of Chinese make.
That was all, except the immensity of the desert, for the
frontier-station was still about fifty miles distant. Then the
rock-heaps died out, and the earth as far as we could see it was thickly
covered with millions of little mounds, like untended Chinese graves,
with hints of scanty tuft-grass on top of them. At long intervals we
passed a caravan, the dull-toned notes of the bell-camels reaching our
ears momentarily as we dashed past. The first camel of one long train
carried the American flag at his masthead, so to speak, to warn would-be
marauders that the hides and wool behind him were under whatever
protection our consuls and diplomats in the former Chinese Empire have
to offer. Otherwise the world about us was mainly a confirmation of the
fact that, while China proper estimates the density of her population at
two hundred and twenty-five to the square mile, Mongolia’s is rated at
two.

Were the world not so slow to accept geographical changes, even in these
days of the constant remaking of maps, we should long since have ceased
to distinguish between Mongolia and China “proper.” Though the Chinese
Republic claims, and to a certain extent maintains, the loyalty of that
strip of earth bordering her on the north and known as Inner Mongolia,
the vast region we call Outer Mongolia cast off Chinese rule a decade
ago. More exactly, it never was under Chinese rule, at least in modern
times, for barely had their kindred Manchus been driven from the throne
of China than the Mongols asserted their independence from the
new-formed republic. That was why we Americans had looked forward with
some misgiving to our arrival in Ude, which occurred early on this third
day. Ude consists of half a dozen _yourts_ and a new mud-walled
telegraph station, a desolate spot, owing its location to a near-by
water-hole. But it is the place where the merits or demerits of persons
entering Outer Mongolia from China are passed upon—passed upon by
unpolished Mongols who have little knowledge of, and less interest in,
the way such things are handled at other boundaries between the
countries of the globe. The Russians had no misgivings; while men of
their race would not willingly have traveled to Urga eighteen months
before, they were now, as it were, among their own people. But, for
reasons which will in due time be apparent, there is just now a certain
lack of welcome in Mongolia toward Americans, in which the British and
certain other important nationalities share. Less than a month before,
two Englishmen in their own car had been halted at Ude and refused
admission to the land beyond, eventually giving up lengthy and useless
negotiations to have this decision reversed, and returning to China. We
had no “papers” calling upon Mongolia to admit us. Our legation in
Peking had only been able to tell us that, if our passports were sent to
the Chinese foreign office, they would be returned—long afterward—with
the information that, while Mongolia was still Chinese territory, it was
in the hands of rebels—they might even have called them bandits—and
since the Chinese Republic could not guarantee the safety of foreigners
in that region, they could not consent to our traveling there, even to
the extent of giving us a visé. The Mongols themselves have no
accredited representative in China, naturally, and while certain other
agents in Peking might have smoothed things over for us if they had
wished, it is their policy to pretend that they and those they represent
have no real power in Mongolia, apparently in the hope of keeping the
world ignorant as long as possible of their doings in that region. It is
customary, therefore, for those citizens of Western nations who wish to
enter Outer Mongolia to pick up their traps and go, regardless of legal
permissions.

But all our misgivings of being turned back at Ude were worry wasted.
The Mongols have a reputation for instability in the conduct of affairs
of government, of stiff-necked severity at one moment and great leniency
in quite a similar matter the next; for after all they are little more
than adult children to whom government is a new and amusing plaything.
Moreover it may be that the letter and the bottle of vodka which the
chief of our party brought for the Ude functionary had their effect; at
any rate he not only did not demand our papers but did not even ask to
see us, so that by the time we had breakfasted on our own food and local
hot water in a _yourt_ next to the official one we were free to continue
to Urga.


Ox-carts with a single telegraph-pole diagonally across them were
crawling northwestward in great trains; new poles and rolls of wire,
both from far off, lay here and there along the way near Ude, where we
ran into the Dane who had been all summer repairing the line which
retreating armies had left a wreck behind them. Within a week, he
promised—and his word proved good—messages would again be flashing from
Paris to Peking, as they had not in more than two years. Mongols and
Chinese now well trained for the task were replacing the last of the
thousands of missing poles which forced neglect or the demands of
military camp-fires had brought down, and their methods were worth
watching. Instead of the sharp spikes at the instep used by our
pole-climbers, the Mongols wore on each foot a semicircle of iron about
two feet long, with saw-teeth on the inside, which made their climbing
suggestive of some tropical spider, and must be taken off whenever they
walked from pole to pole. The Chinese, on the other hand, used a method
characteristic of their overcrowded, man-cheap country—each pole-climber
had two coolie assistants, who carried a ladder! Building, or even
repairing, a telegraph-line across the Gobi is no effeminate matter of
nightly beds and full hot meals. The sole national representative in
Mongolia of this Danish enterprise had been weeks at a time even without
bread, while the less said in his presence about bathing the greater the
popularity of the speaker. Stern methods are needed, too, to protect
such exotic assets as telegraph-poles in an utterly treeless and even
bushless region. By the “law of the Living Buddha,” as it is called in
Mongolia, the cutting down of a telegraph-pole is punishable with death.
The Dane and his party had come across a man so engaged not long before,
and had tied him up and sent him off to be judged by his fellows; but so
effective has the law been that the severed and useless end of a pole
will lie until it rots away close beside a trail along which pass
hundreds of caravans and groups of travelers to whom fuel is almost a
matter of life or death.

For nearly a day’s journey beyond Ude the desert is so smooth and hard
that we could maintain a speed of fifty miles an hour for long
stretches, so smooth that riding the roadless plateau was almost like
falling through space. Sain-Usu, which is Mongol for “Good Water,”
welcomed us for half an hour in one of its three huts, and not far
beyond there rose deep-blue above the horizon the flattened peak that
marks the site of Tuerin. With such splendid going as nature furnished,
it seemed visibly to move toward us; yet the sun was low and the night
cold already biting into our bones when we dragged ourselves to the
ground before the telegraph station at its foot. This highest point on
the trans-Gobi journey, five thousand feet above the sea, is a great
fantastic heap of black rocks, many of them large as apartment-houses,
piled up one above the other, here as carefully as if by the hand of
man, there tossed together in such a pell-mell chaos as to suggest that
the Builder had suddenly taken a dislike to his task and knocked it over
with a disdainful sweep of the hand. On the further slope lies a large
lamasery, where travelers may sometimes find shelter, but not food, for
all the quantities of everything which the pious nomads roundabout bring
the loafing lamas. Otherwise there is nothing whatever except the
yellow-brown plains, sloping away to infinity in every direction.

The last hundred and fifty miles were more like a prairie than a desert,
beautiful light-brown folds of earth, everywhere cut on a generous
pattern, rolling on and on farther than the advancing eye could ever
reach. There was a kind of prairie-dog, too, squatting on its haunches
and gazing saucily upon us, or dashing for the gravel-banked holes with
which it had dotted the plain. These were marmots, of special interest
to our Russian companions, since their skins form one of the most
important items of export for the fur-traders of Mongolia. Mile after
mile they lined the way, whole colonies of them, some of the bluish tint
much sought after by dealers, most of them a beautiful gray-brown which
flashed for a moment in the brilliant sunshine as they dashed
gopher-like for their holes with an impertinent flip of their bushy
tails.

At length women and children, and not merely men, began to appear,
riding on camels and horses; camps of hides and wool grew almost
numerous; there were more settlements along the way, though all of them
were still the round portable huts of the nomads. Great flocks of what
looked like plovers swirled up; big brown birds that seemed a cross
between hawk and vulture rode by on the wind; wild ducks were so tame
and numerous as to have tantalized a hunter. We came out upon a rise
with a magnificent view—the yellow foreground fading to brown as the
world rolled away before us, then a purplish tint, increasing to a blue
that grew ever darker, until the broken ridge along the horizon far
ahead blended into the strip of clouds hanging motionless over it.
Gradually mountains rose on every hand, the few scrub evergreens along
the crests of some of them being the first trees or even brush we had
seen since soon after leaving Kalgan. The cold wind that had cut clear
through us for days seemed to come forth from the Siberian steppes
beyond with renewed savage intensity. Before long the crest-line of
trees became a low but dense green forest, covering all the upper
portion of what we soon learned was the sacred mountain of Urga, where
all furred and feathered creatures are under the protection of the
“Living Buddha.” We entered ever deeper into a broad valley, Mongols in
their long cloaks becoming more and more numerous, and more disagreeably
sophisticated than the simple herdsmen with their long poles and
noose-lassos out on the open plain. There the broad-cheeked nomads had
been more friendly, had more manly dignity, than the Chinese; here the
manliness remained, but there was something surly, almost savage about
them, which we were quickly to learn was no mere matter of outward
appearances. There came a small river, actually crossed by a bridge, a
queer massive wooden bridge with what looked like piles of railway-ties
as pillars; and on down the valley a town appeared, the towers of a
radio-station rose from among the hills, a long row of barrack-like
buildings of a European type grew distinct—and just then our troubles
began.




                              CHAPTER VIII
                           IN “RED” MONGOLIA


Across the broken valley at a gallop came two mounted men who turned out
to be Mongol soldiers, picturesque certainly, but not otherwise
particularly inviting. As they rode, they waved their rifles wildly in
the air, and were apparently bellowing to us orders which the raging
wind carried away before the sounds reached us. When they drew near,
their uniforms proved to be the usual costume of the lower-class
Mongol—heavy red knee-boots, pagoda-like fur hats, and a faded, quilted
kind of bath-robe gown covering the rest of their iniquities; but on
their chests and backs were sewed two cloth patches a foot square on
which were several upright lines of Mongol writing, announcing their
official capacity. But for these we might easily have mistaken them for
bandits, for both their manner of riding down upon us and their air
toward us when they had arrived suggested that they had captured booty
and prisoners for ransom rather than that they had merely come to escort
us to town.

One of them, it appeared from their actions, must get into the car with
us; the other would have to ride in with the horses. Like children who
very rarely have the chance of an automobile-ride, they quarreled and
argued for a long time, while the biting wind snapped and lashed at us,
as to which was entitled to the privilege, meanwhile flourishing their
aged rifles with a carelessness that made even such time-honored weapons
dangerous. At length one of them won the point and climbed
unceremoniously aboard, mopping his muddy feet on our robes, stretching
himself out at ease partly on our knees, partly on our most breakable
baggage, and poking us, perhaps unintentionally but none the less
unpleasantly, in the ribs with the business end of his loose-triggered
rifle, while the loser sourly turned away with the horses and the
expression of a six-year-old who had been deprived of his toys and
driven from the playground.

We forded half a dozen stony little streams, for the going had become
abominable in ratio as we approached Urga; we were waved hither and yon
across the valley by other rifle-shaking, vainly shouting soldiers, and
finally brought up at an ordinary little round felt hut with a smoking
stovepipe protruding from its top. It must have been much more
comfortable inside this than out in the bitter wind, for those within
showed no haste in braving the outer temperature. Finally, however, two
or three Mongols crawled through the low door and demanded our _huchao_,
our Chinese permit to make the journey. There was an interminable
argument over this, mainly inside the _yourt_, which we had not been
invited to enter. Then two more bullying soldiers with poorly controlled
rifles tumbled into the car and ordered us to drive on.

Before a _yamen_ that might have been mistaken either for a run-down
temple or a well kept stable we were again halted and commanded to
dismount. This place, it turned out, was not yet Urga, but the former
Chinese merchant section of Mai-Mai-Ch’eng (“Buy-Sell-Town”) some miles
away from the sacred city, in which trading was until recently
forbidden. Here a veritable mob of soldiers and petty officials poured
out upon us, led by an exceedingly insolent youth in a rich, silky, but
much soiled light-blue gown topped off by a kind of archbishop’s miter.
He demanded our weapons. We dug them and the bit of ammunition we
carried out of our baggage, protesting in vain that as this was all to
be examined at the next _yamen_, and armed guards were to conduct us
there, this extra labor of disentangling our overloaded car was
unnecessary. But it was plain that there were at least two motives for
putting us to this gratuitous trouble: the insolent Mongol youth did not
wish to lose an opportunity to show his authority to the full,
particularly toward men of a race which seldom fell into his hands; and
the whole posse was eager to meddle with our belongings as much as
possible. They passed our revolvers and my companion’s rifle from hand
to hand, each trying his own method of manipulating them. Fortunately—at
the time we felt it was unfortunate—we had not loaded them, or several
tragedies might have ensued before their curiosity was satisfied and we
were allowed to conclude our journey. Then the overbearing youth in
charge decided that he must search our persons for weapons, though we
had given our word that we carried none. The implied insult would not
have mattered so much had not his hands looked as if he had been
handling Gobi fuel incessantly from childhood without a pause even to
wipe them, and had his manner been less that of the protected bully
venting an unaccountable spleen against the whole white race. But
cleanliness and common courtesy, we soon learned, are the two qualities
most foreign to the crowd now ruling Outer Mongolia.

The quarrel as to who should have the privilege of the automobile-ride
into Urga was at length decided in favor of all who could pile
themselves into and about the car and baggage. How the machine escaped a
broken back under the burden was a mystery which even Detroit probably
could not have explained. Then there came a delay while the blue-gowned
youth found and adjusted a fanciful pair of goggles, in all likelihood
filched from the baggage of some previous victim, and without which of
course the two- or three-mile ride ahead would have been unendurable. We
groaned away at last, rifles and our own weapons covering us on every
side, first through a half-ruined town of mud alleys between endless
palisades of upright logs of the pine family, then across a stony,
barren, wind-swept space with several axle-cracking little streams to be
forded. Between bumps we caught glimpses of the several distinctly
isolated sections of Urga, its golden temples and black dogs, its one
lofty building, and the Tibetan texts in stone on the flank of its
sacred mountain across the valley. Then we were suddenly turned into a
noisome back yard peopled with shoddy-clad and unwashed soldiers and
prisoners, the latter engaged in worse than menial tasks under the
bayonet-points of the former; the gate to the outside world was closed
and barred, and a new set of examiners fell upon us.


If a gang of young East Side New York rowdies should suddenly get the
complete upper hand in the city, I can imagine them going through the
belongings of their victims along Fifth Avenue in quite the same way as
now befell our own. At a word from a superior who would himself scarcely
have inspired a lone lady with confidence on a dark night, there sprang
forward from all sides a dozen young men who seemed to have been
specially chosen for their gangster-like appearance. In their shoddy
uniforms of some nondescript dark color, they looked like a cross
between low-class Russians and the scum of the Mongolian plains—which is
about what they were, in other words Buriats. The pleasure they took
both in putting us to annoyance and in prying minutely into our affairs
quite evidently purged their task of any stigma of labor. I have passed
many frontiers in my day, but never have I beheld an examination in the
slightest degree approaching in thoroughness this one. Every single
article, large or small, in our valises, bedding-bags, even our
lunch-sacks, was picked out one by one, carefully, not to say stupidly,
scrutinized, taken apart if that was physically possible, and finally
tossed into a heap on the filthy bare ground of the yard. Clean linen
must be completely unfolded, stared at minutely on both sides, and
crumpled up into a mess from which only a laundryman could rescue it. We
were not surprised that such articles aroused the suspicion of the
examiners; anything resembling clean linen was quite evidently strange
to them. Nor was there any intentional offense meant, perhaps, in mixing
our bread and our tooth-brushes with the offal in the yard, for no
conscious line of demarcation between these seemed as yet to have been
drawn in the minds of the examiners. They did consciously resent our own
higher plane of cleanliness, however, when it was called to their
attention. I was attempting to rescue my dismembered sleeping-bag from a
worse fate by picking it up from the ground where it had been thrown
after examination, when one of the rowdies snatched it out of my hand
and deliberately tossed it into an especially choice source of
contamination.

My shaving-stick was opened with extreme caution, as a possible infernal
machine. My safety-razor caused a considerable argument, until a
gang-chief ruled that it was not a deadly weapon. The man who picked up
an ordinary can of pork-and-beans tore off the label and attempted to
unscrew the top in his efforts to examine the contents, and was with
difficulty induced to spare me the labor of attacking it with a
can-opener. I rescued my exposed films just as they were about to be
unrolled, and came very near bodily injury for my interference before
our interpreter could get in touch with some one of authority and more
or less human intelligence. Thus it went, for more than an hour, through
every simplest article we had brought with us. Nor did a single
examination of each suffice; whenever anything unusual turned up, which,
thanks to the ignorance of the examiners, was often, all of them must
satisfy their monkey-like curiosity by thoroughly studying it. It was
not that we objected to having our baggage inspected, even with unusual
thoroughness—though legally we Americans were not subject to any
interference by the local authorities of Mongolia—but at least it would
have been a kindness to give the job to men who had some inkling of the
paraphernalia of civilization and some hazy notion of why tooth-brushes
and offal are not commonly mixed.

In the end they kept our weapons and cartridges, our American passports,
and all our papers, down to letters of introduction and scribbled
memoranda, which had not escaped their erratic attention. They demanded
that the tool-box be removed from the car and the spare tire opened, as
possible hiding-places. That these were the only ones they thought of
was due to their ignorance of automobile mechanism. The Russian Jews had
more influence than we, however, and after long and vociferous wrangling
this order was rescinded. In contrast to the deliberation with which
they had been examining it, they insisted that we snatch together our
heaped-up property and thrust it pell-mell, filth and all, back into our
bags and valises. Long blanks must then be filled out, in Russian, with
our personal biographies. These went to an inner office, while we still
shivered like hopper-screens in the wintry air outside; and at length a
man came out to announce that they must also keep my kodak and films.
This required a complete reëxamination of all my baggage, for my word as
to the number of films I carried could not of course be trusted. Finally
we were taken into the sanctum of the _Okhrana_ or the _Ghospolitakran_,
as it is variously called in popular parlance—the “State’s Internal
Guard” would perhaps answer as a poor and inadequate translation in
English. This is a genuinely Russian form of secret service and
espionage within the country, devised under the czarist régime and
continued by its receivers, the Bolsheviki, who had recently imposed it
upon Mongolia. The plain bare room of European style contained a rough
table and a few chairs, a surly Mongol nearer twenty than thirty, in
native garb except for a faded slouch felt hat, who proved to be the
ostensible head of the secret service, and an older Russian “adviser” in
grayish semi-uniform and quite modern glasses. The “adviser” looked as
if he had been familiar with the common forms of courtesy in earlier
days, but evidently he had either forgotten them or dared not mix them
with his “Red” allegiance, for his behavior was as studiously uncivil as
that of the Mongol was naturally rude. We had stood for a long time,
with empty chairs plentiful, when the pair deigned to notice our
existence. A handsome, courteous little Buriat, greatly contrasting with
the rest of the crew, explained our cases at length, with special
emphasis on the seizure of my kodak. Uncouth soldiers, Mongol, Buriat,
and Russian indiscriminately, lounged in and out, most of them
carelessly juggling guns with fixed bayonets, glaring ominously at us
from time to time, and picking up and examining any of the official
papers on the table which happened to catch their fancy. It is said that
there are no ranks in the “Red” army; certainly there was no outward
evidence of discipline among the detachment of it in Urga, or among
their apt Mongol pupils.

[Illustration:

  The frontier post of Ude, fifty miles beyond the uninhabited frontier
    between Inner and Outer Mongolia, where Mongol authorities examine
    passports and very often turn travelers back
]

[Illustration:

  Chinese travelers on their way to Urga; it is unbelievable how many
    muffled Chinamen and their multifarious junk one Dodge will carry
]

[Illustration:

  The Mongol of the Gobi lives in a _yourt_ made of heavy felt over a
    light wooden framework, which can be taken down and packed in less
    than an hour when the spirit of the nomad strikes him
]

[Illustration:

  Mongol women make the felt used as houses, mainly by pouring water on
    sheep’s wool
]

A receipt, in Russian, was finally given us for our confiscated
belongings, and about four in the afternoon, ten hours since we had
eaten and five after our arrival, we were at last allowed to drag our
shivering frames away in quest of lodging. There are no hotels in Urga,
and visitors must appeal to the hospitality of one or another of the
stray Europeans living there, of whom, excepting of course the numerous
Russians, there seemed to be a single sample of each nationality. I was
just sitting down to a belated lunch in the home of Norway’s handsome
contribution to this international group when a red-clothed native of
the better class dropped in, hat and all. He was a young man of unusual
attainments for Mongolia, it seemed, educated at the University of
Irkutsk, speaking Russian perfectly, and famous as the only Mongol known
who spoke English. In the last accomplishment, however, he had not
advanced beyond the bashful stage, and consented to display it only when
there was no one to interpret his Russian or his Mongol. He was attached
to the foreign office, though soon to leave for Moscow as a member of
the Communist Congress there; and he had come, mainly out of personal
friendship for my host, to warn me of trouble ahead. A telegram, he told
the Norwegian in Russian, had just been received from a station out on
the Gobi, announcing that two Americans in a motor-car carrying four
persons had killed a Mongol on their way to Urga. He had no intention of
making unkindly insinuations against me or my companion, he said, but we
were the only Americans who had arrived within a fortnight, the only
foreigners who had come within a week, and ours was the only car that
had reached Urga for two or three days, as well as the only one in a
long time with only four occupants. Moreover, we had carried arms.

Absurd as the covert charge was—for our revolvers had lain unloaded in
our baggage throughout the trip—it was not wholly a laughing matter. My
compatriot had frequently fired his rifle at antelope along the way, and
there was a very slight possibility that a bullet had carried too far.
But worse almost than any question of guilt or innocence was the
possibility of becoming entangled in the intricacies of a Mongol court
of justice. Its point of view would be quite unlike that of our Western
judiciary; certainly haste would not be one of its attributes. All at
once the rights of extraterritoriality, to which I was legally entitled
in Urga even though forcibly deprived of them, seemed no mere forced
concession but the only way of being fairly judged in such a predicament
in a land and society so utterly alien to my own. Within an hour or so,
the Mongol thought, they would come to arrest us, and though he spoke
optimistically of the final outcome, he could not recommend even four or
five days in prison as a pleasant week-end. I had already heard
something of Urga’s place of detention, the earth cellar of the
_Okhrana_ where we had been examined, in which a score of Russians and
as many Mongols were even then huddled together, without a suggestion of
daylight, beds, blankets, human conveniences, or anything that could
honestly be called food, with nothing but the cold, damp ground to lie
on and a scanty bit of garbage to eat and drink. Judging by the cavalier
manner in which we had been treated as unaccused and ostensibly free
beings, it was not hard to imagine what those rowdy soldiers about the
place would do to us as prisoners. I did all possible justice to the
lunch before me, for at least if we were to join the community in the
icy cellar I wished to be partly filled up and thawed out before
beginning the experience.

A hasty council was convened of the few Americans—all visitors—and the
more Western Europeans in town. The seriousness with which these treated
the situation was anything but reassuring. Their patent distrust and
unexpressed dread of the sinister powers then ruling Urga recalled
stories of the terror that filled men’s lives in the worst days of the
French Revolution. It was plain that it was not a mere matter of proving
our innocence, if the authorities chose to make this a “frame-up” to be
rid of unwelcome visitors. In the end it was decided that the best plan
would be to forestall the authorities, to go at once to the minister of
justice before some of his less intelligent underlings received and
carried out the warrant for our arrest.

We reached him indirectly through his adviser, who was fortunately a
friend of my host. In the late afternoon light of his wholly European
study this polished and intelligent man in our ordinary garb looked
entirely like a Russian; it was not until next day that his more swarthy
tint and the quilted silk robe he wore to office showed him to be a
Buriat. He admitted that the telegram in question had been received, and
that the warrants would probably be ready within an hour or two—and no
doubt served, I reflected, in this leisurely moving world, just in time
to drag us out of our beds in the middle of the cold night. But as I had
taken the trouble to come and show myself, the Buriat went on, and to
explain my movements to his personal satisfaction, he would suppress the
warrants for the time being, if all four of us would appear at the
_yamen_ of justice, with an efficient interpreter, in the morning.

For all the absurdity of the whole affair there was a sense of relief in
having gained at least a respite, and before dinner was over I had
almost forgotten the matter. But when I woke once during that otherwise
deathly still Urga night, the howling of two or three of her man-eating
dogs had a curiously ominous, almost terrorizing, sound. Only a
fortnight before, fifteen men, a former prime minister among them, had
been shot in a near-by gully and their bodies fed to these dogs, in the
cheery Urga fashion. Those had been Mongols, to be sure, but a score of
Russians were even then shivering out the night in the cellar-prison,
charged with a hand in the same conspiracy, and from thinking of
shooting Russians for treason to actually shooting a stray Caucasian of
another nationality for some other alleged crime would be no impossible
leap for these “Red”-led, self-satisfied nomads. I had to remind myself
several times what a fool I was before I turned over and fell asleep
again.


Few things are ever as serious the next morning as when they happened
the night before, and I could laugh at my midnight anxieties when I sat
down to breakfast. It took some time to get our scattered party
together, and a suitable interpreter was not easily picked up, so that
it was nearer eleven than ten by the time we found a Russian speaking
both English and Mongol and set out for the _yamen_. But we need not
have let a little thing like that worry us. Promptness is neither
customary nor welcome in Mongolia; moreover, there are no two timepieces
in anything like agreement in all Urga, so that an hour or two one way
or the other can always be excused, in the unlikely event of any excuse
being expected, on the ground of incompatibility of clocks. What does an
hour mean, anyway, in a land where time is merely a vacuum? An American
who was just then flirting with the Mongolian Government for an
important concession made an appointment with the minister of foreign
affairs for ten one morning, and was there on the dot. When he had
waited an hour and a half he beckoned to a sub-official and asked
whether the minister would be unable to see him that morning, in which
case he had other matters requiring his attention.

“Oh, yes,” replied the functionary, “he will see you; but it is not yet
ten o’clock.”

However, to come back to our own affairs; we made our way across the
stony, dusty, wind-howling open space between the business and the
official sections of the holy city in time to avoid any risk of being
charged with tardiness. The _yamen_ of justice was a two-story frame
building mainly in European style, built by the Chinese when they held
the suzerainty over Outer Mongolia, as the flaring roofs, sky-blue
façade, dragon-decorated brick screen against evil spirits, palings of
crossed sticks to the number of outriders due the prince who once
occupied it, and the like, told us without any necessity of inquiring.
Two typical Mongol soldiers, resembling Oriental rag dolls that had lain
out in the garden for weeks and then been lost for a few days in the
coal-bin, lumbered to their booted feet from a fantastic sentry-box in
order, as is the habit of their class nowadays, to impress us with their
equality and authority by gratuitously delaying us for a few moments,
and at last we reached our destination. This was one of the barn-like
rooms of the unpretentious building. Near the door rose to the ceiling a
big cylindrical Russian brick stove. Around the other three sides of the
room ran a raised platform, knee-high and a man’s height in breadth. The
reed matting and cushions covering it recalled Japan, but there was
nothing Japanese in the way in which the dozen officials stepped upon it
from the unswept floor in their heavy boots, all more or less covered
with the filth of the streets, and calmly tramped about it or squatted
on their haunches. All these functionaries were dressed in Mongol
fashion; that is, in long robes of dull red, blue, green, purple,
violet, or similar conspicuous color, half obliterated with grease and
dirt, topped off with some one of their many fantastic national
head-dresses. The latter were never removed, nor were we foreigners
expected to take off our hats. In fact there seem to be no social
politenesses among this rude nomad people. They neither shake hands,
unless they are meeting or aping foreigners, nor bow, like the Chinese,
nor use any other gestures of greeting or parting; they stalk into
foreigners’ houses in hats and boots; their whole conduct is as if none
of the little courtesies and formalities of more highly civilized
communities had ever occurred to them, which is probably the case.

The place had electric lights, and from one of the walls hung an ancient
European type of telephone, which was frequently jangling or enduring
the shrieks of one or another bureaucrat, but which never seemed to
bring or transmit any information. Most of the functionaries, big sturdy
men who would have looked more at home herding cattle on the plains,
squatted near little tables or desks, a foot high, some smoking long
pipes with tiny bowls and much silver decoration, others rocking idly
back and forth, while their greasy pigtails, swaying to and fro,
increased the soiled line they had already drawn down the backs of their
gowns. A few were working; that is, writing in their national script, so
different from Chinese, on long strips of cheap tissue-paper folded
lengthwise and opening like an accordion. Their pens were the
camel’s-hair brushes common to the Far East, however, of which each man
carried two in a silver scabbard hanging from his girdle; their ink was
taken from a little flat stone on which they rubbed their pens sidewise,
and their writing-desks were thin squares of board held on their left
hands. A big dinner-bell in a corner of the room served to call
attendants, or to summon prisoners for the next case to be tried. For
justice was being dispensed, leisurely but steadily, all the time we
were there. In the center of the raised platform, opposite the door and
in the chief place of honor, squatted an imposing man who might easily
have been taken for an unusually burly Chinaman, in his darker gown, his
mandarin cap with a colored button, his oily cue, and his rimless
ear-piece glasses. He was fat, and he was fully aware of his own
importance in the Mongolian scheme of things. From time to time a group
of prisoners was brought in by one of the coal-bin soldiers, always
armed with a fixed bayonet. The accused, all ragged, shivering, and
visibly hungry, looking as if they had been living for weeks in an
underground dungeon and had been periodically beaten half to death, were
forced to kneel on the bare floor and bow their heads down to it several
times as an obeisance to the haughty judge. If they failed to do so
promptly, they were prodded or thumped to their knees by the soldier.
The trial consisted merely of the judge’s questioning the cringing
prisoner, during which his honor smoked, stretched himself, and spat
copiously on the floor in front of the kneeling culprits. When he was
done, he growled out something which may or may not have been a
sentence, and the prisoners were led away again. Of the score or more
tried while we were there none was released.

Meanwhile other business, such as our own, went serenely on along the
side platforms. Some of the scribes or officials wrote on their little
boards, some asked questions of an official nature, more chatted and
smoked as freely as if they were in a café. Curious individuals dropped
in now and then. There was, for instance, a little dried-up Jew with
long straggly red whiskers, and a furtive look in his eyes, as if he had
been the last survivor of a dozen pogroms. For more than an hour he sat
inconspicuously in a corner near the door, holding his aged slouch-hat
in his hands, ignored by the contemptuous Mongols, lacking the courage
to address them on whatever matter had brought him.

Our own case moved as we would have had it, except in speed. When
testimony must be written down in Mongol script with a camel’s-hair
brush on the poorest of paper and the least convenient of desks by an
official whose chief code of conduct is never to let any one or anything
hurry him under any circumstances, even a simple affair is not quickly
disposed of. There was a long argument as to how to turn our
extraordinary names into the native hieroglyphics; there were other
lengthy discussions during which I found ample time to study not only
the scene within the room but the big felt tent of fanciful decoration
with a mat-cloth door, in which the minister of justice lived out in the
back yard, a true Mongol nomad still, like many of his highly placed
fellows. The whole case should really have collapsed like a house of
cards, for another telegram had arrived which not merely reduced the
crime from the killing of a Mongol man to slightly wounding a Mongol boy
in the wrist, but showed that, by the records of our stopping-places, we
were at least a day’s travel away at the time; furthermore, the deed had
been done at short range with a revolver—on that point the information
was insistent—and the most cursory examination of our pistols, in the
hands of the secret service department, would have demonstrated that
they had not been fired on the way. In fact, it looked rather doubtful
whether even the slight crime alleged had been committed; perhaps it was
some boyish tale made up to gain sympathy for a scratched wrist.
Officially “the incident was closed” almost before we reached the
_yamen_; but that did not hinder us from being three hours there, nor
did it make it possible to have the thing written up in its legal form
and “deposited in the archives” forty-eight hours later, when the
clearing of our reputations was essential to the making of certain other
requests with which we were forced to trouble the authorities.




                               CHAPTER IX
                               HOLY URGA


The holy city of Urga squats out on what would be an ordinary Mongolian
plain were it not for the rows of hills or low mountains which roll up
on either side of it. The landscape is the same yellow-brown, smooth as
the fur of the fox, the city, its wide shallow valley, and the rolling
hills on the right hand are as utterly devoid of trees or even a
suggestion of brush, as the Gobi. Only along the edge, and covering the
upper portion, of the range to the west and south, sacred to the “Living
Buddha” whose two palace compounds sit at the foot of it, is there any
vegetation except the thin brown grass of mountain heights. The soil
does not welcome it, for one thing. Even the forests capping the long
low sacred mountain, though planted centuries ago and strictly
protected, while dense enough, have attained little more than scrub
growth. About forty-five hundred feet above the sea and no great
distance from the Siberian border, Urga is no tropical haven. They tell
me that in summer its middays are sometimes uncomfortably hot; but
though it was only the middle of September when we arrived, all the
clothing we had brought with us was none too much to shut out the
penetrating mountain cold. Five days before, Peking had been sweltering;
here the entire population wore heavy quilted garments, from which
hardly a bare foot peered among the most poverty-stricken even on the
days when a brilliant sun in a glass-clear sky made delightful autumn
weather; before the month ended, howling gales of hail and snow swept
across the city and blotted out the surrounding hills, to leave them
covered with white as far as the eye could see.

The city is built in several towns or sections of distinctly different
characters, separated by bare, stony, wind-swept spaces. Besides the old
Chinese merchant town back up the valley, and the straggling buildings
which partly flank the nature-laid road to it, there is the official
town of _yamens_ and the like, with two great temple compounds closely
allied to it, then the now main business and residential section where
virtually all non-Mongols live, and farther on, a little higher up the
slope of the hills, a whole city completely given up to lamas, with the
great sanctuary of Ganden, only high building in Urga, bulking far above
it. Then, across the flat valley and several little streams, more than a
mile away against the background of the sacred mountain, is the
dwelling-place of Bogda-Han, the “Living Buddha,” flanked at some
distance by his summer palace on one side and on the other by clusters
of buildings housing the things and the men who serve him. Lastly there
are scores of _yourts_, the low round felt tents of Mongolia, scattered
at random outside the permanent city, particularly to the north, the
homes of true nomads who will not be without the comforts of their
portable houses even though they live in the holy national capital.

For that matter, many of the dwellers in the city itself still cling to
the customs and architecture of the plains from which they came. Mongol
princes and saints, of whom there is a generous number in Urga, cabinet
ministers and judges, may have a rather Russian type of frame house
within their compounds, but the chances are that they do their actual
living in their felt tent beside it. The _yourts_ are said to be
uncomfortably warm in summer, whence the tendency of those who are
wealthy by Mongol standards to copy European dwellings; but when the
first early frosts come they like the low crowded tent, with its intense
dung-fire heat, its sense of coziness, even the smell of the sifting
smoke of their pungent fuel, that has come down to them from their hardy
nomadic forefathers. The story is told of some high-placed Mongol to
whom fell a fine big room in one of the government buildings of the
expelled Chinese, who complained that it was as bad as living outdoors
and demanded either that another small low room be built for him within
it or that he be allowed to conduct his official business in his tent.

Urga is as wholly made up of walled compounds as any Chinese city; but
here the walls, instead of being of stone or baked mud, are of upright
pine logs, bark and all, some ten feet high and set so tightly together
that only here and there can one peer through a crack. Between these
frowning palisades, broken for block after block only by identical gates
which are a cross between a wooden arch and a Japanese _torii_ with
three uncurved crosspieces, and painted a dull red, run, not streets,
but haphazard passageways deep in dust, mud, or mere stony soil,
according as nature left them—grim defenseless lanes full of the offal
of man and beast, of putrid carcasses and gnawed bones, and always
overrun with groups of those surly, treacherous big black wild dogs of
Urga, ready the instant they feel they have mustered sufficient force to
pounce upon and drag down the passer-by. Inside, the compounds are bare
and unswept yards, for filth means nothing to the Mongol, and the
planting of a flower or a shrub is far beyond his stage of civilization.
A house or two, even three, perhaps as many felt tents, a tethered
horse, a heap of dried dung fuel, and the inventory is complete. A small
stream, its banks heaped high with filth and garbage, lined with
foraging dogs and squatting Mongols, crossed by half a dozen precarious
bridges culminating in the red one sacred to the “Living Buddha,” which
is barred against every-day traffic, meanders disconsolately through the
gloomy town. For there is a gloominess, an ominousness about Urga which
even the great gleaming gold superstructures of its many temples and
shrines, so brilliant as to cow the eye on days of clear sunshine, do
not dispel.

A few streets of the central town, to which commerce is confined, are
flanked by shops of a hybrid Chinese-Russian character, the great
majority of which are inwardly establishments quite like those of China,
though often scanty of goods and with a discouraged air in these days of
oppressive rule. Then there are numerous open-air markets more worth
visiting for their picturesqueness than for their wares. In one wide
dusty space Mongolian ponies are put through their paces for prospective
purchasers; camels or oxen may be had near-by on certain days; then,
there are several blocks lined with displays of furs, mainly of sheep
and goats in this season, but now and then offering wild pelts at
reasonable figures. Shop after shop is filled from floor to low shack
roof with the gaudy boots worn indiscriminately by all Mongols; little
portable booths or stands overflowing with every manner of silly and
useful trinket, chaotic collections of second-hand hardware spread on
the ground, more or less itinerant purveyors of used garments and of the
heavy silver ornaments that go with Mongol dress, each strive in their
turn to attract and detain the stroller. Almost all these merchants,
from horse-dealers to hawkers of lama rosaries and alleged photographs
of the “Living Buddha,” are Chinese; the Mongol is frankly a nomadic
herdsman and scorns any other occupation. Even in the purulent meat and
vegetable market stretching along the carrion-lined stream just outside
our window there were but few native venders. The more lowly members of
the tribe might consent to slash up and distribute the still bleeding
carcasses of cattle and sheep which Urga consumes in surprising daily
quantities; even out on the plains that is a necessary and respectable
task. But as the Mongol considers it unholy to cultivate the ground, the
huge carrots, the turnips larger than cocoanuts, the squashes, potatoes,
cabbage, lettuce, _kaoliang_, millet, and corn-meal all came from the
truck-gardens of Chinese in inconspicuous hollows about the city and
were sold only by them. Millet and _kaoliang_ and rock-salt were about
the only non-flesh wares appealing to the natives, anyway, for boiled
meat, each mouthful slashed off before the lips with a sheath-knife, as
among the _gauchos_ of South America, is almost an exclusive diet with
them the year round.

There is the atmosphere of a frontier town about Urga, for all its age
and holiness and costly religious structures. Perhaps it is the great
prevalence of mounted people as much as the rough-and-ready style of its
architecture and streets which gives this feeling. The poor, and most of
the despised foreigners, may or must go on foot, but the true Mongol,
male or female, young or old, layman or lama, is by nature a horseman.
Even the women, in their incredibly heavy ornaments and cumbersome
garments, sit the tight little wooden saddles covered with red cloth as
if they were part of the jogging animal beneath them. Children ride as
easily and as soon as they can walk. Horsemen are so numerous and so
fundamental in the Mongol scheme of things that the pedestrian has only
secondary rights in the soft-footed streets of Urga. It is not so much
his natural rudeness, nor even his inbred scorn for the horseless, which
makes the Mongol so apt to ride down the walker unless the latter
sidesteps. Probably it has never occurred to him, any more than to his
horse, that all other movable beings should not necessarily always make
way for him.

Besides the omnipresent Mongol pony there are strings of haughty camels
from, or off again to, the desert; there are oxen and their crudest of
two-wheeled carts, and now and again a yak, or a cross between this and
the native cattle, identified mainly by its thick bushy tail. It is not
only this quaint long-haired animal from the roof of Asia which reminds
one of the close relationship between Mongolia and its distant neighbor,
Tibet. The lengthwise Tibetan script stands beside the upright Mongolian
on the façade of more than one building and on many a monument; not a
few of the friendly-looking, darker-tinted natives of the lofty land
behind the Himalayas, recognizable also by their different garb, the
right arm and shoulder protruding from the cloak, may be met in the
market-places; when the visitor begins to poke his nose into religious
matters he finds that Tibet is much closer to him than he suspected.

Though there are sights of an inanimate nature in Urga that are well
worth seeing, it is especially the unique and striking costumes of her
people which cause bitter resentment for the confiscation of a camera.
The Mongols are as fond of gaudy colors as the Andean Indians, though
somewhat less given to barbaric combinations of them. Of a score of
laymen often no two wear robes of the same hue; red, purple, blue,
green, and all the combinations and gradations between them may be seen
in any gathering outside religious circles. Men who pride themselves on
their liberality toward the outside world show a fondness for ugly
slouch-hats of a cheap quality that quickly fades to a nondescript hue.
But these are so few as to be conspicuous among their orthodox fellows,
who display a variety in head-dress which I have not the energy to
attempt to describe. Suffice it to say that these are all striking, both
in color and form, and that the overwhelming favorite seems to be the
pagoda-shaped thing with a ball, generally of colored glass, on top, and
side-wings of fur. This is common to both laymen and lamas and is said
to have been originally copied from a sacred peak of central Asia.

But it would be unchivalrous to expect the men, even of an Oriental race
in which the women form the bottom layer of society, to outdo the other
sex in effective decoration of the cranium. Until I came to Mongolia I
had been laboring under the delusion that in my various wanderings about
the globe I had already run across the final word in woman’s head-dress.
I humbly apologize, and hereby bestow the leather medal upon the ladies
of Urga, without the least fear of ever again having to modify my
decision. In intricacy, ugliness, fearsomeness, unportability,
wastefulness, absurdity, not to say pure idiocy, their contraption
surely outdistances all competitors, at least in our own little solar
system.

It starts, so I have been assured by those of wider experience and
reputation for veracity, often at virtual baldness, which under the
circumstances, or under such a head-dress, is not surprising. Over this
goes a skull-cap of silver in elaborate designs, weighing, if the eye be
permitted to judge what the fingers may not touch, several pounds. I am
no ladies’ _coiffeur_, and I may be getting the cart before the horse,
but it is my strong impression that the hair comes next, most of it the
hair of some one else, naturally, or at least hair which has ceased to
derive its direct nourishment from its wearer. In color and texture,
too, it has a way of recalling the tail of a horse, though this may be
mere coincidence. First of all the hair forms a wig; then it flares out
and is wound, in single strands that give it a cloth-like texture, round
and round two horns that are thin and flat but wider and longer than
those of the water-buffalo, which the lady with these appendages
protruding well beyond her shoulders considerably resembles. Across the
horns, front and back, at close intervals, run inch-wide bars of
silver—replaced by wood or other substitutes in poverty-stricken
cases—while from the ends, perhaps as a concession to the timid
spectator who cannot rid himself of the fear of being gored, are
suspended braids or cords reaching to the waist. A lady of reasonable
tastes might conclude that this is enough, but there are innumerable
opportunities for adding other silver and colored decorations, and
naturally one needs a hat over one’s hair, so that milady of Urga piles
on top, at the jaunty angle of a first-year sailor, one of the
fur-sided, pagoda-shaped helmets favored by the men, thereby crowning
herself in a manner befitting the rest of her costume. Let not the hasty
reader get the impression that this ponderous and deeply cogitated
head-dress is confined to the consorts of princes and saints, nor
relegated to festive occasions and popular hours. The old woman who sold
half-decayed fruit opposite our window wore the whole contraption, and
all available evidence goes to show that it is as seldom removed as is
the fly-trap hat of the Korean male. Indeed, it would be impossible to
reconcile daily hair-dressing with the early hours at which many a fully
clad woman appears. One easily surmises that this unbelievable millinery
was copied from the cattle that have been the Mongols’ constant and
chief companions for many centuries; but why hang the horns on the
woman? Is it to keep before the mind that she, too, is a dangerous
creature, or is it a means of training her in patience and the
uncomplaining endurance of lifelong impediments, like the crippled feet
of the women of China?

In ordinary circles the rest of the female costume of Mongolia would
attract attention, but under the national head-dress it is almost
inconspicuous. It includes big puffed sleeves, for instance, not unlike
those of the Western world a generation ago, but filled with something
that makes them hard and solid, and lifts the puffs some six inches
above the shoulders. Unseemly exposure of the person is not a Mongol
fault. Though personal habits of an indescribable nature are constantly
in evidence among both sexes and all classes, there is never anything
even remotely reminiscent of the freedom of a bathing-beach in more
civilized lands. The woman’s thick, quilted, colorful jacket-gown covers
her from tonsils to instep; her long sleeves serve her, Chinese fashion,
as gloves; though it is known that she wears heavy lumber-jack trousers
quite like those of her husband, even her trim ankles, if she has them,
are never in evidence, for she thrusts her feet into the same mammoth
boots which are universal beneath all ages, ranks, callings, and degrees
of sanctity.

The Mongol boot, as I may have said before, is knee-high, of soft
leather, usually red and most elaborately decorated, the toe turned up
like the prow of Cleopatra’s barge, and it is made much too large for
the foot, in order that many layers of thick socks may be worn in wintry
weather. The extraordinarily slow pace of life in Urga is partly due,
beyond a doubt, to the necessity of stalking about like a hobbled
prisoner in such boots; but then, they were never made for walking,
which is not a natural Mongol means of locomotion. The favorite one is
the single-foot pony, with a kind of Indian rawhide reins, stirrups so
short that the rider seems to be kneeling, and a tight little red
saddle. It is an old joke in Urga that a Mongol would make an excellent
cook—if he could ride about the kitchen on horseback. As the women as
well as the men ride astride, with the easy abandon of born cowboys, it
is perhaps as well that most of them cling to their marvelous
head-dress, for without it there is little to distinguish between the
sexes.


It is said that almost half the population of Urga are lamas. Certainly
there are thousands upon thousands of them, swarming everywhere, in the
market-town as well as in their own temple-topped sections, sometimes on
horseback, more often plodding through the slovenly streets in their
ponderous boots. Their round clipped heads, in contrast to the long cues
of laymen, are often bare in any weather. It is visually evident,
without asking questions, that they wear no trousers under their long
quilted robes, which are similar to those of the marriageable men, yet
easily distinguishable from them. Their gowns, originally saffron-yellow
or brick-red in color, are well suited to the mahogany tint which the
cold of high plateaus gives the Mongol cheeks; but they are so
invariably dulled by grease, filth, and rough desert living as to
suggest that this is considered the most holy and fitting state for
seekers after a pseudo-Nirvana. Cleanliness certainly has no relation
whatever to godliness in this unedifying religion of creaking
prayer-wheels and barbaric hubbub; laity and lamas alike seem frankly to
scorn it. Now and again one saw a prince who had just donned his winter
garments, or a group of high lamas rode by in gleamingly new saffron or
red robes, the yellow streamers from their high hats trailing behind
them, clad in the most spotless of beautiful silks. But there is
evidently something unmanly about such a condition, for those even of
the highest class seem to make haste to reduce themselves to the common
dirty drab, as some of our youths “baptize” a new pair of shoes. From
high to low the Mongols are an unlaundered people, like so many dwellers
in semi-desert lands, apparently never subjecting their clothing to any
cleansing process—so filthy in fact that even the Chinese call them
dirty!

Yet these big brawny Mongols of the Gobi, beside whom the Chinese look
delicate and harmless, bring history home to the beholder in a striking
fashion. It was easy to imagine these fearless nomad horsemen banding
together under a Jenghiz Khan and sweeping down upon the rich but weaker
people to the southward; once in Mongolia, that breeding-ground for many
centuries of new virility for the human race, as it were, it was no
longer hard to understand why the timorous but diligent Chinese should
have spent such incredible toil to fling a wall across their whole
northern frontier, in the vain hope of shutting themselves off from
these dreaded barbarians, scorning civilization but ever ready to loot
it of its fruits. Now and again I met a prince—not a pampered weakling
of a run-down stock, like so many who bear that title in the West, but
big powerful fellows who could ride their horses day after day like
centaurs, sleep out on the open plain, and master their great herds with
the pole-and-noose lasso as easily as any of their herdsmen
subjects—handsome Mongol princes with a truly regal poise and dignity,
for all the countless grease-spots on their silken gowns, whom one could
readily picture in the rôle of another Jenghiz Khan.

Speaking of those halcyon days of the Mongols seven centuries ago, there
seems to be but little differentiation in the minds of historians
between them and the Tartars; but in Mongolia to-day there is a wide
gulf between these two peoples. What is known as a Tartar in Urga at
least, where a few score of them dwell, is no longer a warrior but has
degenerated into a tradesman, a close bargainer wearing mainly European
garb, with a little velvet cap always on his head, topped off by one of
fur when he sallies forth into the street. He is a Mohammedan, too, and
the Mongol certainly is not. Once he seems to have been at home in
central Mongolia; now he lives far to the West, scattered through the
regions about Bokhara, Kashgar, and Samarkand. In much greater numbers
and influence in Urga to-day are two other semi-Europeanized
peoples,—the surly Kalmucks from western Mongolia and Sungaria, and the
Buriats, Mongol by race but grown half Russian during generations under
the rule of the czars in an annexed province, and by long intermixture
with their more Caucasian fellow-subjects.

But though Urga so nearly coincides with that Karakoram which was still
the capital of Jenghiz Khan when his vast conquests ended, one feels
even there that the power of the Mongol is broken, that with his
debauching idolatry and his all but universal taint with one of the most
abhorred of diseases, he will never again have the initiative and the
energy to band together into a menace to more advanced civilizations. He
will do surprisingly well, in fact, if he succeeds in his new attempt to
govern himself. The traveler cannot but be struck by the astonishing
scarcity of children in Mongolia, especially if he has just come from
Japan and China, until he learns that fully a third of the population of
the country as a whole are lamas, and notes the prevalence of missing
noses among both sexes and all classes in the streets of Urga. The most
educated Mongol, in our Western sense, with whom I came in contact
declared that within a century his race will completely have
disappeared. While there is probably undue pessimism in so flat a
statement, there are many signs that the people which once subjugated
nearly all Asia and stopped only at the Danube in Europe is to-day on
the same swift downward path as the American Indian they in so many ways
resemble.


As befits a holy city, Urga is overrun with temples, shrines,
monasteries, and all the myriad paraphernalia of lamaism, that
degenerate, repulsive, yet picturesque offshoot of Buddhism, centered in
Tibet but clinging with a tenacious hold to all Mongolia. Take away
everything concerned with her religion, and the Mongol capital would
shrink to a mere filthy village. Most conspicuous of its structures is
the shrine or temple of Ganden, towering not only above the lama town
about it but over the whole city. A stony and sandy hollow separates
this monasterial section from the secular one, but when one has climbed
the further slope of this he finds himself wandering through just such
another maze of narrow, dunghill streets shut in by high wooden
palisades. Here it will be doubly wise to carry a heavy stick, for not
only are the savage black dogs that everywhere dot the landscape in and
about Urga particularly numerous and ravenous in this log-built
labyrinth, but they are accustomed to seeing only lamas in their dirty
robes, and foreign garb quickly attracts their unwelcome attention. At
least in theory there are no women in lama-town, and as lamaism is not a
religion calling for congregations, even native laymen are conspicuous
in this section by their absence.

As the stroller comes out upon an open space on the summit of the low,
broad hillock, he finds before him not only the great central edifice of
Ganden, built in Tibetan fashion of a square stone wall many feet thick,
with deep window-embrasures of fortress-like size, topped by three
overhanging stories in wood, but also many lower yet no less ornate
buildings flanking and surrounding it. From these, in all likelihood,
proceed barbarous sounds of drum-beating, the hammering of big brass
disks, a cabalistic chanting, and yet more awe-inspiring noises the
source of which he cannot identify. Huge cylinders on the high corners
of Ganden, many of its absurd outer ornaments, and much of the
superstructure of the lower buildings are covered with gold, upon which
the cloudless sun gleams richly. If it is “school” or service time, only
a score or so of ragged, besmeared beggars, most or all of them lamas,
will be in sight, scattered along the outer walls or in the gateways of
the religious structures. One of the largest of these is built like a
mammoth Mongol tent, with a saucer-shaped roof, and inside, if a lone
Caucasian wanderer has the courage to march through the gate and step
into the open doorway in the face of hundreds of scowling bullies in
once-red robes—for the “orthodox” yellow of more genuine Buddhism is
much more rare in Urga—he will behold a veritable sea of lamas, squatted
back to back on wide low wooden benches more or less covered with soiled
cushions, in rows so close together that a cat could scarcely squirm
between them, and stretching so far away in every direction that one
must stoop low to see beneath the idolatrous junk suspended from the low
rafters, even as far as the dais in the center of the building. Here
sits what I suppose we would call an abbot, leading the services or
instructing the gathering in the fine points of lamaism. For this is a
kind of seminary, a lama university to which sturdy red-robed males come
from all over Mongolia and beyond, to perfect themselves in the
intricate hocus-pocus of their faith, in which a bit of Buddhism is
swamped by the grossest forms of demonology and ridiculous
superstitions. The students are of no fixed age; burly men in the
forties and sensual-faced old fellows who are soon to feed the dogs are
almost as numerous as impudent youths already soiled and begrimed in
true lama fashion. For hours at a time this huge gathering rocks back
and forth on its haunches, intoning supplications under the lead of the
abbot, sometimes chanting its litanies to the accompaniment of a “music”
so barbaric as to send shivers up the unaccustomed spine, meanwhile
moving the hands in distorted gestures prescribed by the ritual. Their
devotions consist mainly of the endless repetition of the same brief
prayers, mumbled over and over until the monotony promises to drive the
listening stranger to sleep or to distraction. The notion is that this
never ceasing iteration of the same scant theme will withdraw the minds
of the devotees from worldly things and fix their attention on that
nothingness which is the goal of the seeker after Nirvana; it needs but
a slight acquaintance with lamas, however, to show that the real effect
is to make them mere mumbling automatons, with minds as narrow and as
shallow as their monotonous invocations.

[Illustration:

  The upper town of Urga, entirely inhabited by lamas, has the temple of
    Ganden, containing a colossal standing Buddha, rising high above all
    else. It is in Tibetan style and much of its superstructure is
    covered with pure gold
]

[Illustration:

  Red lamas leaving the “school” in which hundreds of them squat tightly
    together all day long, droning through their litany. They are of all
    ages, equally filthy and heavily booted. Over the gateway of the
    typical Urga palisade is a text in Tibetan, and the cylinders at the
    upper corners are covered with gleaming gold
]

[Illustration:

  High-class lamas, in their brilliant red or yellow robes, great
    ribbons streaming from their strange hats, are constantly riding in
    and out of Urga. Note the bent-knee style of horsemanship
]

[Illustration:

  A high lama dignitary on his travels, free from the gaze of the
    curious, and escorted by mounted lamas of the middle class
]

From time to time the immense crowded gathering stops to eat and drink,
still squatted in their places, from bowls of tea and of some such grain
as millet, which are passed around among them. This is “holy food,” and
the young lower-class lamas who bring it growl protests if the stranger
comes too near them while they are carrying it. Then the intonations
begin again and go on hour after hour, as tediously as such things can
go only in the East, until at last “school” is dismissed and red lamas
pour forth through the door and gate like wine from a punctured
wine-skin, pausing a moment to take advantage of their first escape into
the open air in many hours, then stalking away in their heavy oversize
boots with that peculiar ball-and-chain gait of the walking Mongol.

Nowhere on earth probably, unless it be in Tibet, is so great a
proportion of the population exclusively engaged in the unproductive
nonsense of saving its souls. Every first son becomes a lama; if a boy
recovers from any serious illness, the parents usually take the vow that
he, too, shall don the red or yellow robe; there are many other reasons,
among them the dread of labor, fear of hunger, hope of more promiscuous
favors from the weaker sex, which add to the crowded ranks of lamas. No
census is available, but in Urga almost every other person one meets
displays the clipped head and collarless gown, while conservative
estimators reckon that fully two fifths of the population of all
Mongolia live, in the name of religion, on the exertions of the rest.
Nor is it possible to conceive of a priesthood—to use the word
loosely—more deeply sunk in degradation. Not merely do the lamas live in
filth and sloth, engaged only in the pursuit of their own salvation, in
no way serving their fellow-men, but they are notorious libertines,
moralless panderers, in many cases beggars of the lowest type. The first
lamas I ever saw were a pair who accosted us at a halt during our climb
out of Kalgan, powerful fellows big and sturdy enough to have laughed at
the most arduous labor, yet who begged even the sweepings of our wayside
lunch and picked up the cigar-butt I tossed away. In Urga lamas
bedraggled to the _n_th degree squatted day after day on busy
street-corners telling their beads and monotoning a brief prayer
incessantly from dawn to dusk for a few stray coppers and scraps of
food.

However, there are lamas of high as well as of low degree—Jenghiz Khan
himself, you may recall, was one. Several of the ministers in the
Mongolian cabinet were lamas; some are princes as well, holding vast
tracts of land and hundreds of slave-like subjects; among a number who
called upon my departing host during my stay I recall a magnificent
specimen of manhood who came to buy for his own use all the best
furnishings of the house, and a strong-featured older man who brought a
thousand silver dollars to make good the debt of a scamp for whom he had
gone surety out of mere friendship. Such strict honesty is not customary
among the Mongols, though they have something like the Chinaman’s way of
keeping promises; hence there was not even the pressure of public
opinion, certainly no fear of legal action, to cause him to yield up for
no value received what was perhaps a considerable portion of his
fortune.

Some of the lower orders of lamas engage in worldly occupations, at
least intermittently, to keep the wolf from the door; and those who do
not live in monasteries may enter into a sort of left-handed marriage,
though their wives are always known as “girls.” The higher ranks are in
theory celibates, but no such rule actually cramps their personal
desires, and the “Living Buddha” himself has led anything but a life of
lonely bachelorhood. Among the rank and file of red-robed roughnecks
much the same standard of sexual morals seems to prevail as that reached
by the lecherous touts of our large cities. It is said to be almost the
general practice to reward a lama who has “cured” a young woman by means
of his incanted gibberish by granting him the temporary boon of her
affections, and foreigners have had experiences in Mongolia which
indicate about the same indifference to lack of privacy in the amorous
adventures of wearers of the red or yellow robe that prevails in some of
their other personal habits.

There are no real schools in Mongolia except these choral gatherings of
lamas. In them they learn to read and write, not Mongolian but Tibetan,
the Latin of lamaism. The laymen boys of better-class families get their
education, if at all, from private instructors, and in rare cases reach
universities over the Russian border. Women have, of course, no need for
other teaching than what their parents and husbands can give them,
though now and then a prince or a wealthy saint hires tutors for his
daughters.


However, to turn away from the retreating stream of lamas and push
onward, even an enumeration of the religious structures and trappings
about the great squat “university” would be wearisome. Most amusing or
imbecile of them all to the Westerner, according to his mood, are the
prayer-cylinders. Why these are more commonly called “prayer-wheels” is
a mystery, for they are invariably cylindrical in shape, varying in size
from the largest to the smallest sections of sewer-pipe. How many
hundreds of these there are, not only in lama-town but everywhere in
Urga, could be computed only by a man of energy and patience. Endless
rows of large ones, each covered by a kind of sanctified guard-house,
stretch along whole sides of the upper town; they line several of the
principal streets; there must be at least one, that could better serve
as outhouse, for every family in Urga. The small ones are as flies in
summer. Each of these upright wooden cylinders contains thousands of
prayers, all, if I am not misinformed, the repetition of the same
monotonous phrase, written in Tibetan characters on scraps of
tissue-paper,—_Om mani padme hun_, “The Jewel is in the Lotus,” whatever
that means. A kind of capstan furnishes half a dozen protruding bars by
which to turn the contrivance, and every turn is equivalent to saying as
many thousand prayers as the cylinder contains. Every pious passer-by
pauses to revolve one here and there; pilgrims, or residents who have
sallied forth especially for that purpose, turn them all, one after the
other, along the whole row or, as far as is physically possible,
throughout the whole town. Thus the creak of prayer-cylinders is seldom
silent, though they furnish a great market for axle-grease. Around the
lower massive stone walls of Ganden shrine something like a hundred
smaller cylinders are so arranged that by a simple twist of the wrist
all of them are turned at once, releasing literally millions of
prayers—a labor-saving device compared to which the proudest invention
of our industrial world is but clumsy and wasteful.

Unlike the disciples of the truer and more kindly Buddhism to the east
and west, the surly lamas of Urga resent visits by strangers to their
sanctuaries, and prevent them entirely to the more holy ones. But there
happened to be no higher official to forbid it when I stepped through
the deep stone door of towering Ganden into a cluttered and musty
interior, and the half-dozen young lamas of the garden variety who at
first moved toward me in a mass, with a manner almost as threatening as
might meet the intruder into a Mohammedan mosque, were softened by a
gesture which implied the eventual bestowal of a silver ruble. Closely
trailed by them I was permitted to make the circuit of the ground floor,
and study from feet to knees the colossal figure of a standing Buddha
which takes up almost all the space within Urga’s most lofty building.
Then they urged me toward the door, but as I refused to part with the
coveted coin for any such slight view they conferred together for some
time in hoarse whispers. Finally one was sent to the outer entrance to
make sure that none of the higher lamas was likely to drop in
unexpectedly, and while two clambered before and three behind me I
climbed a steep crude wooden stairway to the second story. This brought
me about to the hips of the statue. In the semi-darkness of the
building, filled to overflowing with hundreds of small Buddhas, with
silk banners and streamers in many colors, with strings of paper
prayers, with tawdry freaks of an unclean imagination and all the drab
and indecent mummeries of a religion of fear, it was impossible to make
out more than that the figure was of slight artistic merit, and that it
was completely covered with what had every appearance of being real gold
of considerable thickness. A third story on a level with its chest had
low doorways at the four corners which opened upon a gallery overhung by
one of the massive roofs and gave a far-reaching view of all Urga and
its vicinity. Here one might have touched the massive ornamental
lanterns, covered with gold, as were parts of the cornices and many of
the smaller decorations. Still another half-perpendicular, makeshift
stairway led to a higher gallery, carpeted with the droppings of birds
and admitting light enough to show that the contents of the building
were as soiled and unlaundered as the gowns of my suspicious and worried
companions. This was at the level of the Buddha’s face, which resembled
nothing so much as a very young “flapper” given to overindulgence in
rouge, almost a babyish face, with bright crimson lips a yard long and
an immature, affectionate expression that did not in the least befit a
being presiding over the sullen and repulsive religion of Mongolia. Two
sets of arms, one raised and the other extended in a familiar Buddhist
fashion, could be made out in the gloom. Of the weight of actual gold
covering the figure from sandals to coiled-snake coiffure there was no
means of judging, but I would have been prompt to accept it in lieu of
any income I could acquire in the course of a natural lifetime. One of
the lamas wished to know whether we had anything in the outside world
from which I came comparable to their four-story Buddha. Having in mind
only ecclesiastical constructions, I could think of nothing that might
be mentioned as a rival; but I might have told them of a statue on an
island in the harbor of our principal city which just about equals this
one in stature, without bringing in the fact that it is of tarnished
bronze instead of gleaming gold.

It is easier to believe the tales of the old Spanish _conquistadores_
after seeing Urga. If the capital of the Inca empire had half as many
“golden roofs and cornices scintillating in the sunshine,” it would have
been enough to arouse the cupidity of more saintly men than the
followers of Pizarro. Gaze across the holy city of Mongolia in almost
any direction, and a golden superstructure is almost certain to strike
the eye. The lower story is in every case made of materials less
tempting to the light-fingered, and palisades shut them in. But what
burglar would not give all the rest of his earthly chances for one short
half-hour of feverish, unmolested activity at any of those glittering
second stories? That of the holy of holies in the monasterial section to
the east of the official _yamens_, in particular, is of an elaborate
massiveness which suggests some unlimited source of the precious yellow
metal, and when the unclouded sun shines full upon it the eye can
literally not endure the sight. Gold, filth, and superstition—after we
have seen Urga even the least bigoted of us can understand more fully,
if not completely condone, the high-handedness of a Cortez in
overthrowing the heathen idols and burning the unholy temples of
conquered “Gentiles.”

Along the sloping brown hillside just behind lama-town stands a row of
whitewashed brick dagobas, the tombs of saints so holy that their bodies
were not disposed of in the customary Mongol fashion. On the ledges of
these, as on any projecting place inside the prayer-cylinder sheds, and
indeed anywhere on holy edifices where there is room for them and it is
permitted, worshipers have laid heaps of loose stones, each representing
some appeal to supposedly supernatural forces. Of many another strange
device in and about the mammoth temple compounds, there are the
prostrating-boards, slightly inclined planks on short legs for the use
of the pious during their extraordinary genuflexions before venerated
shrines. With that indifference to soiling themselves for which the
Mongols are conspicuous, however, the bare ground suffices most
worshipers, and the boards do no great amount of service. The orthodox
prostration so closely resembles one of the movements in great favor
among our gymnasium instructors that the sight of a group of devotees,
women fully as often as men, repeating it time after time in their
ponderous boots and heavy garments threatens to convulse the American,
at least, with laughter. Though there is no unison among the worshipers,
each one performs the ceremony with a fixed rhythm which could not be
more exact if a maltreated piano were pounding out the periods, so that
the effect is of individual perfection of movement but utter inability
to synchronize the group. The worshiper first stands at attention with
his face to the shrine, as nearly like a soldier as “the conformation of
the body”—not to mention the abundance of clothing—“will permit,”
murmurs a prayer several times over, then bows his trunk to the
horizontal, places his hands on the ground, straightens his legs to the
rear, and lowers himself to the prostrate, even his nose touching the
earth. There he remains a moment, then, flexing his arms until his rigid
body rests on hands and toes, he regains the original position by
performing the same movements in reverse order, repeating the exercise
as long as piety, the weight of his sins, or his dread of evil spirits
suggests. I know from experience that it is a genuine exercise even in
gymnasium garb; what it is in full Mongol attire, sometimes including
even the feminine head-dress, any vivid imagination can picture. No
wonder the Mongols are big and strong; and what call is there for our
famous gymnastico-religious organization ever to establish one of its
Oriental branches in Urga? It may be just as well, perhaps, for us
dilettante gymnasts of the West never to challenge a red-robed lama to
bodily combat; for I have seen more than one of them make a complete
circuit of some holy section of the city performing this prostration at
every other step forward, leaving off at the point where night overtook
them, and returning to start there again at dawn.


Except in Lhasa, and perhaps Rome, the worshiper in Urga has an
advantage seldom to be found on this earth; he may perform his pious
antics, not merely before silent shrines and motionless statues, but
before a living god in flesh and blood. It is a pleasant tramp for any
one with unatrophied legs across the valley to the dwelling-place of the
“Living Buddha.” A few small streams block his way, unless he can hit
upon the stepping-stone fords of the horseless lower classes. But if he
is a Westerner, one of the mounted lamas who are constantly jogging back
and forth between the palace and the city may, out of mere curiosity to
see him at close range, or because all the native benevolence of the
nomad herdsman has not yet been steeped out of him by superstition and
the misbehavior of other outlanders, carry him across on his crupper.
Or, if the stroller is not in a mood for petty adventures, he may take
the causeway. This is a road wide as a Western boulevard and perhaps
half a mile long, raised on wooden trestles which carry it across the
slightly lower part of the valley; but it runs, not from the section
where foreigners lodge and carry on such business as is possible under
present conditions, but, being designed merely for the use of the
“Living Buddha” and his courtiers, it connects his palaces with those of
his late sainted brother, and with the shrine topped by that most
coveted golden superstructure to which he sometimes comes to be
worshiped. Apparently there is nothing sacred about this roadway,
however, for any one may use it, and a gang of Chinese was engaged in
replacing the logs covered with earth—which spells bridge to the
Oriental—of a section that had collapsed. For that matter, it is Chinese
workmen who repair, as they probably originally built, the fantastic
gates and the flaring tile roofs even within the sacred palace precinct,
but for which concession by his holiness and the jealous preservers of
his sanctity nothing probably would ever get mended.

The low chaos of roofs within his principal compound, green, yellow,
blue, golden, a jumble of Chinese, Tibetan, Russian and hybrid
architecture, stands out against the little lines of trees along the
foot of the sacred mountains,—evergreen, white birch, and other species,
now red or yellow, like the omnipresent lamas, with early autumn. A few
guard-houses with a ragged armed Mongol or two lounging before them
surround the place, but these picturesque sentinels do not interfere
with the movements even of foreigners so long as they do not attempt to
enter the sacred precincts. On special occasions non-Mongols have been
permitted to pass the gates, but very, very few have ever entered the
presence or even the actual dwelling of the “Living Buddha” himself, to
whom even the highest of Mongols do not have free access. The elaborate
gates have the same demon guards, the same isolated wall as a screen
against evil spirits, and all the rest of the flummery common to such
structures in China and Korea. Some of the buildings within the
compound, however, might have been taken bodily from some cheap
European, or at least Russian, town, while the confusion of the whole
scheme of structures would not awaken delight in the heart of any real
architect.

The “summer palace” of the human deity, a furlong away, being more
fully Tibetan, is less unpleasing to the eye. At about the same
distance from the main palace in the opposite direction is almost a
town of mainly modern buildings, housing the non-religious belongings
and the servants of the Mongol god. His stables contain many horses;
his garages have automobiles of a dozen different makes, European as
well as American, not to mention the usual proportion of Fords; a
Delco system lights his establishment; and most modern inventions are
represented in one form or another. The “Living Buddha” buys every new
contrivance the West has to offer, merely as playthings, in a vain
attempt to make a noticeable inroad in a burdensome income. A foreign
business man of Urga who has furnished much of it assured me that he
purchases on the average ten thousand dollars “Mex” worth of assorted
junk a day, things of every conceivable kind, which are petulantly
tossed aside when the owner and his swarms of satellites tire of them.
Many of the motor-cars rust away unused, though this modern god does
all his traveling to and from his various thrones by automobile, and
his chauffeur, a khaki-and-legging-clad Buriat, may frequently be seen
speeding about town on the only motor-cycle in Urga.

In striking contrast to this modernity of his surroundings is the
attitude of the Mongols toward their living god. It is something which
we of the West can scarcely conceive, and which probably has no
precedent among even the most pietistic creeds of the Occident. Second
only to the Dalai-Lama of Lhasa in the hierarchy of lamaism, Bogda-Han,
to give him one of the many titles by which he is known among Mongols,
is worshiped by millions throughout a vast space of central Asia. The
attribution of deity with which they invest him is due to the belief
that he is a reincarnation of the original Buddha. When a “Living
Buddha” dies—of which more anon—the high council of lamaism, by the
consultation of certain sacred books and a deal of hocus-pocus which
saner mortals would not have the interest to follow, determine where the
body into which his soul has been reborn will be found. At first blush
it would seem that this must be a new-born babe; but perhaps there is no
nursery in the sacred palace, or no lamas of sufficient experience in
that line to take charge of a puling infant. Therefore, by something
corresponding to poetic license, the signs point to a boy of about nine
years of age, who will be found, say, on such a corner of such streets
in this or that city, doing so and so at a specified hour. A cavalcade
of high lamas travel to the place indicated, which is more likely to be
in Tibet than in Mongolia, capture the new and unsuspecting Buddha, and
carry him off to a life of deification. It is commonly reputed in the
outside world that each Buddha is quietly done away with by what we
might call his cardinals at the age of eighteen, his body embalmed, and
a new find installed in his place. A Russian professor long resident in
Urga has been to some pains to prove that this is not true, that it is
in fact mere nonsense; but he admits the curious coincidence that all
the “Living Buddhas” up to the present one seem to have died at about
eighteen years of age.

[Illustration:

  The market in front of Hansen’s house. The structure on the extreme
    left is not what it looks like, for they have no such in Urga but it
    houses a prayer-cylinder
]

[Illustration:

  A youthful lama turning one of the myriad prayer-cylinders of Urga.
    Many written prayers are pasted inside, and each turn is equivalent
    to saying all of them
]

[Illustration:

  Women, whose crippled feet make going to the shops difficult, do much
    of their shopping from the two-boxes-on-a-pole type of merchant,
    constant processions of whom tramp the highways of China
]

[Illustration:

  An itinerant blacksmith-shop, with the box-bellows worked by a stick
    handle widely used by craftsmen and cooks in China
]

The present one played in unusual luck. To an even greater extent than
his predecessors he took advantage of his position to become the Don
Juan of Mongolia, and among his many light-o’-loves there was one to
whom he wished to stick—or who decided to stick to him. Being a god is
very convenient at times. This one calmly overruled the time-honored law
that lamas, and especially “Living Buddhas,” may not marry—though of
course this verb does not exactly fit the case—and attached the minx to
him for life. She seems to have some such power over men as did the old
Empress Dowager of China, an impression borne out by her masterful face
in such photographs of her as are extant. Not only did she succeed in
saving her paramour from the usual fate in his youth, but she so
strengthened his position that he is still on his deified throne at an
age variously reckoned at from fifty to sixty. Some explain this
survival in another way: there were, they say, to have been a fixed
number of reincarnations of the Buddha, of which this is the last, after
which, we are led to infer, the stainless soul will pass into Nirvana;
and of course a few years more or less of hanging back from that
blissful state can do no one any harm, least of all in the Orient, where
the sense of time is so nearly paralyzed. Even among those who do not
accept this view there are many who claim that there will never be
another “Living Buddha” in Mongolia, for political rather than lamaistic
reasons.

The fact is, probably, that while the masterfulness of his consort had
something to do with the survival of the present reincarnation, the
powerful clique about him has been willing to permit it because of his
weakness, which has prevented him from ever grasping any real authority.
Since his gallant youth he has been tainted with that dread disease so
wide-spread among the Mongols, which not only makes him a semi-invalid
easily manipulated by the real power behind his pseudo-divinity, but
which left him some years ago stone-blind. Because he is too sacred to
be touched by impious hands, there was no way of curing him, and now it
is too late. Besides, the high lamas preferred him sickly and supine
rather than well and strong, not to mention the almost complete
ignorance among the Mongols of the real nature of their well nigh
universal ailment.

Perhaps his blindness increases his divinity in the minds of the
faithful, as a sightless witch often wins more followers than one with
all her senses intact. At any rate, Mongols of all classes treat their
living fetish with divine honors. Pilgrims come from all over central
Asia to prostrate themselves on the ground or the prayer-boards outside
his compound; on special days they are blessed, not by his actual
appearance in person—for visibility often breeds contempt, and the
physical labor of being a god should be reduced to a minimum—but by
being tapped on the heads with a contrivance in the hands of
middle-class lamas to which is attached a rope the other end of which is
grasped, hypothetically at least, by the “Living Buddha” seated on his
throne inside his central palace. So divine is he that notwithstanding
his infirmity the excretions of his body are collected in silver and
gold vessels, sealed, and sent out among the credulous as a cure for
their infirmities! Foreigners who have chanced to catch a glimpse of him
on his way to or from the city temples to pray for rain—he has, of
course, the latest and best thing in barometers—or some other ceremony,
describe him as being more cleanly dressed than is the Mongol custom,
but otherwise quite like any other lama of high class, plus a kind of
gold crown. Close inspection might reveal that this alleged pulchritude
is an exaggeration—I am skeptical of the possibility of combining
cleanliness and Mongol—but that has never been permitted a foreigner.

While no manifestos are issued commanding the foreigner to remain within
doors and avert his face, as was long the case when the emperor of China
made his annual journey to sacrifice to the Altar of Heaven in Peking,
armed guards as well as pious fanatics see to it that the divine being
is not too nearly approached during his passing to and fro about Urga.
No later ago than the month of my visit a group of Americans in an
automobile were halted on one side of the unmarked route over which the
“Living Buddha” was to return from the temple where he was just then
enthroned, and compelled to get out and walk across it. As a special
concession to the spirit of modernity, when the insistent guards were
reminded that the abandoned machine could not advance of its own will,
they permitted the chauffeur to climb in again and technically break the
divine law by riding across the prospective trail of the blind god.

Tibetan, as I have said, is the Latin of lamaism. Even in Peking, where
branch clusters of the faith exist, only two or three temples are
permitted, by special dispensation, to carry on their services in
Mongolian, and there is said to be only one in Asia where Chinese is
used. The great stone letters on the flank of the sacred mountain,
visible as far off as the eye can reach, are Tibetan characters. From
Tibet come numbers of lamas, and orders tending to keep the ritual more
orthodox; the Dalai-Lama himself once fled before foreign invaders to
Urga. Neither these seekers after Nirvana from Lhasa and vicinity nor
the traders from the more northern parts of Tibet make the journey now
by the direct overland route. Not only are there bleak mountains and
vast morasses, dreary _despoblados_ without a sign of man for days, and
the fanatical Mohammedan province of Kansu to cross, but in these
settled times there are real dangers from bandits of several
nationalities. So the beaten trail of to-day, except for those Tibetan
divinities who come by sea, like any tourist, leads down through
northern India and across into central China, thence northward through
the former Celestial Empire, which still claims, if in vain,
jurisdiction over all Outer Mongolia.

There is nothing more pleasant than a stroll on a brilliant autumn day
across the golden-brown rolling plains about Urga, especially to the
north and east, where they roll ever higher until all the holy city, to
its most distant and isolated clusters of temples, lies spread out
before one. No suggestion of modern industry breaks the peaceful quiet,
which is enhanced by the law forbidding hunting or any other
interference with wild creatures within a circuit of about twelve miles
about the residence of Bogda-Han. Great flocks of pigeons fly up in
purple-blue clouds only when the stroller has almost walked them down;
less charming birds show a similar lack of fear of man; in the low
forest along the crest of the sacred mountain roam elk, wild pigs, deer,
bears, wolves, some say even moose and reindeer, not to mention many
smaller and more harmless animals. Yet there is something ominous rather
than tranquil and inviting about the scene as a whole; the Elysian charm
is sullied and broken by various repelling things, particularly by the
inhuman Mongol method of disposing of the dead.

This consists simply, except in rare cases of reputed gods or demigods,
of feeding the corpses of all to the dogs. There seems to be nothing
corresponding to a funeral service. Foreign residents say that formerly
it was the custom to load the body on a two-wheeled cart and drive
pell-mell across the hillocks until it fell off, the driver not daring
to look back under penalty of having all the evil spirits which
inhabited the dead man enter his own body. Others say they have
sometimes seen a kind of procession of lamas and relatives follow the
corpse to the hills and stand some little distance off watching its
consumption. Certainly in the great majority of cases there is no more
ceremony involved than in tossing garbage on the nearest dump. There are
no fixed spots for depositing the bodies, but they are thrown hit or
miss on the outer edges of the town, often right beside the main trails
and especially in the shallow, verdureless gullies breaking up the
wrinkled brown country about it.

One must be on the ground early after a death to find enough of the body
left to recognize it as more than a broken skeleton. The big black dogs,
covered with long shaggy hair, which dot the landscape everywhere in and
about Urga, filling its streets with murderous-looking eyes that keep
the pedestrian on the constant qui vive, have learned their task well
from many generations of practice. The rapidity with which they can
reduce what was a sentient, moving being the day before to a mere
sprinkling of broken bones is astonishing. This doubly endears these
loathsome beasts to the Mongols, for they believe that the more quickly
a body is eaten the better man does this prove the deceased to have been
in life. It is especial good luck and proof of unusual sanctity to see
the body eaten by birds, but the dogs rarely leave their feathered
rivals an opportunity thus to bear testimony to the character of the
departed. The birds have their turn after the dogs have given up hope of
deriving further benefit from their exertions, and finish off the job by
cleaning out the skull and the other morsels for which a bill is needed.

There is nothing either hidden or sacred about these graveless
graveyards. Any one may stroll through them, and find them quite as
abandoned as any city dump-heap. Dog-nests made of the ragged quilted
cloaks in which the bodies are carried out are the only conspicuous
feature, except the skulls which lie about everywhere. I wondered at
first that there were never any remains of the skeleton except widely
scattered and broken bones, until I beheld a dog pick up a rib and carry
it off to a comfortable spot on the hillside, there to sit down on his
haunches, break it in two, and gnaw the last scrap of nourishment out of
it. In the dry desert air the skulls quickly bleach snow-white and
brittle; only here and there is one still “green” enough to be gray in
color, so solid as to pain the toe that kicks it across the plain. These
vast bone-yards are no place for the Westerner, living on his
over-refined food, to spend the hour before an appointment with his
dentist, for his envy of the full sets of perfect white teeth in almost
every skull may become overwhelming.

It seems to be the idea of these putative Buddhists, the Mongols, and of
their brethren, the Buriats and Kalmucks, who follow the same custom,
that, since all living creatures are brothers, the least a man can do
for his dumb fellow-beings is to bequeath them his useless body as
nourishment—and thereby, of course, win merit that will improve his
reincarnation. The Tibetans do likewise, except that they feed their
mountain eagles or condors as well as their dogs, and prepare the food
for the latter by mixing it with ground grain. Gruesome as the custom
is, there is a thoroughness and promptitude about it which greatly
outdoes the Christian mode of burial, a real and visible return of “dust
to dust.” I know of no other means of disposing of the dead which gives
the corpse so nearly its true value, none which leaves such a true sense
of the worthlessness of human remains. Between this and the opposite
extreme of an elaborate funeral followed by a showy mausoleum I am not
sure but that I prefer the Mongol method.

To the Mongols themselves there is no more sanctity about their
scattered bones than about any other form of rubbish. Shepherds or
others whose calling brings them there wander or sit about the
skull-strewn gullies quite as calmly as if they were in a field of
daisies. Relatives seldom if ever come to pick up any of the remains;
sometimes the rains wash broken bones down the gullies into the edge of
town, where they lie until they are covered up with silt and disappear.
Most of them simply disintegrate into the semi-desert soil about them.
There is never a sign that the Mongol riding by feels any distress at
the thought that some day these same surly black dogs that are tearing
to pieces the corpse at the roadside will do the same for him. The tops
of skulls, especially of higher lamas and men of standing, are sometimes
used as drinking-vessels, or as oil-receptacles in the temples, and
specially sainted thigh-bones make excellent whistles for use in
ritualistic uproars; otherwise no one seems to have thought of the
commercial possibilities of the bone-yards. Nor are these strange
people, who might punish with death the stranger who forced his way into
the presence of their living god, in the least sensitive about the
possession of their remains. A high lama dropped in upon my host one day
and chanced to spy a skull-top that had just been presented by some
native admirer. He picked it up, looked it over carefully, held it up to
a light, and announced that the original owner had been a very good man,
proof of which was the condition of the zigzag joints and the fact that
the skull was so thin in one spot that the light showed rosy red through
it. Perhaps, he added, as he laid it back on the bric-à-brac table and
accepted a cigarette, it had been the skull of his good old friend Lama
So-and-so.

If I may hazard a guess, it is that this to us gruesome custom has grown
up among the Mongols because they are nomads. They cannot carry the
graves of their ancestors with them, whereas the dogs will follow of
their own accord. Their attitude toward these surly black beasts without
owners, which roam the plains as well as make every street of Urga a
gauntlet, bears out this impression. Though they are as quick as we to
beat them off with any weapon when they get too aggressive, they deeply
resent a serious injury to or the killing of one of them by a frightened
foreigner. Yet the tendency of any Westerner would be to do just that; I
know of few assignments that would give me more satisfaction than to
lead a regiment to Urga and exterminate her swarming dogs. Most of them
seem to have acquired the disease most prevalent among those they feed
upon, and one feels that the slightest bite would prove fatal. Luckily
they spend the day largely in sleeping and making love, so that the
streets are not always as dangerous as they might be. But they easily
gather in packs, and especially at night or during the long hungry
winters they are a distinct menace not merely to women and children but
to the hardiest men. They are really cowards, these man-eating dogs of
Mongolia, as the shrinking look in their tigerish eyes when they are
effectively threatened proves; yet they are so accustomed to human flesh
that man is to them natural prey, and they seem to have developed a
knowledge of human anatomy which tells them where to attack most
effectively, as well as what tidbits to prefer when they are not
especially hungry. Urga is full of stories of the inability of these
ugly beasts to await the natural end of their predestined victims. A man
making his way late at night across the noisome market-place outside our
window had been dragged down and eaten during the past winter. By poetic
justice, he was a lama. In the outskirts just back of one of the temple
compounds a Buriat woman was pulled off her horse and devoured one cold
winter day before those looking on could come to her rescue. A year or
so before, a Russian colonel newly arrived dined late with friends, who
asked him as he left whether they could not give him an escort, or at
least lend him a cudgel. No, indeed, replied the departing guest, a
Russian officer could not be afraid; besides, he had his sword. Next
morning the sword and a few buttons and rags were all that could be
found of the colonel.




                               CHAPTER X
                       EVERY ONE HIS OWN DIPLOMAT


If I found time to see all Urga during my stay there it must have been
due to the fact that it is not, after all, a large city, for most of my
waking hours were of necessity spent in the various _yamens_. First,
every new-comer must have a passport to remain in town; then we had to
get permission from the war minister to carry them before our guns could
be returned to us; there were endless negotiations involved in the
matter of my confiscated kodak and films; finally, to mention only the
high spots, any one leaving the country must have still another passport
and fulfil numerous formalities. All these things would still have left
some of my eleven days in Urga free if Mongol functionaries worked with
even the deliberate speed of our own. But nowhere in all the Orient
itself, probably, is the Oriental conception of time more fully
developed, and when it came to shifting from one official or _yamen_ to
another a question on which no one wished to assume responsibility,
these nomad herdsmen turned ink-daubers could “pass the buck” in a way
to make our most experienced army officers green with envy.

[Illustration:

  Pious Mongol men and women worshiping before the residence of the
    “Living Buddha” of Urga, some by throwing themselves down scores of
    times on the prostrating-boards placed for that purpose, one by
    making many circuits of the place, now and again measuring his
    length on the ground
]

[Illustration:

  The Mongols of Urga dispose of their dead by throwing the bodies out
    on the hillsides, where they are quickly devoured by the savage
    black dogs that roam everywhere
]

[Illustration:

  Mongol women in full war-paint
]

[Illustration:

  Though it was still only September, our return from Urga was not
    unlike a polar expedition
]

Every American is his own diplomat in Urga, where no nation except
Russia has official representatives, so that most of our dealings were
with cabinet members, especially with the minister of foreign affairs.
He was a typical high-class Mongol, with greasy cue and soiled silk
gown, whose qualifications for his office were that he spoke Chinese,
though those who know Urga politics say he is a man of ability and the
most powerful of the Mongols in the present Government. The prime
minister, though a lama and a saint not many degrees below Bogda-Han
himself, resembled all the others in appearance, except of course for
his missing cue and certain details of dress. All the _yamens_ were much
like that of justice, to which we had the first introduction. Scores of
booted and quilt-robed functionaries squatted on the cushioned platforms
about the rooms of frame buildings that would be described as European,
though they were built by the Chinese. An honest day’s work for any one
of them seemed to be the scratching full of upright words with a
weazel-hair brush of a two-foot strip of flimsy tissue-paper, the more
careful copying of which would constitute their next daily contribution.
The fastening of a portrait on the flimsiest of passports known to
diplomatic circles, by sewing it in with pink silk thread and securing
the knot with a wax seal many times heavier than all the rest of the
document, left the man who accomplished it a sensation similar to that
of the famous village smithy on his way to his night’s repose. The
filing of a corresponding caricature of the applicant in the national
archives was usually turned over to another functionary, in order to
equalize the arduous toil. Then, too, no member of the staff wished to
miss anything of interest. Every scrap of letter or document which we
presented must be carefully examined by the whole _yamen_ force; if it
was in Mongolian, each one, from the assistant minister who would
eventually take it in to his chief down to the youth who prepared the
sealing-wax and wore over his eyes the black, bandit-like horsehair
bandage which is the Mongol substitute for eye-glasses, must read it
from end to end, which meant that we were forced to listen to the same
meaningless song a score of times, for the Mongol cannot read without
singing the words aloud. In my efforts to convince the Government of the
harmlessness of the snap-shotting I should do about town if they would
be so kind as to return my apparatus, I ran across some copies of the
most photographic of our monthly magazines, and carried them to the
_yamens_. These created unrivaled interest. All other work, slight as it
always was, invariably was abandoned forthwith, and the combined force
took to studying and discussing the pictures, their capped heads crowded
closely together. When, hours after our arrival, it came time for the
minister to give us his attention, he, too, must spend half the
afternoon looking at the magazines, and end by telling us to come
to-morrow when he could find time to make a decision. The advertisements
won fully as much and quite as serious attention as the genuine
photographs in the letter-press, which proved another cause for delay.
For I challenge any one to explain in English turned into Russian and
finally into Mongolian that there is really no curious race of dwarfs in
America in spite of the picture of a merry tot barely exceeding in
height the can of soup beside which he has stood for years in so many of
our national publications.

However, we came to know official Mongolia well, and to find some of
these functionaries pleasant and almost lovable fellows underneath their
curious garb and their atrophied sense of the value of time. Eventually,
too, we got results from our endless squatting about the _yamens_.
Exactly a week after our arrival, when we had seen almost every one in
ostensible authority in Mongolia except Bogda-Han himself, a soldier
came to summon us to the _Okhrana_, and before the afternoon was gone
our guns and cartridges were actually returned to us. True, the strap
had been stolen from my companion’s rifle, and we were “squeezed” again
in veritable Chinese fashion in the payment of the fees involved, as
with our passports, by being forced to pay in “Mex” dollars instead of
the legal rubles and copecks; but we had long since lost any inclination
to trouble over trifles. Besides, the lumps of silver in which Mongol
government employees are intermittently paid do not constitute large
salaries. Permission to shoot lead, however, was not the chief motive of
my _yamen_-chasing; I wished to turn my kodak on some of the curious
types of Urga. The foreign minister having at length given me verbal
permission to do so, I spent a morning in the office of the military
staff—a dismal pair of little rooms occupied by a dozen gloomy and
shoddy-clad Russian men and women dawdling over maps and
translations—and finally interviewed the chief of staff himself. He was
a tall, aristocratic-looking Russian who had been a major under the
czar, but who held, of course, no rank in the “Red” scheme of things,
though a kind of Cossack uniform flapped about his emaciated form and he
occupied a position which in other lands would have called for at least
a colonel. My hopes rose high, for here at last was a man with human
intelligence enough to know that my simple request did not mean treason
to the state. When the new supplication I was asked to write had been
turned into Russian, he took it personally to the war minister. The
interview was long, and though I was not invited to it myself, I knew
that my case was being thoroughly discussed, for the minister spent some
time in staring at me out of the window. Then the chief of staff
returned my request with an annotation by his ostensible superior that
the war department was quite willing to grant me the requested
permission—if the minister of foreign affairs would also do so! I
thought the struggle was won at last and that it was merely a question
of awaiting the final papers with Mongolian patience; for had not the
foreign minister already given such permission, if only by word of
mouth? I no longer took with a grain of salt, however, the statement of
my host that he had made twenty-one visits to the _yamens_ for the
simple purpose of getting a permit to ship some of his own horses out of
the country.

Two days after this appeal to the chief of staff a soldier met me in the
street and handed me a Mongol document. Every one having promised me
permission to use my kodak again, I called at once at the _Okhrana_ and
asked that it be returned to me. The surly, slouch-hatted churl at the
head of that institution, after letting me stand the usual half-hour
without deigning to acknowledge my existence, looked at me in a queer
way and grumbled something about “to-morrow.” Perhaps the document in my
hand was not what I fancied it to be. I went out to have it translated.

It is only by the exercise of the sternest self-control that I refrain
from quoting that remarkable paper in its entirety. Not that it ranks
high as a literary production, nor that it is intrinsically of any
particular interest; but there are probably few better specimens of that
frankness in diplomatic relations between nations which has been of late
so loudly demanded. Written on the usual long strip of tissue-paper
folded crosswise and opening like an accordion, it proved to contain a
yard or more of perpendicular Mongol script, authenticated at both ends
by the big square red stamp of an official seal. A lengthy preamble led
up to the statement that, “inasmuch as an individual named S——, calling
himself an American consul,” had during a visit to Urga some months
before been in conversation with those members of a conspiracy against
the People’s Government of Mongolia who had since been executed for
treason, he “had made to perish the good name of the great American
nation,” and therefore said Government could no longer believe any
American, verbally or in writing, wherefore permission was refused
me ... and so on, to the length of a treaty of peace. However, a little
résumé of recent Mongolian history and politics is essential to the full
understanding of this tidbit of amateur diplomacy; for such it was, for
all its ostensibly private nature, since it was plain that it had been
written in the hope that I would bring it to the attention of our
Government, with whom Outer Mongolia had no regular means of
communicating.


Soon after the revolution that made China nominally a republic, Outer
Mongolia broke the ties which had bound it rather loosely for centuries
to the Chinese Empire. The new Chinese Government had other problems on
its hands, and for several years nothing serious was done to regain the
allegiance of this vast territory, which had declared its independence
without being very strict in such matters as completely expelling all
Chinese officials. In 1917 there was organized in China under Japanese
instructors an army-corps of twenty thousand Chinese, who were to take
the enemy ships interned in Shanghai, sail for France, and win the war.
But the armistice overtook these preparations and left the question of
what to do with the troops on which so much training had been spent.
Some genius at length suggested that they be made a “Northeastern
Defense Corps,” and half the twenty thousand were sent to Urga under
command of a general popularly known in China as “Little Hsu,” one of
those choice morsels of humanity who had to his credit such actions as
having a rival assassinated in his garden after inviting him to
luncheon. All testimony seems agreed that these Chinese troops played
havoc in Urga and vicinity, particularly after China had deprived
Russians of their extraterritorial rights and after the “little worm” of
a Russian consul who had been instrumental in having the expedition sent
had departed. They began boldly looting and killing Russians as well as
Mongols, and it was but a slight shift from that to attacking foreigners
still entitled to extraterritorial privileges. Before matters grew
serious enough to prod the powers to action, however, word came that a
White Russian force was moving on Urga. “Little Hsu” ran away, leaving
General Chu in command. The latter planned to kill all the foreigners
left, according to his own assertion, then lost his nerve as the
Russians drew near, and fled before his army; and when next seen by any
of his intended victims he was basking in the hero-admiring smiles of
foreign ladies and their escorts at a dance in the principal hotel of
Peking.

The Russians under Ungern, justly known as the “Mad Baron,” entered Urga
in October, 1920, and with the aid of Mongol troops chased the
disorganized Chinese corps over the southern border of Outer Mongolia.
It was then that the Paris-to-Peking telegraph line ceased to function
for lack of poles. Bleached Chinese skeletons still lay scattered along
the road to Kalgan when I made the journey to Urga. Ungern was one of
those products of generations of Russian brutality who seem to find
their keenest pleasure in bloodthirsty acts. In Urga he grew more and
more mad, indiscriminately killing Mongols and Russians suspected of
“Red” sympathies, and topping this off one February day in 1921 by a
general slaughter of the Jewish inhabitants. Every Russian, he
explained, hates a Jew; besides, the Bolshevik régime with which he was
at swords’ points was and is still mainly in the hands of Jews, a fact
not fully realized in our land because of the muffling Jewish hand on
our press, but which it is essential to keep in mind in any study of
present Russian problems. So deep was his hatred of these people that he
refused to waste ammunition on them; they were despatched instead by
splitting open their skulls with sabers. Foreigners still living in Urga
describe the streets as shambles, strewn everywhere with the corpses of
Jewish men, women, and children, even of babies with their brains oozing
out amid the dust and rubbish. All speak of the curious fact that many
bodies lay for days where they had fallen, without a dog’s coming near
them, as if even these brutes had been frightened by the madness of the
baron—or had eaten to satiety. As the soldiers reveling in the pogrom
depended mainly on a hasty glance to identify their victims, not a few
foreigners whose physiognomy was deceiving passed some very unpleasant
moments. Such sights as two Mongols and a white woman hanging from the
same gatepost, the woman a poor part-witted creature who maintained even
in death a ludicrous expression of inane hauteur, are still recalled by
the surviving foreign residents.

At length the Bolsheviks, having first, according to their own
assertions, pleaded with the Chinese for several months to join them in
the expedition and catch the “Mad Baron” between them, sent an army into
Mongolia. The personal amusements of the baron do not seem to have had
much weight in bringing about this decision, for the “Reds” themselves
have a well developed taste for flowing blood; but they had begun to
worry lest the Ungern group become the nucleus of a “White” force large
enough to jeopardize their own security. Moreover, being true fanatics,
they were eager to bring Mongolia the dismal gospel of their strange
faith. The “Reds” entered Urga in July, 1921, and have been there ever
since. In those notes for publication with which governments of all
colors attempt to fool their neighbors, their own people, and even
themselves, the present rulers of Russia assure us that they have only a
corporal’s guard in Urga, merely as a protection against a new “White”
gathering, and that the Mongols rule themselves without outside
interference. Even the handsome and polished Jewish gentleman who under
the title of Russian consul represents the Soviet in Urga, will tell you
in any one of half a dozen languages, if you take the trouble to call at
his perfectly consular office adorned with a large signed portrait of
Lenin in a building flaunting a faded red flag, that he is only a lone
foreigner in town, like you, and that he has little influence with the
Mongol Government. But if he keeps from visibly smiling as he makes this
assertion, it is a sign that the urbanity which he displayed at the time
of his expulsion from the United States has improved rather than
diminished.

It is true that there are not more than two or three hundred Russian
Soviet soldiers in Urga. Having painted the town “Red,” and seen to it
that a Mongolian “People’s Government” of that color was installed, no
great force is needed to see that the ideas of Moscow are carried out.
The cabinet ministers ostensibly ruling the country are all Mongols, but
at their elbow, just out of sight, sits a Russian “adviser” whose advice
is never scorned with impunity. I still recall the scene when a Russian
subaltern from the military staff brought the foreign minister a
document that needed his signature to make it legal. As the minister
began perusing it, the expression on the face of the subaltern said as
plainly as if he had spoken the words, “Read it, you old beggar, if you
want to waste the time, but you will sign it whether you wish to or
not.” Thus the “advice” reaching Urga through the telegrams from Moscow
that pour in upon the “powerless” Russian consul in a steady if slender
stream seeps down through all grades of the “People’s Government” of
independent Mongolia.


It has been a long way around, but we have at last come back again to
that example of amateur diplomacy in which my simple prayer was denied,
and a backhanded fillip given incidentally to all citizens of “the great
American nation.” It is true, even as the document alleges, that an
American named S—— did come to Urga a few months before my arrival, and
he does not deny that he had conversation with some of the fifteen
Mongols, one of them the former prime minister, another a saint high in
the lama hierarchy, most of them as splendid fellows as could be found
in Mongolia, who were shot a fortnight before I got there, on the charge
of conspiring to overthrow the “People’s Government.” That he “called
himself an American consul” is not surprising, in view of the fact that
our State Department does also, and pays him a salary accordingly. Nor
is there any cause for astonishment in the fact that he hobnobbed as
much as possible with the most polished Mongols with whom he could come
in contact, if only to avoid still greasier robes. In short, S—— is our
consul at Kalgan, in whose district all Mongolia is included. Neither
China nor the United States, nor in fact any nation except Soviet
Russia, has ever recognized the independence of Outer Mongolia. By the
law of nations, therefore, so far as any such thing exists, it is still
a province of China and a part of one of our Chinese consular districts,
where Americans are still entitled to extraterritorial rights and
subject to trial only by their own diplomatic or consular officers. Soon
after his appointment S—— hurried up to Urga to study the situation. The
Mongols in power evidently hoped that his visit was inspired by an
intention on the part of our Government to recognize their independence.
When nothing of the kind followed, they became more and more resentful.
The animosity of the “Reds,” who look upon the United States as the
chief of the “capitalistic nations” opposed to their sad scheme of
things, served to increase this feeling, at least with the “Red” Mongols
just now in the saddle; there are many evidences that among the Mongols
at large nothing has “made to perish the name of the great American
nation.” That any American consul would promise a minority group in a
foreign country that he would “put them in touch with the enemy of our
people on the east” (by which was meant the Chinese in general and Chang
Tso-lin in particular) “and give his assistance in the liquidation of
the existing People’s Government of Mongolia and the restoration of the
old régime,” as was charged in the reply to my request, is as silly as
that document itself.

But enough of politics, which to my simple mind is usually a bore. I
might add, however, as a personal chuckle, that my case came perilously
near causing a ministerial crisis and overturning the Mongol cabinet.
Not that this is anything to boast of in these days when cabinets almost
daily stump their toes on this or that insignificant pebble and sprawl
headlong; but it was some satisfaction to know that, if I could not
snap-shot Urga, at least I could put it in an uproar. The cabinet, it
seems, deeply resented the action of the upstart _Okhrana_, both in
replying to me direct and in reversing the decision of the ministers,
and the question of resigning _en bloc_ as a protest was, I am
creditably informed, debated long and vigorously. I could not of course,
even as an unofficial representative of the slandered American nation,
take such an attack as the _Okhrana_ document lying down. I replied to
it sternly, therefore, in proper diplomatic form, addressing myself to
the foreign minister, who received my reply in due humility. But my hope
that by thus again stirring things up I might still succeed in being the
cause of a national crisis did not, according to the latest reports from
Urga, materialize.


There can be no other reason than pique or pure ignorance for refusing
any one permission to take photographs in Urga. It has no fortresses or
works of defense surrounded with secrecy; as far as the presence of
Soviet soldiers and “advisers” is concerned, the lens could catch
nothing that could not be told as effectively in words. Simple, rather
brute-faced young Russians in shoddy gray uniforms with a red star sewed
upon them were about the only outward evidences of Bolshevik occupation.
Here or there one or two of them stood on guard with fixed bayonets
which they were even more careless than the average soldier in
flourishing about unoffending ribs. Others, off duty, prowled about
singly or in small groups in quest of anything appealing to their
rudimental appetites which might turn up. Out toward the wireless
station erected by the Chinese, where the Russian soldiers used the
war-ruined office of an American mining company as barracks, detachments
of fifty to a hundred of them might be met marching in close ranks at a
funeral pace and singing in chorus, a rather engaging custom inherited
from czarist days. It was evident, not merely from their appearance but
by the way any suggestion of authority went quickly to their heads, that
almost all these uncouth youths were of the peasant or the lowest city
class. Though I had business in the _Okhrana_ several times a day during
all my stay in Urga, never once was I permitted to enter it, even when
officially summoned, until whatever dull-faced soldier happened to be on
guard at the door had halted me long enough to emphasize his authority
and his dislike of the class which still dared to wear white collars.
What was worse, as in every case of evil example copied by still lower
strata of society, was the studied rudeness, the childish yet
overbearing insolence of the Mongol soldiers, who were much more
numerous, in their efforts to outdo in “redness” their Russian models.

It was common rumor that there were many “radishes” among the Russians
stationed in Urga, which would account for the exceptions to the general
rule of simple, plebeian faces among the soldiers as well as among those
in more important positions. A “radish,” obviously, is a man who is red
on the outside but white within, and the term has of late years become
one of every-day speech in Russia. Many former officers of the czar,
many a member of the old aristocracy whom one would least expect to find
backing the new proletarian doctrine, have no other means of earning
their bread than to accept some small position under the Bolsheviks and
pretend to be in sympathy with their program. How many of these there
are in Russia and adjoining lands who will turn upon their present
rulers when they show definite signs of falling is a question not
without interest to the outside world, but one which no casual visitor
can answer. It is said, also, that men are very glad to be assigned to
duty in Urga, where there is at least plenty to eat, in contrast to
Russia where nearly every one is more or less starving. Yet there are
Russian civilians even in Urga who know the pangs of hunger. Such utter
poverty and abject beggary as may be seen in Harbin or Vladivostok among
refugees from the Bolshevik régime are not found in this bucolic land of
comparative plenty, but barefoot children and the leanest faces were
never those of the Mongols. I recall in particular the widow of an
official wantonly killed by the “Mad Baron,” a young woman who might
have been charming under happier circumstances, who dwelt with her lanky
little daughter in a kind of two-room hut occupied by at least half a
dozen other persons, and who shivered past our window every morning and
evening to and from some sort of physical toil that had already given
her the hands of a peasant woman.

Far be it from me to condemn any honest attempt to work out a new and
better form of government, for certainly I should pin no blue ribbons on
any which so far exist. But even a few days in Urga under “Red” rule
could scarcely fail to convince any one not hopelessly prejudiced in its
favor that the “Red” system does not improve human felicity, which after
all, though that fact seems almost completely to have been lost sight of
the world over, is the only justification for any government. Bad as
opposing systems may be, this one was patently worse, if only because it
brings the dregs and sediment of society to the top and submerges the
purer liquid. It places the ignorant over the more or less instructed,
the rude and the malevolent over those who are at least polished enough
to be somewhat tolerant; it brings to the surface the residue of
savagery in the human race and immerses many of the improvements that
have been accomplished by long centuries of effort. I was particularly
struck by this aspect of things on the evening when I attended the
weekly _Spektakl_ with which European Urga is permitted to attempt to
amuse itself. That, like the government which sponsored it, was as if
the stokers had come up and taken possession of the cabin and insisted
on using only the meager talents to be found in their own ranks, though
those who had given their best efforts for generations to providing
better entertainment still tarried in the obscure corners into which the
irruption had driven them.

While they might as easily have led these childlike people of the Gobi
toward better things, the “Reds” seem only to have improved the natural
cussedness of those Mongols upon whom they have had any influence
whatever. The two races have, to be sure, many qualities more or less in
common, and a history which dovetails here and there. The Mongols under
Jenghiz Khan defeated the Russians, destroyed Kieff, and made almost all
Russia tributary to them. Out on the edge of Urga stands a long row of
European barracks built by the Russians in czarist days as a part of
their program of training a great Mongol army. In other words, it has
been give-and-take between these neighboring races for centuries, and,
shading together as they do through the intermediate Buriats and
Kalmucks, they seem much more closely allied than Europe and Asia in
general. In fact, seeing the two side by side, one was more and more
struck with how Oriental are the Russians. They are Oriental, for
instance, in their cruelty, and while they can perhaps teach little of
that quality to a people who until yesterday placed condemned criminals
in stout boxes and left them out among the skulls and dogs to die, they
have certainly done nothing to soften their innate barbarism. Surely it
is no worse to cut open the body of an executed felon in quest of some
organ of fancied medicinal value than to sentence two of the most
cultivated and charming young Russian ladies in Urga to serve the “Red”
army in Siberia for five years in punishment for the atrocious crime
committed by one of them in being the wife of a “White” officer—for
“serving” a “Red” army in this sense means something quite different
from sewing on buttons by day, something which makes a five-year term
easily a life sentence.


Though they were on the whole surly now toward strangers in general and
Caucasians in particular, one felt instinctively that this was not
natural Mongol behavior. For they are a simple people, close to nature,
a race with lovable traits for all their obvious faults. Three years
ago, say those who knew it then, Urga was as free as air, a delightful
place to visit, for all its filth and superstition. Hardly a Mongol but
had a smile and a cheery, jocular greeting for any one, of whatever
race, be it only at a chance meeting in the street. If now the
atmosphere of the whole place kept the nerves taut, it was rather
because of things that had recently been imposed upon them from the
outside, things which they might or might not wish, but which they have
no choice but to accept. In the olden days the visitor to Urga came and
went, carried on business or loafed, and never met the slightest
interference with his personal freedom. Now, though the European colony
may stroll at sunset a few times back and forth along the noisome stream
oozing past the market-place, no one may go out at night without
imminent danger of spending the rest of it in clammy durance. This rule,
added to the double windows of most houses, covered with wooden
shutters, Russian fashion, gives the nights a deathly silence, only
occasionally broken by the barking of foraging dogs, hoarse-voiced as if
they all had heavy colds from sleeping outdoors. A humorous touch may
soften this general atmosphere of apprehension, for the “Red” and Mongol
idea seems to be that only those who sneak noiselessly along the dark
streets can be bent on mischief, and the small non-Russian foreign
colony have found it efficacious in returning from their dinner-parties
to sing and whoop at the tops of their voices to convince prowling
soldiers that they are innocent of any evil intent.

It is risky now even to use the word _Guspadin_, a kind of Russian
“Mr.,” before any name, in any language; one is expected to say
_Tavarish_, meaning comrade. When they first came, the “Reds” showed
every intention of introducing the same communism in Mongolia as in
Russia. They demanded all title-deeds of real property, announcing that
they would rent everything of the kind for thirty years to the highest
bidder, no matter who the owner might be. The agents of foreign firms
replied that the titles to their company buildings were on file with
their legations at Peking, or at the home offices in America or Europe,
or gave some other plausible answer, and, though copies of them were
demanded, these were returned later with the information that they were
of no use. Mongols and Russians, however, have in many cases been made
communists willy-nilly, and some have already been stripped even of
personal property. Those who have been in both places say that
interference with peaceful pursuits is worse in Urga than it ever was in
Soviet Russia. Merchants are particularly bitter, because while business
is growing steadily better in Russia since the decree legalizing it,
here it is being taxed to death. It is difficult to get a frank
statement from the mistrusting Chinese merchants, who make up a majority
of the trading class; but it is hard to believe that they are any more
satisfied with the often confiscatory as well as burdensome methods of
the “Red” authorities than are the disheartened foreigners. Every import
or export, for instance, must pay a very high duty based on the retail
_selling_ price. Fines for technicalities and the often unavoidable
breaking of some silly rule are the order of the day, while on top of
the cost comes the wasted time and effort caused by the inexperience of
the Mongols in matters of government. A caravan of sixty camels bringing
in or taking out bales of marmot skins must halt for two or three days
while every skin is counted and the bales made up again. When an
Anglo-American branch got in a shipment of cigarettes, every one of the
ninety-eight packages in each of the seventy-two cases had to be
counted. Why they did not count each cigarette remains a mystery. The
same rule applies to bricks of tea, cakes of chocolate, and the most
minute of articles.

Not long after their arrival the “Reds” passed a law making the Russian
silver ruble legal tender on a par with the “Mex” dollar and requiring
every one to accept it as such. When an American firm protested that
this meant a loss of 40 per cent on prices, and refused to comply, it
was heavily fined. Moreover, the fine was paid, legal rights of
extraterritoriality notwithstanding. It is small wonder that foreign
stock is scarce in Urga and that important firms are closing their
branches there. So far as I was able to find, the “Reds” had introduced
only one reform worth while: they had decreed that Mongol women must
give up their extravagant head-dress, saying that the silver with which
it is heavy could be used to better purpose. Some twoscore head-dresses
were seized, but even Bolsheviks learn in time that feminine fashions
cannot be decreed by lawmakers; they returned the confiscated
contrivances later, and the custom remains. In fact, all the “Reds” in
Urga have not done as much for the handful of the human race there as
have three brave Swedish girls who are fighting alone the most
wide-spread of Mongolia’s physical diseases with missionary zeal and
without making any noise about it.

Whatever other forms of violence the Soviet has used in its efforts to
make neighboring Mongolia a first convert and a nation after its own
heart, it has not dared openly attack the “Living Buddha.” The fanatical
Mongols would almost certainly kill all foreigners in the country,
irrespective of nationality, if their blind god were molested; though
the rumor is rife that the “Reds” have threatened to deal with him as
with the former prime minister if he uses his influence against them.
Outwardly they try as hard to keep up the fiction that he is the head of
the Mongol Government as they do to convince the world that they have no
real hand in the latter. The official bulletin, only newspaper in Urga,
in announcing the execution of the fifteen alleged conspirators, called
attention to the law which decrees that those who try to change the form
of government shall be cut up in small pieces, their immediate family
banished two thousand versts from the capital, all their property
confiscated, and all their relatives sent as slaves to distant princes.
There are many such slaves in Mongolia, by the way; Bogda-Han has
thousands of them, just as he has of cattle. But, added the official
organ, the family and the property of these fifteen were not molested,
_by order of the “Living Buddha!”_ It is true that the title Bogda-Han
means emperor, but he was long since shorn of any temporal power, not to
mention the fact that he is said to have no sympathy whatever for the
“Reds” or any of their works.

It is common belief that the Chinese will never return to power in Urga.
A recent despatch from a Japanese source asserting that Moscow has
declared Mongolia a federated state of Russia has not been confirmed,
but it might as well be that in name as well as in fact. As I write, a
story comes through that the “Living Buddha” is asking China to take
charge of the country once more, but that again is from a Chinese
source. The hard, cold facts in political matters are difficult to find
in such a double-faced realm as the Orient. But the future of Mongolia
will be worth watching, as will the apparent tendency of the Soviet to
continue the imperialistic thrust toward the south and east which it
inherited from the czarist régime.


As if they wished to make up for their earlier harshness, the “Reds”
made my departure from Urga extremely easy. Perhaps I should see a less
flattering motive in their leniency. In any case my baggage was barely
opened and shut again, though most travelers find departing a more
trying ordeal than arrival, and ordinarily every line of writing leaving
the country is rigidly censored. The only unpleasantness that befell us
was the failure of the greasy Mongol holding the official seal to reach
the _Okhrana_ before noon, though we had been there ready to start since
eight. Booted soldiers again rode with us to the far outskirts of the
city, halting us at various _yamens_, so that the sun was well started
on its decline before our papers were examined at the last _yourt_, and
we were free to reach if possible the first distant stopping-place
before nightfall. Not until the next afternoon, however, when the
frontier outpost of Ude passed us without comment, did that sense of
apprehension which seems just now to hang like a cloud over Outer
Mongolia give way to one of relief and confidence of the future.

Long caravans that we had passed a fortnight before were still
laboriously making their way toward Urga. Men all but unrecognizable as
such under their many sheepskin garments still squatted at trenches dug
in the desert, coaxing wind-shielded fires to blaze, or bowed their
fur-clad heads to the bitterly cold wind sweeping at express speed down
out of the north; and we drove for nearly a hundred miles through fields
of snow and ice, though September was not yet gone when we stumbled down
the pass into Kalgan.




                               CHAPTER XI
                     AT HOME UNDER THE TARTAR WALL


It is obvious that this chapter should be written by the head of the
house. But any husband, at least of the United States of America, will
understand perfectly what I mean when I say that persuasion is often
useless and coercion out of date. The housekeeping sex will have to bear
with me, therefore, while I do my masculine best with a subject that is
manifestly far beyond my humble qualifications. Whatever the other
faults I display in the process, I shall try not to be reticent in such
matters as the wages of servants and the price of eggs, which I conceive
to be those near the housekeeper’s heart the world over.

Neither of Peking’s modern hotels, not so much as to mention the dozen
others which are now and then astonished by the arrival of a foreign
client, was the place for a boy just reaching the running, shouting, and
breaking age to spend eight or nine months, even if his parents had not
grown to abhor the very advantages of hotel life. So we turned our
attention to the renting of a house. In Peking one does not simply buy a
morning paper, check off a hundred possibilities, and make the rounds of
them. There is an English-speaking, more or less daily newspaper, two or
three of them, in fact; but very few families could live in the
available houses which they call to the reader’s attention. Nor are
there renting agents, or many invitations to the houseless, at least
recognizable to Westerners, to be seen along the streets. One must
depend rather on chance hints, above all on asking one’s friends to ask
their friends, which is not wholly satisfactory for new arrivals with at
most a few letters of introduction and a foolish, perhaps, but
ineradicable tendency to cause the rest of mankind as little annoyance
as possible. We soon learned, however, that some things are quite proper
in Peking which are deeply frowned upon elsewhere, and vice versa.

But at least house-hunting in the Chinese capital is not at all the
physical labor that apartment-hunting is, for instance, in New York. One
steps into the nearest of the rickshaws which swoop down like hungry
sparrows upon every possible fare and is borne silently away to the very
doors of possible dwelling-places. It is almost always a disappointment
to prospective residents, this first rapid survey of Peking outside the
Legation Quarter, yet at the same time fascinating to all but the most
querulous. The narrow, unpaved _hutungs_ are so uneven, if not actually
muddy or swirling with dust; they offer so many offenses to the eye, and
to the nose; unwashed beggars, runny-nosed children, the first close
view of one’s future neighbors, are seldom pleasing even to those most
avid of local color. Almost any one with American training will be
appalled by the lowness and the apparent crowding together of the
houses. The thought of living not merely on the ground floor but
literally on the ground itself, since Peking houses have no cellars and
rarely even a single step to be mounted, may seem unthinkable. The total
absence of front yards, of grass, of even the suggestion of a sidewalk,
nothing but blank walls of bluish-gray mud bricks, here and there half
tumbled in, patched perhaps for the time being with old straw mats or
mere rubbish, close on either hand as far as the eye can see, is likely
to bring a sinking to the new-comer’s heart.

But he is not long in realizing that China is preëminently the Land of
Walls, and that what the streets and the alley-like _hutungs_ lose by
being crowded between their mud-made barriers the dwellings along them
gain in space and privacy within. Once the heavy door-leaves, bright red
in color, with a few big black characters on them calling poetically for
blessings upon the inmates, growl shut behind him, he finds the sense of
unpleasant proximity was a mere delusion. A short tiled passageway
leads, almost certainly at right angles, into the first court, from
which another, very likely with a different direction, that evil spirits
may be completely nonplussed, opens upon a second, and beyond this,
perhaps through a big ornamental gateway with brilliant flare-eared
roof, there may be a third and even a fourth courtyard; though this
would imply that the ordinary house-hunter might better discreetly
withdraw before the matter of price comes up. Usually the brick walls
and the tiled roofs of the separate buildings about these courts are of
that same blue gray that makes Peking so much more drab than the
imagination had pictured it, for all its innumerable palaces, temples,
and monuments. But the eaves and the cornices, the doors and the
passageways, with their red and green and sky-blue decorations of
Chinese motif, the bright blues and reds of the rafter-ends and corbels
under the slant of the roofs, the white-papered lattices of the windows,
make up for this. Probably, too, there is a venerable old tree rising
out of somewhere high above the place; and almost always, winter or
summer, there is that bright blue sky overhead which makes Peking so
delightful a home. What usually troubles the foreigner longest is the
lowness of the houses. A child could throw a cat over any of them; they
have no basements, no garrets, nothing but the low room or two of each
building, generally without even a ceiling, but only the roof-beams,
papered or whitewashed, sometimes painted with dragons and other things
Chinese.

I have been speaking, of course, of Chinese houses. There are many two-
and even three-story dwellings in Peking; there are big compounds full
of houses that might have been shipped intact from Massachusetts; but we
could see no reason for coming all the way to China just to live inside
a little walled-in duplicate of England or America. So we roamed the
_hutungs_. According to treaty all Westerners in Peking still live
within the Legation Quarter. But the foreign community has long since
outgrown such limited accommodations. Chinese with houses to rent,
merchants with goods to sell, every caste and variety of Pekingese who
covets some of the contents of foreigners’ plump purses, is glad to
overlook this fiction in practice, so that brass name-plates in Roman
letters, and flagpoles flaunting various Western colors, are widely
scattered within the Tartar City. We found them clustered most thickly
in the southeastern, or at least the eastern, part of it, thinning out
toward the northwest; but foreigners live even inside the Yellow Wall,
as the Chinese call the Imperial City. There seemed to be few if any in
the broad Chinese City south of the Tartar Wall, or outside that mighty
barrier at all, except for the little suburban community far out at the
race-course.


[Illustration:

  Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall of the Tartar
    City
]

[Illustration:

  The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists of (left to
    right) ama, rickshaw man, “boy,” coolie, and cook
]

[Illustration:

  A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on the wall
]

[Illustration:

  Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our quarter
]

I had gone to Mongolia before we found what we wanted, and therefore can
claim no credit either in the quest, the furnishing, or the selection of
that numerous personnel without which no foreigner’s household in Peking
seems to function. It had been a long search, with certain hitches that
would not have occurred across the Pacific. Legally no foreigner can own
real estate in Peking unless he is a missionary. Many do, but that is by
using Chinese as dummy owners. Some old Chinese houses as yet untouched
by foreign hands tempted us to try ours at recreating them in as
charming a way as some of our friends had done. But the eight or nine
months we could be at home in Peking were already running away, and the
process of making livable such old ancestral mansions, where courtyard
rambles after courtyard, but where former glories have faded with years
of disrepair, would have taken too large a slice out of our time. To
rent a house even from the Chinese landlord who had renovated and
improved it purposely for the occupancy of foreigners was a complicated
process. First of all there was the inevitable bargaining, the landlord
starting at perhaps twice what he would accept and the renter at half
what he was prepared to pay; for it is still a rare Chinese, even in a
city as familiar with foreigners as is Peking, who can honestly name his
price at the beginning and stick to it. Nor were these dickerings
direct, even though my wife and our prospective landlord might have a
language in common. Go-betweens must “save face” on either side in case
the deal fell through. The houses for rent by Chinese were never
furnished; they usually lacked running water, sewers, bath-tubs,
electric light, and similar Western idiosyncrasies, though in cases
where the owner had in mind renting to foreigners preparations might
have been made to introduce these improvements. But unless he was sure
of getting a foreign occupant the landlord did not purpose to go to all
this trouble perhaps for nothing; in most cases his proposition was that
the renter put in these things at his own expense, with the doubtful
probability of having his rent reduced accordingly.

If the two parties did finally come to terms, the inexperienced renter
was likely to faint at the revelation of what still lay before him.
First he must pay three months’ rent in advance, which did not at all
mean that he would not have to pay again before the three months were
up. This payment would cover the first and the last months of the
occupancy, and the other third of the sum no month at all. It went as
_cumshaw_ or “squeeze” to every one concerned in the deal—except of
course the man who paid it—to be divided among all those who had in any
way taken part—the “boy” of an acquaintance who had pointed out the
house, the caretaker who had opened the door, the servant across the
street who knew the name of the landlord, the man who had fetched said
landlord, on up through all the go-betweens to the landlord himself.
Even the most generous of us hesitates to give tips of a hundred or a
hundred and fifty dollars, though it be only “Mex.” Then the papers in
the case must be sent to the legation of the foreigner involved, which
in due time would do to them whatever is customarily done, and pass them
on to the Chinese police. In Peking some officials work with unusual
promptitude (for China), so that the documents might be complete and
back in the hands of the landlord with a celerity that would be
vertiginous in the interior of the country—that is, with good luck, so
every one told us, within three or four months!

Then all at once there appeared a little Chinese house just about our
size, which an American missionary had recently civilized and was ready
to rent in the offhand fashion of our native land. For a week,
coolies—bowed under assorted articles of furniture picked up at auction
sales, bargained for piece by piece out in the maelstrom of the Chinese
City, in shops scattered elsewhere, and as a last resort made to order
by Chinese craftsmen of adaptable ability and very reasonable
demands—wandered up the little _hutung_ to our new home. A carpenter
produced from a scanty suggestion a four-posted crib with brilliant
dragons climbing each post; another stray artist covered the face of the
nursery wardrobe with a marvelous blue forest through which China’s most
famous actor, in his usual rôle of a willowy lady, strolled with a green
deer; most of the furnishings were purely Chinese, adapted as far as
possible to foreign use, and our chief regret was that this could be
only a temporary, and must therefore be an inexpensive, abode, in which
we could not indulge in the real beauties of Chinese trappings. As it
was, something between seven and eight hundred dollars had melted away
before we were done, and still no one would have mistaken the place for
a prince’s palace. But they were only “Mex” dollars, as is always the
case when one uses the word in China, and there was a chance that some
one might give us back a few of them when the time came to abandon
Peking and push on. Besides, either of the hotels would have taken the
dollars and not left us even the furniture.

By the time I returned from Urga we were ready to move in. Our Peking
home is out in the very eastern edge of the Tartar City, so close under
the East Wall that sunrise is always a little later with us than in the
capital as a whole. It is not easily found, for it opens off a narrow
_hutung_ of its own, a nameless little lane running head on into the
mighty wall, without another foreigner for several minutes’ walk in any
direction, and—since we are to cast aside reticence for the information
of other householders—the rent is seventy-five dollars “Mex” a month,
with no Oriental jokers in the lease. Before I have occasion to mention
them again, let me say that, though their value varies daily, the
dollars of China averaged a hundred and eighty-seven to a hundred of our
own during our winter in Peking. Wherever the words “dollar” or “cent”
appear hereafter in these pages they are of this cheaper variety.

It was a great change from the carefully tended Legation Quarter, with
its macadamed streets and tree-bordered sidewalks, its wide gateways
with vistas of one great power after another—though one comes to wonder
whether in China of to-day these powers are greater than they are
impotent—to cross Great Hata-men Street and strike off into the maze of
_hutungs_ to the east of it. But there the joy of a real home was
impressed upon us; we were living as we had long planned, in a Chinese
house among Chinese neighbors in Peking, the spell of the old capital,
of the real China, weaving itself all about us. Outwardly the place
would not be inviting to American tastes. But once a quick, light
tapping of the door-ring brings a “boy” to swing back the heavy halves
of the poetic red door we enter a very world of our own, completely shut
off from all but the sounds, and occasionally the smells, of the teeming
Chinese world about us. Its voices may drift over to us, but what does
it know of us within?

A Chinese house turned out to be a very pleasant place to live in. There
was pleasure even in having no stairs to climb, especially after being
on the top floor of a hotel where the elevator too often bore the sign
“No currency”; the delightful feeling of being at home as soon as the
red doors closed behind us was more real than we had ever felt it in any
of our Western abodes. Ours is a simple dwelling, to be sure, as befits
mere rolling stones. It has only one court, perhaps thirty feet square,
paved with gray mud bricks and surrounded by four separate little
low-browed houses of two rooms each, their roofs of curved tile slanting
down in a protective way, as if presaging hot summers or bitter winters.
Their bare backs are turned to the neighbors who crowd us on every side,
and their windows all face the court, take up all four sides of it, in
fact, for on the inside there are nothing but windows. At the top these
are lattices covered with the flimsy white paper so general in China,
easily renewed and much more adequate against heat or cold than one
would think; but foreign influence has put real glass in the lower
panes. One is not long in discovering that in Peking the main house
always faces south. If the compound is on the north side of the street
the best rooms are at the far back of it; if it is on the south side
they back up against the street wall, and so on. This most important
building almost always has a low wide porch, like ours, with a
pergola-roof over which plants rooted in the unpaved strips of earth
along the sides of the court can clamber. In summer it is the Peking
custom to have the courtyard covered by a _pêng_, a huge reed mat on
pole legs, high enough above the whole establishment to shade it without
cutting off the breeze—and always rented, by the way, from the
_pêng_-gild, which refuses to sell. But summer was waning when we moved
in, and for eight or nine months a year it would be a sacrilege to shut
out the brilliant blue sky that tents Peking, often without the tiniest
rent in it for weeks at a time. Even when the dry cold of a Peking
winter was at its sharpest we never regretted the separation of our
little houses which necessitated crossing the court and having another
glimpse of that unsullied blue sky and a breath of the outdoor air
whenever we went from one room to another.


The collecting of the requisite staff of servants was the mildest task
of all. In Peking, as in all China, human beings swarm so thickly that
the mere rumor of a desire for services is enough to bring many fold of
applicants. The wise thing for the new-comer is to hire his servants
through the servants of his friends, or in some such linked-up way. They
will no doubt have to pay their informants a certain “squeeze” for the
job, but one is protected from fly-by-night domestics whose antecedents
and family roots are unknown; though compared with the opportunities
which Chinese servants have for fleecing foreign employers they are
honesty personified. A staff thus recommended to us lined up for
inspection. There was an engaging-looking little cook nearing middle
life, a round-faced, too youthful “boy,” who, having once served in a
Japanese hotel and learned unpleasant habits, soon departed in favor of
a man from the interior of the province, and a tall, handsome Shantung
coolie. Then there came a wrinkled old rickshaw-man, one of the swiftest
runners in Peking for all his age, and finally, after more careful
picking, we chose the only feminine member of the staff, an _ama_ for
the most important task of all,—pursuing the younger generation. Then,
with a dose of interpreted orders, we were off.

For on one point we were adamant: we would not have an English-speaking
servant in the house. Chinese domestics who have even a smattering of
the language of their employers, we had already noted, are likely to be
impudent, to be experts in the matter of “squeeze,” and to demand what
in Peking are fabulous wages. Life is much simpler, too, when one can
talk freely without being understood by the servants. But the really
important motive was that we wished to learn Chinese, above all to have
the son who had lost his second birthday in crossing the Pacific learn
it, and not the atrocious Pidgin-English which constitutes the
linguistic lore of so many “boys” and _amas_. Looking back upon it we
can testify that there is no more direct road to a speaking knowledge of
even the Chinese language than living in the unbroken midst of it.

Down in the Legation Quarter people pay their servants two or three
times what is customary in the rest of Peking, to say nothing of the
“rake-off” which careless auditing and boastful living give them. Our
new staff named their own wages, but they named them on an uninflated
basis, so that both sides were satisfied. All except the _ama_
considered ten dollars a month a suitable return for their services,
though the rickshaw-man, of course, had to have eight more for the use
of his shining carriage, housed just within the outer door. The woman
stood out for fourteen, something more than the average in that quarter,
but she proved well worth it, for not only was hers the most responsible
job but the many other tasks that fall to an _ama’s_ lot made her
specially valuable. Besides their wages, Chinese servants get nothing,
legitimately, except the _k’ang_ they sleep on in their cramped
quarters, a basket of coal-balls now and then in the colder months, and
sometimes a garment used exclusively in their employer’s service. Their
food is their own affair. Thus our staff of five cost us sixty-two
“Mex,” or, to put it into American money, about thirty-five dollars gold
a month. In addition to this they expected cash presents at our
Christmas, their New Year, and when we should break up housekeeping,
totaling approximately an extra month’s wages.

Chinese servants have their faults, but when these are all summed up I
doubt whether they exceed those of domestics even in Europe, to say
nothing of our own land. Certainly life runs more smoothly under their
ministrations than the most willing and efficient of “hired girls” can
make it. Whether it is their natural temperament or merely a pride of
their calling, a surly face or manner, the faintest breath of impudence
or “back talk,” even when the lady of the house has been alone with them
for weeks at a time, have been as unknown in our circle as has a protest
against any task assigned them. They have their own ways of doing
things, but even these we have succeeded in changing where it was
essential to do so. The division of work is left to them, for this is a
matter in which one quickly finds it wise not to attempt to interfere.
If any of them has ever felt that he was being imposed upon by the
others, it was settled among themselves, and the matter never came to
our ears. There are no such things as afternoons off among Peking
servants; like their fellows, ours work, or at least are on call,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Once in a while the “boy” or
the coolie interrupts our evening reading for an instant by asking
permission to go out, but we have never known them to be missing when
next they are wanted. The rickshaw-man asked perhaps three or four times
during the winter to go and have something done to his vehicle, but only
in a few cases of misunderstanding was he not on hand when we wished him
to trot away with us, until with the coming of the Chinese New Year he
decided that he had held a steady job long enough. The _ama_ has two
small daughters, not to mention a husband and the inevitable
mother-in-law, at her home not half an hour away, yet though she has
never been discouraged in doing so I doubt whether she has gone to see
them a dozen times during the winter, and whenever she does she brings
back some gay and not always inexpensive Chinese toy to her appreciative
charge, as if to make up for the presumption of leaving him. It is
really more than that, of course, like the constant kindnesses of all
the servants toward him, for nowhere could a small boy be more royally
treated than among the child-loving Chinese.

Though we have never gone deeply into the matter, the work of each
servant seems to be definitely fixed by custom. The rickshaw-man sweeps
the court in the morning, unless he is busy with his chief duty, and
keeps an ear on the door-knocker. The “boy” combines the lighter tasks
of butler and chambermaid, and in general acts as a buffer between us
and the outside world. The coolie does most of the rough labor,
including the floors, the stoves, the washing, both of dishes and
clothing, and the ironing, producing dress-shirts that would make the
best steam-laundries in the United States blush with shame, if they were
capable of any such display of emotion, and pressing even feminine
evening frills with the deft hand of a French maid. In the time left
over from her chief duty the _ama_ does much of the sewing and many of
those little odds and ends which in other lands make up the drudgery of
a housewife. Since a daughter joined us in the spring she has performed
her augmented task with the same ever cheerful efficiency.


The cook is more of a free lance, with very definite duties, including a
daily trip to market. In China as a whole the _tsoa-fan-ti_ and the
mistress have a frequent meeting over his account-book, but in Peking
there is a wide-spread custom euphonistically known as “boarding with
the cook.” It simplifies the task of keeping him in hand, especially for
a _tai-tai_ speaking a very limited amount of Chinese, to set a fixed
price for the day’s food and leave the rest to the Celestial kitchen. We
adopted this custom, and have found it not only satisfactory but as
economical as our friends report the other method to be. For Rachel and
myself we dole out a dollar a day each, and half as much for the
youngster. This includes everything that comes to the table except the
morning bottle of milk and those nefarious products of France and Italy
in similar containers with which I or our guests choose to flout our
constitutions and that of our native land. The spenders among the
foreign colony of Peking will undoubtedly, if it ever comes to their
attention, sneer at the paucity of this sum; perhaps those who have
deigned to accept our hospitality will say, “I thought so.” But I have
promised to be frank. We are simple people, with tastes which do not
daily require such viands as are commonly symbolized as quail on toast.
As a matter of fact we often do have just that, for there is probably no
capital in the world where game is more plentiful and cheaper than in
the Peking markets. Certainly we never go hungry, and what that cook can
do for a whole day with a sum that would not leave enough for a tip
after a single luncheon in a very modest New York restaurant would give
an American the false impression that the high cost of living has never
come to China.

We live mainly on Chinese products, augmented by such foreign delicacies
as cocoa, coffee, canned milk, imported butter, spices, jam, bacon, and
the like, all furnished out of the cook’s stipend. Eggs, I believe,
reached the height of an American cent each during midwinter; a chicken
of moderate size costs from fifty to sixty coppers, which is not more
than sixteen cents in real money. The far-famed Peking duck, which dot
with white the moat just over the wall from us, would be a more serious
acquisition, being in great demand among Chinese epicures; but squab,
plump and tender, sells for the equivalent of a nickel each, and the
succession of snipe, pigeons, partridge, pheasants, and wild duck that
have graced our board would be luxuries to a war profiteer at home.
Vegetables are plentiful in Peking, but the choice of meat is limited.
Pork, beloved by all Chinese, foreigners eschew as a matter of course;
if they have not seen what Chinese pigs feed on they are sure to have
heard. Peking beef has the reputation of being the flesh of animals that
have outlived their usefulness as beasts of burden rather than of those
raised for food. Now and again, as the hungry militarists have boosted
octroi duties at the city gates, the sheep butchers have gone on strike,
which is particularly a hardship to Peking’s large Mohammedan
population. But fowl, wild and tame, is always on hand to make up for
any such catastrophe. We found Chinese corn meal and millet and a native
brown but excellent cream of wheat preferable to the breakfast cereals
from across the Pacific. Chinese pears, and especially the big golden
persimmons which last almost all winter, are no poor substitutes for the
California oranges sold in at least one foreign-goods grocery at three
for a dollar. Now and then “Ta-shih-fu” takes a flier in desserts. Like
all Peking chefs he prefers to make a thing which is fearful and
wonderful to behold but which is a trial of temper and skill to the
guest who has first to cut into it. There is that infamous “Peking
dust,” a wall of glacéd fruits enclosing a mound of grated chestnuts of
exactly the consistency, though by no means the splendid taste, of
sawdust, and doted on, unfortunately, by that member of the family with
most influence in the kitchen. Sometimes dinner is topped off with a
pastry-and-cake basket, handle and all, full of custard and nuts. But
all such weaknesses are amply made up for by the fact that pies worthy
of the proudest New England housewife often come from the kitchen,
usually labeled in the white of an egg with poetic Chinese characters.
These literary effusions are seldom missing on any formal dessert, if
there is space to get them in; when our first national holiday came
there appeared a brave pink and green iced cake with the greeting
“Thanksgiver Day” written boldly across it.

Our cook is noteworthy among his tribe in that he can prepare a Chinese
as well as a foreign meal, and two or three times a week this wholly
different but no less enjoyable repast adorns our table, chop-sticks and
all. In general he is given a free rein in selection, so long as he has
a certain balance in menu, and using his excellent Chinese judgment he
dines us almost too well, and no doubt, in the time-honored Chinese way,
pockets the coppers left over. We do not know that our cook “squeezes” a
cent, but if he does not he should be drummed out of the Chinese cooks’
union, if there is such a thing. For it is taken for granted by all
foreigners in China that their cooks believe a certain legitimate
“squeeze” is attached to the job, and though it takes an American
housewife some time to reconcile herself to it, old foreign residents
would be much put out to find that the rule is not general. Popular
tradition has it that all cooks put into their own pockets a certain
percentage of all money given them to spend; 5 per cent seems to be the
accepted amount among foreigners in Peking, except in the Legation
Quarter, where there are no definite limits. There are innumerable
anecdotes illustrating this custom. Missionary cooks, boasting
themselves Christians, have laid up small fortunes on their eight or ten
“Mex” dollars a month. I know of one who, from the day his service
began, made it an invariable rule to take six coppers for every person
he cooked for during the day, and he now owns two modern houses which he
rents to foreigners.

We have often wondered just how much our cook manages to lay aside.
There is no way of finding out, for the Chinese market-man is ever
faithful to his own people in any controversy with the “outside
barbarian,” and the custom is so perfectly legitimate in the cookly mind
that no pricking of conscience ever sullies the frank and smiling face
of the king of our kitchen. In overcrowded China it has been the
practice for centuries to fee any one who brings a job or a client, and
even if the foreigner went to market himself he would not save the
“rake-off”; in fact he would probably lose money. For the market-man
does not quote a foreigner the price to which a Chinese cook will
finally bring him down, and no grocer is going to tell his client when
he pays his monthly bill that 5 per cent of it will go to his cook as
soon as he comes in when there are no telltale foreigners looking on.
Yet supernatural as the Chinese are in slicing off a “cash” or a copper
where even a French eye could not possibly detect any such protuberance,
we do not see how our cook can have made a fortune on the leavings.
Including his six dollars for kitchen fuel he has eighty-one dollars a
month to feed us on when I am at home. When we go out to dinner of
course he is not the loser; extra money for invited guests gives him a
trifle more leeway; possibly he sells a tin can or a bottle now and then
to the constantly passing peddlers, though we have never seen any
evidence of stooping to such methods. Yet his wages have never been
higher than with us, at least since his youthful days as a retainer in
the Manchu court, and, for all that, he has educated two of his four
boys into fine, upstanding, well dressed young men with enough English
to take important positions with foreign firms; the third is already
well along the same road, and no doubt the youngest, who romps about all
day in a neighboring _hutung_, will be similarly provided. We have never
quite reconciled those grown sons to our little cook, still well on the
sunny side of middle age; but in China, of course, the generations
succeed themselves swiftly. We may be wronging him in assuming that he
does not spend on us all we give him for that purpose, and if so I
apologize. If we are not, he certainly is welcome to all he has kept,
for he has served us for eight months in an unobtrusive, efficient, and
most agreeable manner.

Chinese of standing have let us into a few of the secrets of life among
house servants. Most cooks, at least for foreigners, are not Peking men,
it seems, but come in from the country. Having no family to support in
the capital, those earning ten dollars a month, eating leftovers—though
few Chinese servants care for foreign food—and spending perhaps two
dollars a month of their own, can send home about a hundred dollars a
year. Those with families in Peking have to devise methods for
augmenting their wages; therefore they do not consider those methods
dishonest. One might ask, why not pay the man a living wage to begin
with and then expect him to be honest? Alas, centuries of the other plan
have made that contrary to the Chinese way of thinking. The moment you
pay a servant more than the market price he takes you for a gullible
victim or a millionaire and “squeezes” all the more. It is the Chinese
system, and many a foreigner has broken his head against it in vain.

A genuine cook to foreigners owes it to his dignity to have an
apprentice assistant, just as he must ride to and from market in a
rickshaw. Not long after we settled down, “Ta-shih-fu” asked permission
to bring into the kitchen his younger brother, whose profession of
torturing a Chinese violin seemed to be in ever decreasing demand. There
he has remained month after month, learning the rudiments of foreign
cooking, until he has gathered sufficient audacity to go and cook for
foreigners himself, thereby making his future secure. But never has it
been so much as hinted that we should pay him anything; his wageless
standing is perfectly in keeping with the Chinese scheme of things, and
no one would be more surprised than he or his brother if we offered him
money.


Whatever we can say for our cook we can testify that the “boy” who has
been with us since the second month is honest even in the Western sense.
He is, we hasten to admit, different from the rank and file of “boys” to
foreigners in Peking; no doubt they would dub him “queer.” He comes from
somewhere ’way down the province, well off the railroad, and seems
deliberately to refuse to learn the tricks of the capital. Down there he
has a wife of seventeen, perhaps forced upon him by his parents in the
customary Chinese manner; at least he has never shown any desire to go
home, not even at New Year’s. But then, he is past forty. His service is
so constant that we have sometimes urged him to go out more often, but
he replies with a smile that he has few friends in Peking and nowhere to
go. Once or twice a month he calls in a passing barber, and perhaps he
has stepped out half a dozen times during the winter on a brief personal
errand—except that, as regularly as fortnightly pay-day comes round, he
goes to send a letter home. The extent to which Chinese families pool
their incomes, with some grandfather or mother-in-law as treasurer,
would take almost any American’s breath away. We have many a time caught
this extraordinary “boy” carefully avoiding chances to “squeeze,”
passing on to the other servants buying errands assigned him, lest we
suspect him of taking a commission. Once a tourist couple dropped in for
tea, and having traveled too fast to orientalize the point of view of
their native Chicago, surreptitiously slipped a silver dollar into the
“boy’s” palm as he opened the door at their departure. He did not faint;
hence we might never have known of that social blunder if the “boy” had
not rushed back as soon as the door was closed, his outstretched hand
offering us the coin. I warned you he was queer; I am not sure but that
the normal “boy” of Peking would not consider him downright crazy. But
honesty and diligence, alas, are not always sufficient in this miserable
world. When we move on we despair of finding this “boy” another place
more than any of the others, for his stock of self-confidence is as
scanty as his integrity is unusual.

The normal Peking “boy,” particularly if he knows some English, is
usually the general factotum of a foreign household. Many foreigners
never speak to their other servants but transmit all orders through the
“boy,” or, if the staff is large, through “number one boy.” Some of the
older and more experienced of these take on the efficiency and the
manner of old English butlers; they can arrange anything, from a
dinner-party on Christmas to a picnic out at the Temple of Heaven by
moonlight, at a mere hint from their socially busy mistresses. But we
much prefer our type of “boy.” Though they may succeed in keeping their
own employers in ignorance of that fact, the observant guest can hardly
fail to see that these efficient head servants grow scornful toward
their subordinates and often despise foreigners in general and the
family they serve in particular. Obviously their “squeeze” increases
with their importance and their opportunities. Some of them make
fortunes out of the peddlers and shopkeepers whose patronage they
recommend, and positions under them are not had for the mere asking. The
“boy” of an American official in Peking came to his mistress one day and
insisted on giving her a present worth easily his year’s salary, saying
he had become a Christian and hence was “ashamed for the much money” he
had been given by those who sold things to the family and to their many
tourist guests—and begged her to accept this customary percentage on his
winnings. How the _t’ing-ch’ai_, or topmost “boy” in a foreign legation,
makes use of his opportunities is a story worth telling, but that would
be trespassing into the realms of high finance.


The long, handsome Shantung coolie, who laundered dress-shirts and
pressed georgette evening-gowns with such amazing skill, turned out to
be a contrast to the “boy,” and was destined to depart suddenly about
the middle of January. At first the _tai-tai_ used to “call the coal,”
but Wang had gradually taken over the task and was getting it for as low
a price as she—I am sure I am not doing Wang an injury by mentioning his
name, any more than I should by specifying an American called Smith. The
coal, however, seemed to burn up faster and faster, and each alleged ton
piled against the wall of the little back court at the front of our
compound looked smaller. One day we questioned its size, and Wang
promptly guaranteed to make it last the month out. That would have been
physically impossible, yet last it did. Other suspicious little things
began to gather about the tall handsome coolie. None of them were
definite, however, and Wang might be with us yet but for the other
servants, though I fancy he would have hanged himself alone in time. A
whisper from the _ama_ caused Rachel to “call” the next ton herself, and
to borrow scales from an American friend down the _hutung_. It was a
cold evening when the ton arrived, but we persisted in watching it
unloaded, weighed, and carried in. But why were there not sixteen sacks,
as the silky Chinese dealer just outside Hata-men had promised, and why
did twelve sacks total five hundred _chin_ more than a ton? It took us
until next day to find out.

The scales, of course, being Chinese, consisted of a mere stick with
marks on it; but for the same reason it would have been impossible for
them to be as simple and straightforward as they looked. All such scales
have _two_ loops by which to suspend them, and Wang assured us that both
of these were used at once. That was all. Even the lady down the street
who had been using them all winter did not know the difference. When at
last we learned the Chinese trick of the scales the missing four bags
were easily accounted for; and a little more trouble, mainly for the
benefit of foreign residents in general, brought the blackened
cart-driver over to confess that Wang had intercepted him just around
the corner from us and sold the four bags to a little coal-yard almost
behind our bedrooms—the same one, of course, from which he had bought
back enough to fulfil his guarantee. The night before, Wang having asked
permission to go out and get his hair cut, or something of the sort, we
had been startled to have all the other servants irrupt upon us over our
evening lamp, smiling nervously, but saying through the cook as
spokesman that they could not endure our being misled about the missing
man any longer. He was keeping bad company nights, they announced with
visible unwillingness; he often brought in friends to sleep on their
already crowded _k’ang_; coppers were sticking to his fingers in a way
which apparently even a cooks’ union could not approve.

Chinese servants are not in the habit of tattling against one another to
their masters, and things must have come to a pretty pass to bring about
this unusual scene. But we waited until we had other proof that it was
not merely a case of spite; then we spoke gently to Wang as he was
stirring the fire in my office next afternoon. There were four bags of
coal missing from the ton of the night before, we confided to him, and
as we did not wish to have the police mixed up in so small a matter we
wondered if perhaps he could trace them. Then we went out to tea. That
evening found us without a coolie; he had folded up his bed and
departed, and he has never been back to claim the three or four days’
wages due him.

Wang is a handsome youth, to Chinese eyes, and naturally he needed more
money than his older stick-at-home colleagues. Besides, he did more hard
work than all the others. If he had come to me privately and whispered
his troubles, I think I should have been tempted to give him a monthly
bonus, if he could have convinced me that the other servants would not
hear of it, rather than see him depart; for never again in this
imperfect world do I hope to display such gleaming shirt-bosoms as Wang
furnished me. The _ama_ promptly introduced her husband as coolie, and
he has proved satisfactory, besides being under a watchful eye that
completely belies the accepted notions of the position of wives in the
Chinese scheme of things. But stiff shirts go to a professional laundry
now, and though a new front costs there just one-tenth what it would in
New York, they have lost that final touch of perfection, of youth and
genius, which Wang put upon them.

But on the whole our Peking servants are good, as human beings the world
over go, for all the Wangs among them. I shall have forgotten their
faults long before I forget the motherly care they have taken of my
family during my long absences, the tasteful little presents they gave
my wife on her birthday when I was not there to give her any myself, and
the grandfatherly way they have with our small son.

I should be sorry, however, if I have given the false impression that
living is on the whole much cheaper for the foreigner in Peking than at
home, thereby causing our no doubt overworked State Department to be
bombarded with ten-dollar bills and demands for passports. Whether it is
because low prices tempt one to spend more than one could if they were
high, or that the absurd cost of certain necessary things physically or
mentally imported from the Western world mount up faster than seems
possible, we find that we are spending quite as much in Peking as we did
in New York, and we do not play bridge or the races.

The Chinese way of housekeeping, as we have pieced it together from bits
of information picked up among our native acquaintances, is quite
different from that of foreign residents. According to them,
middle-class Chinese families usually have two servants—an _ama_ and a
cook. The _ama_ does the washing and all the general housework, at least
in the women’s apartments. Obviously the Chinese would be horrified
beyond speech at the goings-on in foreigners’ houses; the “boy” of our
white-haired compatriot down the _hutung_, for instance, lays out her
most intimate garments when he judges it is time for her to change! Such
an _ama_ receives from one to two dollars a month, and a “present” of
two or three dollars at each of the four principal Chinese holidays.
Servants in native families are also given their rice, the monthly rice
allowance for the whole household being fixed and the domestics eating
the poorest quality. But they must have more income, and that is where
gambling comes in. Much of this goes on in the average Chinese home,
even among the women and their feminine guests in the afternoons. For
every dollar staked ten cents is set aside by custom as _cumshaw_ for
the servants. Cigarettes sold at eight coppers a package around the
corner cost the family and its guests ten, and so on. But gambling is
the important thing. Servants in wealthy or political families, where
high stakes are the rule, may get as much as a hundred dollars a month.
A trustworthy Chinese informant told us that the one question always
asked him by a prospective servant is some form of, “Is there gambling?”
Where there is not, it is hard to get and keep good servants. In these
days of comparative poverty in Peking those who cannot find places with
foreigners, or have not the courage and adaptability such positions
require, often have a hard time of it.


It would not be just, as well as being a sad blow to his pride, to
mention Li _Hsien-sheng_ among our servants. Mr. Li is our Chinese
teacher. By our own choice he, too, speaks no English, so that our
introduction to the language is by the method by which children learn
one. He comes for an hour every afternoon, and carries away a ten-dollar
bill at the end of each month. Yet he is something of a scholar, even
if, like all his colleagues we have so far tried, not much of a teacher.
However, I must not be too severe toward those numerous men of Peking
who eke out a livelihood by guiding the barbarian within its gates into
the mysteries of their strange tongue. At least they earn all they are
paid, and if one learns to use them mainly as a dictionary, the result
may be more worth while than at first seems possible. Nor is this the
place to express my opinions, harsh or genial, on the incredible Chinese
language. Suffice it for the moment to say that we both soon found
ourselves able to express our simple desires to the servants without
calling in some more experienced friend, and by midwinter could make
ourselves understood to merchants keenly eager to understand us. The
more diligent, stay-at-home, and mentally alert member of the family
quickly left me in the linguistic background, but even she cannot keep
pace with “Ha-li,” as the Chinese call my son and namesake. Though his
third birthday is still ahead of him, he is already the family authority
on tones and similar bugbears of the adult student of the Celestial
vernacular, and I should hesitate to pit myself against him even in a
test of vocabulary. I can only plead that it is an unfair advantage in
acquiring a new language not to be able to speak any other when the
acquisition begins.

Besides, what chance does an overworked father have compared to the
opportunities of childhood? When “Ha-li” is not up on the wall
discussing with the guardians who live there whatever he and they have
in common, or chatting in Chinese with playmates whose mother-tongue may
be that of anywhere from Brittany to Odessa, he is listening to the
voices of the world outside our compound as they drift over to us. He
has already picked up more hawkers’ cries than an adult ear can
distinguish, and totes his basket about the courtyard shouting his
wares, hand to ear in the Peking venders’ fashion, in tones so exactly
those of the original outside that we often wonder what that original
thinks of his echo. Daylight brings a never ending succession of these
hawkers, from the cereal-man so early in the morning that surely no one
could have the appetite to call him in, to the seller of sweetmeats so
late at night that none but habitually hungry people could still be
thinking of food. Our neighbors probably do some cooking of their own,
but they save much fuel by patronizing these itinerant restaurants, the
more sumptuous of them push-carts of a very Chinese type, most of them
mere baskets oscillating from shoulder-poles. The people about us seem
to have no fixed meal-hours, if indeed they keep any track of time at
all. They eat one by one as appetite moves them or as coppers are
available, and as surely as we leave home we will see a child or two, a
woman, or some other solitary member of a large family squatted in the
dirty little _hutung_ beside their door engrossed in the contents of a
bowl that has been rented, chop-sticks and all, from the vender who
waits so patiently for the transaction to be completed that he does not
seem to realize he is waiting.

Some of the street cries are almost musical, even to our Western ears;
some hawkers use instruments to spare their voices. The barber twangs
what looks like a gigantic pair of tweezers; the knife- and
scissor-sharpener blows a long horn or clashes together half a dozen
heavy steel pieces carried only for that purpose; the toy-and-candy man
has his gong, the china-riveter his swinging bells, the blind man his
reed pipe, or his big brass disk, and his long tapping cane, and the
water-seller has, of course, his squeaking wheelbarrow. The croak of the
oil-man suggests some superannuated frog; the jolly old fellow who
peddles Chinese wine from a beautiful copper urn has a succession of
hoarse shouts that never vary; the cabbage-man, the peanut-man, the
delicatessen wagon, so to speak, even the rag-picking women, all have
their own cries, distinctive, yet unintelligible until one has learned
them by rote rather than by meaning, as Peking did generations ago. Even
we dull-eared adults know nearly all of them now, and are conscious of
something missing if they fail to come at the usual hour, which is a
rare lapse indeed. One fellow sings what might almost be a bar from some
Italian opera. He is the gramophone-man, carrying his box and his big
tin horn, and offering to play his well worn Chinese records for those
families that have the coppers to spend on mere entertainment. The
seller of fritters also comes near being a singer, with a lilting
refrain that stays with one long after he has passed. But all in all the
cries are disappointing. Though some start off as music, even though it
be of the falsetto kind beloved of the Chinese, they almost invariably
bring up somewhere in a sudden raucous shout that spoils them. Perhaps,
as even some foreign enthusiasts insist, our Western ears are tuned only
to the simplicity of Western music; our scale of eight tones may be
crude as compared with the twenty-five gradations of the Chinese. But I
doubt it. I have tried to imagine that haunting street-cry which trills
through the opera “Louise” ending in a shrill shout. Surely its lyric
quality would not thus be improved. Yet all this does not mean that our
Peking cries are displeasing. Their fascination is something subtle, and
we shall be sorry to move on again out of their orbit.

[Illustration:

  At Chinese New Year the streets of Peking were gay with all manner of
    things for sale, such as these brilliantly colored paintings of
    native artists
]

[Illustration:

  A rich man died in our street; and among other things burned at his
    grave, so that he would have them in after life, were this
    “automobile” and two “chauffeurs”
]

[Illustration:

  A neighbor who gave his birds a daily airing
]

[Illustration:

  Just above us on the Tartar Wall were the ancient astronomical
    instruments looted by the Germans in 1900 and recently returned, in
    accordance with a clause in the Treaty of Versailles
]

There may be a gauntlet a block long of merry but habitually unwashed
children, chanting their incessant “Ee mao ch’ien! Ee mao ch’ien!” (“One
dime money!”) as often as they catch sight of us, and the daily beggar
of our section, with his “Lao yea tai-tai! Lao yea tai-tai!” (“Old
gentleman lady!”) that wheezes down the scale in so persuasive a manner,
is frequently out-shouted by his poaching rivals; but once the gate of
the nearest wall-ramp is locked behind us by the keeper who jogs down at
the tinkling of his little bell we are as free from such annoyances as
from the dust and the forgotten garbage along the _hutungs_. For the
Chinese are not allowed on the wall. That is, the great rank and file
are not, and those of the better class who care that much for physical
exercise are few, so that the top of the great Tartar Wall is almost a
foreigners’ private promenade. None of our servants, not even those born
in Peking, had ever been admitted to it until they appeared at the foot
of our ramp with “Ha-li” as a passport. For that matter nearly all those
wonderful monuments which even the three-day tourist has visited are
closed to them, either by rule or by the high cost of admission.
Scandalous, no doubt, from the Western democratic point of view;
pathetic when we imbue our servants with our own feelings. But it never
seems to have occurred to them that it is unjust—if it is. For to throw
open the wall to the general public of Peking for a single week would
make it an impassable stretch of filth, sleeping beggars, and jostling
coolies; and in a month even what is left of its parapets would have
been thrown down for the building of new hovels inside it or out.

When we came at the end of summer the top of the wall was a jungle, in
places almost impassable, gay with morning-glories and other flowers, a
broad hayfield even in its least fertile portions. By December
hay-makers and fuel-gatherers had made it a wind-swept concourse almost
fit for an automobile race, half a dozen cars abreast, except for that
short piece of it between Hata-men and the gate by which the emperor
once came and went, where it is in the hands of the foreign legations
below. On the brilliant spring Sunday not long ago that I made the
circuit of the wall this autumn’s harvest was already promised in the
delicate green that was spreading along it, as it was across the great
tree-topped city it encloses. That stroll of twelve or thirteen miles is
almost a complete course in Chinese life and history, at least of recent
centuries; but what lies outside our immediate neighborhood is another
story. From that bit of the wall just above us which is our principal
playground there is enough of interest within plain view, from the
courtyards of our neighbors below to the distant range of the Western
Hills half enclosing the plain of Peking, to make it a loafer’s
paradise. The streets down below may seem mere miserable lanes to those
of us from the West, and the dwelling-places drab and uninspiring; but
inside the compounds trees are general, so that Peking from aloft is
pleasantly, almost thickly, wooded. Every city, from incessantly
grumbling New York to the hillside town with its church- and cow-bells,
has a voice of its own, and that of Peking resembles no other I have
ever heard. It is made up mainly of street-cries, from venders,
rickshaw-men asking right of way, from shouting carriage out-runners,
never completely blending together but still retaining a certain
individuality, so that from the top of her wall Peking sounds like the
tail-end of some great football game, with the victorious rooters still
sporadically shouting their pæans of glee as they disperse to the four
points of the compass.




                              CHAPTER XII
                          JOGGING ABOUT PEKING


There are various ways of getting about Peking, even though it lacks the
principal one of most large cities in other lands; but of them all I
like best riding “Hwei-Hwei.” He is the robust, shaggy-red little
Chinese pony I brought back from one of my trips into the interior, and
if he has not yet learned to look with equanimity upon a scrap of paper
or a wheedling beggar that suddenly springs up at him, at least he can
pass an automobile now without filling the timid hearts of all Chinese
within gunshot with speechless panic. “Hwei-Hwei” and I have jogged
together all over Peking and its surroundings, nosing our way through
the _hutungs_ and prancing down the broad streets of the Chinese as well
as the Tartar City, exploring every sunken road and meandering path
within reasonable distance outside the walls. I am under the impression
that this is improper. Though the élite among the foreign residents play
polo on the French drill-field and scamper over the broken landscape
about the capital on Sunday afternoon paper-chases, even canter solemnly
up and down the new cinder track at the edge of the Legation Quarter,
each followed at a respectful distance by the _mafu_ who will presently
walk the blanketed and almost shaven native imitations of thoroughbreds
slowly up and down before some improvised stable, I gather from the
glances that are thrown sharply upon us that mere sight-seeing on
horseback is not in accordance with the Peking social code. I am
heartbroken, naturally, at the thought of infringing that vital
document; but the opportunity of indulging in a luxury I have never
before dared even to consider has outweighed even that consideration.

The truth of the matter is that keeping a riding-horse is a luxury even
in Peking. “Hwei-Hwei’s” complete care and nourishment cost just twice
what one human servant does; yet the reflection that this is, after all,
only “Mex” and only relative has so far been sufficient to stifle the
grumblings of a troublesome conscience. I suppose, too, there is a
certain subconscious complacency in looking down, even from
“Hwei-Hwei’s” height, upon the throngs with which we mingle in places
where perhaps no other foreigner, and surely no Chinese, has ever before
intruded on horseback. Certainly I must confess that I find pleasure in
watching the continuous succession of acrobatic feats with which
Pekingese of all ages and degrees remove themselves from the immediate
vicinity the instant it is borne in upon them that they are mingling
with an animal that I can guarantee not to hurt an infant thrown under
his very hoofs.

Outdoor fairs, seasonal markets, temples without number, corners unknown
even to our Chinese teacher, have “Hwei-Hwei” and I explored together.
But there is a line beyond which his advantages over Peking’s more
common means of transportation cease. Even if it is possible to park him
outside those ugly buildings in which China’s Parliament flings
ink-wells at itself and refuses to draft a constitution even after it
has voted itself a daily bonus for attending the sessions, he can
scarcely expect admittance to the Forbidden City, or ask an evening
hostess to find accommodations for him. When “Hwei-Hwei” must remain at
home there are various substitutes, but only one of them is really
feasible. Sedan-chairs, in these modern days, are only for brides and
mourners, or the emperor himself; there are jolting Peking-carts which
it would be infantile yet exactly descriptive to dub “peek-out” carts;
mule-litters like gaily decorated cupboards on shafts come in at least
from the northeast; on the moats outside the walls there are boats in
summer and sleds in winter—except when the men laying up ice in mat- and
mud-covered mounds along them deprive their fellow-coolies of this
simple source of income; bicycles are not unknown; curious little
one-horse carriages with shutters, and an outrunner who clings on behind
whenever a corner or a crowd does not bring him running ahead to lead
the horse or to shout the road clear, are still the favorite equipage of
old-fashioned families of means. But none of these things ply the
streets for hire; if they did they would be beneath the dignity of
foreigners, and probably of many Chinese unconsciously under their
influence. Ordinary mortals cannot call an automobile every time they
wish to go around the corner, even if their nerves are proof against the
madness of Chinese chauffeurs. Promoted only yesterday from the abject
position of coolies, these conceive that they always have the right of
way over anything they could best in a collision—an impression in which
they are abetted by the police who, with outstretched hand, gaze only at
the machine, like men fascinated, as it dashes drunkenly past through
the maelstrom of pedestrians and other helpless forms of traffic—and,
evidently gaining “face” thereby, they delight to make life a constant
misery to the passenger by the incessant use of those atrocious horns
that seem especially to be exported to China. So it boils down to the
omnipresent rickshaw.

We often wondered how many rickshaws there are in Peking, until at
length the metropolitan police reported that they had registered 41,553
such vehicles, of which 4,788 are private. Even if this really includes
all those within the gates, there are thousands more in the dozen
villages clustered close outside them, whence men run to places many
miles distant. We still wonder how Peking got about in the imperial days
before an American missionary in Japan, wishing to give his invalid wife
a daily airing, invented the rickshaw. As late as the beginning of the
present century, old residents tell us, this vehicle was unknown in the
capital. To-day it is the most numerous, or at least the most
conspicuous, thing in Peking.

Who but a man gone mad on the matter of speed would not prefer the
rickshaw to the automobile after all? Silent on its pneumatic tires and
the soft-shod feet of the runner, it is the most nearly like sitting at
home in an arm-chair of any form of transportation. There is no
formality about it; even the man who does not keep one for his exclusive
use scarcely needs to call one, for it is a strange corner of Peking
where a rickshaw is not already waiting whenever he steps out. Once in a
rickshaw one can leave it to the runner to arrive at the right place,
and turn the mind to the streets and their doings. It is not merely
“Ha-li” who is so fond of “widin’ man,” though he is the only one of us
who shouts aloud at each donkey and big stone “pup dog” we pass,
especially at the camels as they stride noiselessly by along the wall or
through a city gate, whenever we ride hither and yon about busy yet
good-natured Peking.

The police go on to say that from sixty to seventy thousand rickshaw
coolies earn an average of a hundred coppers a day, of which about
seventy are for themselves and their families after deducting the rent
of the vehicle. That means a daily income of nearly twenty cents in real
money, which is high in Peking. An official inquiry, by the way,
reported during the winter that the minimum on which a Chinese adult
could support life in the capital is $1.87 “Mex” a month! One
particularly cold winter, foreigners, especially women, almost ceased to
patronize rickshaws, not so much for their own sake as for that of the
poor fellows who sat outside waiting for them, and sometimes froze to
death. It devolved upon the police to call their attention to the fact
that death by starvation is even more painful, and is likely to include
the dependents also. I suppose that same omniscient body could say how
many persons starve to death in Peking each winter; at any rate they
once announced how many hundreds of free coffins they had been called
upon to provide since cold weather set in.

Perhaps the constant sight of starvation more or less close upon their
heels is the reason that Peking rickshaw-men are such excellent runners.
They never slow down to a walk, as the much better paid ones of Japan,
for instance, do on the slightest provocation. If the trot from our
corner to Hsi-Chi-men station, diagonally across the Tartar City, is too
much for one of them he turns his fare over to an unoccupied colleague
when he is exhausted rather than disgrace himself by walking. Yet I have
almost never seen a well built rickshaw-man in Peking. Their ribs show
plainly through their leathery skins, and they are conspicuously
flat-chested, in contrast to the men all about China who carry burdens
over their shoulders. The belief that rickshaw-runners die young and
often is wide-spread, especially in lands that have never seen one. The
only personal testimony I can offer on the subject is that during this
year in the Orient I have never seen, or heard of, a man dying in the
shafts, and that there are many jobs in China that I would quickly
refuse in favor of drawing a rickshaw. Certainly many runners, not to
mention the vehicles themselves, reach a ripe old age in Peking; and
there is evidence that they do not take up the profession late in life.

Some one once wrote asking us to send a copy of the child labor laws of
China. When we had recovered from the resultant hysterics I went out to
photograph some of the smallest specimens of rickshaw-runners along
Great Hata-men Street for the benefit of the inquirer. Unfortunately a
good example and photographic conditions never have coincided. I do not
wish to be charged with exaggeration, and hence I will not assert that I
have seen two boys of six or a single one of eight trotting about town
with a big fat sample of the Chinese race lolling at his ease behind
them; but I have no hesitancy in reporting that male children of eight
and ten respectively may often be seen thus engaged. Perhaps these are
house-servants or their offspring, or even members of the family itself,
forced into service; more than once I have been sure of a facial
resemblance between the perspiring youngsters and the unsoaped old lady
who was urging them on. Often a small boy runs behind, pushing, who is
hardly as tall as the hub of the wheel, but perhaps that is a form of
apprenticeship. Recently there has been some agitation against employing
rickshaw pullers under eighteen, though apparently only among
foreigners. The Chinese of the rank and file bargain for their rides as
they stump along, pretending they will walk rather than pay more than
they are offering, and naturally they wish to be surrounded by as many
clamoring competitors as possible. If the lowest bidder chances to be a
child just heavy enough to keep the passenger from toppling over
backward, or an old man who looks as if he had been unwisely rescued
from the potter’s field, _bu yao gin_—it does not matter, for the
average Chinese hardly distinguishes between real speed and a steady
jogging up and down almost in the same spot.

In contrast to these sorry dregs of the profession are the haughty men
in the prime of life who run on a monthly wage for foreigners, or for
Chinese of wealth and official position, some of them in livery and with
clanging bells and blazing lamps that attest their importance. The tall
youth who runs with a physically light-weight young lady of our
acquaintance always calls a rickshaw when he wishes to go out on a
personal errand. Well fed and not overworked, these private human
trotters are often marvels of speed and endurance. I would like nothing
better than to enter our wrinkled old _la-che-ti_ in an Olympic
marathon—though foreigners who have tried that sort of test find that
the men cannot run without their vehicle, which is so balanced as to
help lift them off the ground. Like the runners, the rickshaws of Peking
range all the way from filthy half-wrecks to rickshaw-limousines. The
former are due both to the Chinese blindness to uncleanliness and to the
fact that, human fares lacking, they are ready to accept any form of
freight, be it even the bleeding carcass of a hog. The vehicle looking
tolerable, however, most of us pick our rickshaw-men exactly as we would
a horse, except that age is fairly apparent without examining the teeth.

Slavery is a dreadful institution, but if millions of the human
draft-animals of China were slaves they would at least be sure of a
place to sleep and something fit to eat. Yet they are a cheerful,
good-hearted, likable lot of fellows, these swarming rickshaw-runners of
Peking, amusing in their primitive ways. However much they may arouse
sympathy, for instance, there is no surer means of being involved in a
noisy dispute than by overpaying them. Find out the legal fare and pay
it, and the chances are that your runner will accept it without a word
and rate you a person of experience and understanding, for all your
strange race. The louder and longer you wish him to dance and shout
about you, the more you should overpay him. A soft-hearted old lady
arriving in Peking almost directly from America and wishing to be just
toward the man who drew her from Ch’ien-men Station to the principal
hotel handed him a silver dollar. It took three men from the hotel to
rescue her from the frenzied runner and kick him dollarless outside the
grounds.

The fact is that rickshaws are too numerous in Peking and their fares
too low. Even foreign residents grow flabby from so habitually jumping
into one rather than walking a block or two, though I confess it is
easier to do so than to endure the endless gauntlet of persistent
shouting, and even subtle ridicule in the case of “foreign devils”
supposedly ignorant of the language, which every well dressed pedestrian
must run. Hard-hearted men assert that the oversupply is due to the
laziness of the runners also, that coolies would rather wander about
with a rickshaw than work all day at some steady labor. What will become
of them when the street-cars arrive, for which the French were long ago
granted a much-opposed franchise, is a question which men of higher
intelligence than the runners themselves cannot answer. Yet they are
coming; cement poles are already creeping into the Tartar City from the
northwest, and rails are being piled up before the Forbidden City;
unless Mukden outstrips her, Peking will be the first to follow
foreign-influenced Tientsin and Shanghai by desecrating her streets with
the ugliness and clamor of electric tramways. We are glad to have known
the inimitable Chinese capital before they came.


The slowness of her man-drawn carriages and the dead flatness of Peking
give an exaggerated impression of its size; everything seems farther
away than it really is. In my school-days we used to hear wild tales
about this being the largest city in the world. Perhaps it has a million
inhabitants, though eight hundred and fifty thousand seems nearer the
mark. There is no “squeeze” to be had out of a census, however, and
guesses will probably continue to be the only available information on
that point for years to come. A one-story city with the courtyard habit,
to say nothing of enormous palaces and monuments that scarcely shelter a
human being each, and of big vacant spaces even inside its principal
wall, can hardly vie with New York and London, however like rats many of
its people may live. In what we foreigners call the Chinese City there
is a maze of shops and dwellings outside the three south gates of the
capital proper, human warrens here and there, swarming sidewalk markets
by night as well as crowded rows of booths by day; but vast graveyards,
cultivated fields, even great unoccupied areas take up much of this
secondary enclosure, not to mention the huge domains of the Temples of
Heaven and of Agriculture, playgrounds now of those with the price of
admission, with tea and soda-water and pumpkin seeds served almost on
the very spot where the Son of Heaven so long held his annual vigil.

Distressing are many of the noble monuments that make Peking justly
famed the world over, not merely because of the ruins they are becoming
under an anarchistic republican régime, but by reason of the rabble that
is permitted to overrun and defile so many of them. Ragged beggars
masquerading as caretakers beset the visitor in almost all of them;
foreigners, or Chinese with money but without influence, may still be
required to pay their way into Pei-Hai and the Summer Palace, but once
inside they find themselves jostled and gaped upon by loafing soldiers
and ill-mannered roustabouts whom the gate-keepers have not the power or
the moral courage to exclude. How long before imperial Peking will be
but another Baalbek or Nineveh, for all the busy streets that surround
it, is another subject for guessing.

We found few soldiers in Peking, however, compared with such places as
Mukden, and those are still curbed in a way that would bring gasps of
astonishment from their fellows in the provinces. Before the Boxer days
Peking had no police force in the Western sense; to-day the little
stations are as numerous as in Japan, while the white-legginged
gendarmes under a Norwegian general stroll the principal streets in
pairs, with drawn bayonets and an eye especially to the protection of
foreigners. We have tried in vain to impress upon our friends at home
that Peking is safer than any city we know of in our own land. A lone
woman not even speaking the language, and bespangled with jewels if you
like, can go anywhere in Peking, whether on foot or with a rickshaw
coolie picked up at random, at any hour of the day or night, without the
ghost of a chance of being molested, to say nothing of running any real
danger. They are a curious people, the Chinese. They will often starve
with riches within easy grasp rather than screw up their courage to an
act of violence, as they will display the cheerfulness of contentment
far beyond the point where Westerners would have even a transparent mask
of it left. There is something uncanny, if we ever paused to think of
it, in being so well protected by a police force whose meager wages are
many months in arrears; and the petty graft they inflict upon foreign
residents may almost be justified. Their task is greatly lightened, of
course, by the pacifist temperament of the Chinese; but criminal, even
violent, characters cannot be lacking even in Peking. Punishments are
still drastic, after the Chinese custom. Out toward Tungchow and over
beside the outer wall of the Temple of Heaven groups of men are
frequently shot, and they are by no means all assassins. When the
invasion from beyond the Great Wall was being repelled last spring and
bullets were singing across our corner of the city, the police were
instructed to punish with summary execution anything suggestive of
looting. A Chinese of some standing, friendly with several foreigners of
our acquaintance, went up broad Hata-men Street to borrow a few dollars
from an exchange-shop that had often favored him with small loans. The
proprietor happened to be out, and the youth in charge did not know the
client. “Oh, that’s all right,” the borrower assured him; “your master
always lets me have small sums when I need them, and I am in a hurry.”
He picked up a few dollars, jotted the amount down on a slip of paper,
and started away. The youth shouted, the police came running up, and
although the proprietor appeared at that moment and identified the
prisoner as an old friend who had acted in no way improperly, a headless
corpse was left lying in the dust before the shop.

There are incredible contrasts, too, among the scenes past which the
pony and I jog on our afternoon jaunts. Legation guards of half a dozen
nationalities play their boyish games almost across the street from
rag-pickers who are scarcely distinguishable from the garbage-heaps out
of which they somehow claw a livelihood. Along “Piccadilly,” as
foreigners call what is “Square Handkerchief Alley” to the Chinese, we
can easily imagine ourselves in the days of Kublai Khan; and around the
corner from it the Wai-chiao-pu is a more modern foreign office,
outwardly at least, than London, Washington, or Paris can muster.
Beneath the “Four P’ai-lous” motor-cars speed north and south while
barbaric funeral processions crawl under them from the west between two
long rows of squealing pigs, resenting the cords that bind their four
legs together and the discourtesy with which they are tumbled about by
sellers and purchasers. City gates like mammoth office buildings tower
above long vistas of lowly human dwellings; lotuses bloom on the lake of
the Winter Palace, and the visitor thither is pursued by all but naked
mendicants—_yao-fan-ti_ (want-rice-ers) the Chinese call them in their
kinder language. Sumptuous private cars stand before most modern
buildings, and Peking street-sprinklers, consisting of two men and a
bucket, with a long-handled wooden dipper, attempt to lay the dust about
them. We remember these sprinklers only too well, “Hwei-Hwei” and I, for
during the winter the sprinkling turned to ice almost as it fell, and
our progress was a kind of equestrian fox-trot. But for them, and the
water-carriers whose screeching wheelbarrows drip so incessantly, Peking
streets would be easy going the year round, for the whole winter’s snow
has been but a napkin or two that faded away almost as it fell. Nor have
I ever known a genuine Peking dust-storm, though I have seen the air and
the heavens, the inmost recesses of my garments and my food, even the
contents of locked trunks, filled with those flying particles of her own
filth and her surrounding semi-desert which the capital of Kublai Khan
has always charged against the distant Gobi. Old residents tell us that
this season’s dust-storms have been unusually rare, but my family was
vouchsafed one of the first magnitude during my absence. A welcome wind
blew all one hot spring night, and only in the morning was it discovered
that it had carried volumes of dust with it, so that the sleepers looked
as if they had been traveling across Nevada for a week without so much
as a wet cloth available, and everything from hair to mattress-covers
had to be washed at once, which was particularly difficult with the
blowing dust obscuring the sun for several days to come.

Often our way through a city gate or along a narrow street is made
disagreeable by passing wheelbarrows filled to over-slopping with the
night-soil of the city—sewers being as great a luxury as running water
in most Peking households. This is dried along the outside of the city
walls and distributed among the vegetable-gardens which, protected from
the north by rows of tall reed wind-breaks, take up much of the land
immediately outside the city. It goes without saying that the use of
chloride of lime is as fixed a habit in the kitchens of foreign
residents as boiling our drinking-water. The Chinese cannot understand
why Westerners persist in wasting the richest substitute for potash,
spending money to have it destroyed instead of gaining money by selling
it. Sometimes the foreigners are converted to the Chinese point of view;
I know at least one American mission school which supports two of its
girls on what it contributes to the fertility of the neighboring fields.


But it is not difficult to forget all such drawbacks when one looks down
upon Peking from her mammoth wall or the lonely eminence called Coal
Hill. Obviously “Hwei-Hwei” cannot climb Mei-shan; it is bad enough to
have outside barbarians of the human kind looking down upon the
golden-yellow roofs of the Forbidden City. This is not especially
forbidden now, with more than half of it open to the ticket-buyer, and
the rest hardly free from intruding politicians and their protégés. But
there still hovers an atmosphere of mystery, of something mildly akin to
the Arabian Nights or the Middle Ages, about the northern end of the
enclosure, within the moat in which coolies gather submerged hay and set
up fish-traps, and above which tourists shriek their delights from
Peking’s lone hill, even from airplanes. For, sadly shrunken as it is,
the imperial Manchu dynasty still holds forth within.

China is, I believe, the only republic on earth with an emperor. It was
stipulated in the agreement of 1912 between the imperial court and the
republican party that the emperor should keep his title, his imperial
abode, and certain other privileges, should receive a large annual
allowance from the Government for the upkeep of his court and household,
and should “always be treated by the Republican Government with the
courtesy and respect which would be accorded to a _foreign_ sovereign on
Chinese soil.” Thus the young man who, as a child, abdicated the dragon
throne can still go and sit on it any afternoon that it pleases his
fancy to do so. Perhaps no such caprices come into his head, for if we
are to believe his English tutor he is wise, as well as regally
polished, beyond his years, and does not really consider himself
emperor. He has lived in the imperial palace of the Forbidden City ever
since he was actually Manchu sovereign of China, however, and is still
accorded imperial honors there. Any one who rises early enough may meet
Manchu courtiers in ceremonial dress, a trifle shabby, their
red-tassel-covered hats still not entirely out of place in modern
Peking, jogging homeward on their lean ponies from an imperial audience
at the unearthly hour at which these have been held in China for
centuries.

Most Chinese have several different names, and emperors are no exception
to this rule. There is a “milk name” during infancy, a _hao_, or
familiar name by which one is afterward known to one’s intimates, a
school name, a business name, finally, but not lastly, in the case of an
emperor, a throne name or dynastic title. But though the present
occupant of the Forbidden City has such a name, to wit: Hsuan T’ung,
even this cannot be freely used; you cannot call a man to the
billiard-table by his dynastic title. The names by which we know former
emperors of China are really their “reign titles” and not personal
patronymics. This left the present head of the Ch’ing dynasty
handicapped, for, not being a real sovereign in spite of his legally
imperial title, and unable to have a reign title at least until he is
dead, there was no name by which he could be properly and generally
called, whether to dinner or to an audience. Being a sensible young man,
of modern rather than reactionary tendencies and by no means hostile to
foreign influence, noting moreover that not only do foreigners who
remain long in China have a Chinese name but that Western sovereigns
have personal appellations, he decided to take a foreign name. The fact
that his foreign tutor is an Englishman may or may not account for the
fact that he has chosen to be called “Henry.”

Those who have seen him describe “Emperor Henry” as a tall, slender
young man who is still growing, with the Chinese calligraphy of an
artist and some of the poetic gifts of his imperial ancestor known as
Ch’ien Lung. Not merely does he wield a wicked brush in both the classic
and the modern colloquial Chinese, now and then having a poem published
under an assumed name in a Peking paper, but he writes a very legible
English with pen or pencil. His English speech is described as slow but
correct, with a strong British accent. He reads newspapers voraciously
and is said to be unusually well abreast of the times, both at home and
abroad, for his years. His greatest single blow to date against
tyrannical conservatism, however, and the mightiest example of his
progressive tendencies occurred last spring at one fell swoop—he had his
cue cut off. The three imperial dowagers and his two distinguished old
Chinese or Manchu tutors tore what was left of their own hair in vain.
“Henry” was determined to be up-to-date even if he is confined in one
end of the once Forbidden City. The result is that for the first time in
nearly three hundred years there is hardly a pigtail left within the
Purple Wall, though the two old tutors, as a silent protest against what
they consider an act of disloyalty to the traditions of “his Majesty’s”
house, still wear their cues.

During last winter “Henry” turned sixteen, and it was high time he took
unto himself a wife—two of them, in fact. He is reputed not to have
wanted two—possibly he is not so ultra-modern as we have been led to
suppose—but his retinue insisted. Number one wife would have too many
duties to be able to perform them all alone; besides, what would the
neighbors say? So they chose him two pretty Manchu girls several months
his junior and set the date for the wedding. But “Henry” has a mind of
his own, and if he could not go out and pick a bride on his own
initiative he could at least exercise the sovereign rights of any
citizen of a republic and choose between the two candidates allowed him.
Thus it came about that the girl named by the high Manchu officials to
be “empress” became merely the first concubine, and vice versa. Some
time during the seven weeks of ceremonies between the betrothal rites
and the actual marriage “Henry” conferred upon the lady of his choice
the name of “Elizabeth.”

The wedding itself took place between the end of November and the dawn
of December, according to our Western calendar. By republican permission
the streets between the lady’s home, out near the Anting-men, and the
East Gate of the Forbidden City were covered from curb to curb with
“golden sands”—which in Peking means merely the earth we use in a
child’s sand-box. At three in the morning the principal bride set out
along this in a chair covered with imperial yellow brocade and carried
by sixteen bearers, with a body-guard of eunuchs from the palace. The
procession was no longer and hardly more elaborate than those that may
be seen along Peking streets on any day auspicious for weddings; some of
the impoverished Manchu and Mongol nobles, members of the imperial clan,
and former officials of the old empire looked, in fact, a trifle more
shabby under the specially erected bright lights along the route than do
the wedding guests of a wealthy Chinese merchant. But there were some
unusual features. The sedan-chair had a golden roof, on each corner of
which was a phenix, a design that predominated in all the flags,
banners, and mammoth “umbrellas” carried by the hired attendants.
Instead of the familiar Chinese wedding “music” produced by long,
harsh-voiced trumpets, there were two foreign-style bands, one of them
lent by the President of the republic. These played over and over, not
in concord one with the other, “Marching through Georgia,” “Suwanee
River,” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” It was a memorable night
for Peking.

The chief escorts sent by the emperor to receive his favorite bride rode
horses and wore mandarin costume, including the official cap with a
peacock plume and buttons of every former rank. Promptly at four in the
morning the Phenix Chair, followed by a series of yellow-covered litters
containing the ceremonial robes of its occupant, passed through the Gate
of Propitious Destiny into the central and most sacred portion of the
imperial precincts. Foreign as well as Chinese guests had been admitted
as far as the large open space before this, which is used as a
parade-ground for the imperial guard and as a place of reception for the
camel caravans which still, even in these republican days, bring
“tribute” from beyond the Great Wall to the Manchu emperor. With the
moon just dropping out of sight in the west the scene was of a pageantry
which has almost disappeared from our modern commonplace world.

What took place beyond the gate that swallowed up the “empress” ordinary
people know only by hearsay. This has it that the bride, having been
carried over fire—pans filled with glowing coals—as old Chinese custom
decrees, was set down at the foot of the throne and greeted by the
emperor and his first concubine, after which he and all those of the
male gender except the eunuchs immediately retired. The concubine had
merely walked in without ceremony twenty-four hours before, one of her
first duties being to welcome the real bride at her arrival. Gossip has
it that she did not make the requisite number of kowtows to her more
fortunate rival and that “Elizabeth” took this so to heart that she shut
herself up from the emperor for some time. No sane person will vouch for
the truth of Peking rumors, however, imperial or otherwise. The fact
remains that “Henry” and “Elizabeth” were duly married, the clinching
rite being the ceremonial drinking together of the nuptial cup, and the
latest report is that they are all three living moderately happily, at
least, this long afterward.

An American girl is tutoring the “empress” in English and Western ways,
as she did before her marriage, and the emperor continues to grow,
mentally if not physically, under his cued and uncued tutelage. Even the
first concubine is said to be fond of learning, and the two no doubt
comment on their similarity of tastes with “our” husband. There is
probably less friction between the two young ladies than their Western
sisters may fancy, now that relative grades are inevitably fixed—with
reservations depending on the birth of a son; the most powerful woman in
Chinese history, the dowager who long ruled the country under the
puppets Tung Chih and Kuang Hsii, was, it is well for the two young
ladies to remember, only a concubine. Court etiquette prevents conflicts
in their demands upon the husband. By a rule said to be centuries old
the emperor is entitled to the company of his empress six times a month,
of the first concubine ten, and of the second concubine fifteen, in
reverse ratio, of course, to the social demands upon them. “Henry”
should by the rules of the game have chosen his second concubine before
this, but like all those to whom the Chinese owe money he has not been
paid his allowance for years, and there may be excellent reason for
putting off this addition to his cozy little household. It is what
school-girls call “thrilling” to think of him toasting his toes
alternately with his two brides, perhaps of dissimilar temperaments as
well as mental and physical charms, and still having every other evening
left free for the pursuit of his studies.


Misfortune, of course, does not spare even throneless sovereigns. Fire
has just destroyed much of that portion of the Forbidden City which the
head of the abdicated Manchu dynasty had left him, and has given a hint
of life within those mysterious precincts. Though the conflagration
broke out before midnight nothing worth while was done to curb it until
two in the morning. Most of the courtiers have always lived within the
Purple Wall and had never seen a disaster of such magnitude, so that
when they saw the palace buildings in flames the whole court, including
“Henry” and “Elizabeth,” some stories have it, were seized with nothing
more effective than frenzied excitement. Partly for fear of looting,
partly because no orders were given by their superior officers to break
an ancient rule, the guards refused to open the gates to the two Chinese
and one foreign fire brigades that offered their assistance. After a
lengthy conference these were admitted, but by this time the fire was so
far advanced that only by cutting down many old trees and leveling some
of the smaller buildings was it finally brought under control at seven
in the morning. Even the Chinese admit that almost all the effective
work was done by the foreigners; whatever their excellencies the
Celestials do not shine during emergencies.

Many priceless treasures, and the portraits of many former emperors,
were destroyed. The official report had it first that the fire was
caused by the bursting of a boiler in the palace electric-light plant,
but the more probable truth has since leaked out. The latest assertion
is that it was deliberately set by palace eunuchs, disgruntled over the
failure to receive their allowances, or to cover up their thefts of
imperial treasures. The time was close drawing near for the annual
inspection of these when the conflagration occurred. Looking about the
next day “Henry” found many precious things gone even from places which
the fire did not reach, and incidentally, the story runs, he discovered
a plot against his own life. Cynics wonder that the new régime has not
hired some one to do away with him long before this. Various eunuchs
were handed over to the police, some with bits of loot upon them, but
“unfortunately,” to quote one Chinese paper, “the emperor no longer has
the power to order their heads off.” When he demanded the arrest of some
of the chief eunuchs, however, he found they were under the protection
of two old imperial concubines—of Hsien Feng, consort of the famous
dowager, and of Tung Chih, her son, respectively, who have been dead
sixty-three and forty-eight years! So “Henry” and his two brides ran
away to his father, who has a “palace” outside the west wall of the
city, and refused to come back until all the eunuchs were discharged.
This may have alarmed the old concubines, as the newspapers put it;
certainly it frightened the republicans, with no president in office and
the country threshing about for want of a head; pressure came from
somewhere, the eunuchs went, and “Henry” came back.

[Illustration:

  Preparing for a devil-dance at the lama temple in Peking
]

[Illustration:

  The devil-dancers are usually Chinese street-urchins hired for the
    occasion by the languid Mongol lamas of Peking
]

[Illustration:

  The street-sprinklers of Peking work in pairs, with a bucket and a
    wooden dipper. This is the principal street of the Chinese City
    “outside Ch’ien-men”
]

[Illustration:

  The Forbidden City is for the most part no longer that, but open in
    more than half its extent to the ticket-buying public
]

The palace eunuch system has always been pernicious and one of the main
causes of the fall of the many imperial houses that have ruled China.
These have been served by eunuchs ever since the Chou dynasty, more than
three thousand years ago. The dynasty might change, but the eunuchs, who
were the palace servants and often the confidants of the other inmates,
mainly women, stayed on and carried all the vices of the old court over
into the new. Each new dynasty began with a hardy, outdoor ruler, but as
his successors, thanks to the silly “Son of Heaven” idea, were
practically imprisoned for life within the palace among women and
eunuchs, they were bound to become weeds in the enervating atmosphere.
Thus almost all dynasties petered out within two or three centuries, and
in the closing years the eunuchs often became masters; it is well known
that Tzu Hsi, the notorious old “Empress” Dowager, who governed China
for forty years, was herself ruled by a favorite eunuch, who started
life as a shoemaker’s apprentice—though some doubt has always been
expressed about his real eunuchhood. He is believed to be more
responsible than any other single person for the Boxer uprising, but the
only punishment meted out to him was that his wealth, in gold bars said
to be worth several millions, was discovered by the French troops upon
the occupation of Peking and—no one has ever heard of it since.

Avarice is the chief weakness of the eunuch tribe; and the official who
could afford to get a powerful palace servant on his side was sure of
preferment, and in time this system made China officially rotten to the
core. Masters of intrigue and selfishness, they had to be “greased” from
the outer gate to the throne-room even by those who wished to give the
emperor himself a “present.” Each palace occupant was allowed the number
of eunuchs which suited his rank, the total number being three thousand.
They came mainly from Hokienfu, a small city about two hundred miles due
south of Peking, where it was the custom for parents to make eunuchs of
many of their boys, just as they bound the feet of their girls, for they
could place them to still better advantage than a mere girl and thereby
improve their own incomes. When “Henry” made this new break with
antiquity, however, it was found that there were but 1430 palace eunuchs
left, all, it is said, over thirty years old. Orders were also issued to
all Mongol and Manchu nobles and princes forbidding the employment of
eunuchs, and it is hoped that hereafter no native of Hokienfu will get
himself mutilated for the sake of a palace job. Unlike bound feet, the
system was, of course, by no means confined to China. The papal choir
was made up of eunuchs, long since driven by public opinion from the
Italian stage, at least as late as the beginning of the present century,
and they are still employed as the keepers of harems in Mohammedan
countries, being part and parcel of polygamy. Transportation to their
homes, temporary lodgings, and a bit of money was allowed those whom
this lad of sixteen at last cleared out of the Forbidden City, and it
was a picturesque sight to see them leaving the palace with their tawdry
belongings, quarreling to the last with the men sent to pay them off.
Perhaps that is the end of them in China; but it is the land of
compromise, and already the old and crippled eunuchs have been taken
back into the palace until they die.

There are people who believe that “Henry” may again be a real emperor of
China, that he has proved himself so strong by some of his recent
actions as to suggest that had he been born twenty years earlier China
would not now be trying to pose as a republic. Even as modern a young
man as our Chinese teacher thinks that a constitutional monarchy is the
only feasible relief from the present anarchistic chaos of theoretical
republicanism. He puts at ten years, others at from a generation to a
century, the time required under such a restraining form of government
to prepare for a real republic. Who knows? Perhaps even if the monarchy
returns it will not be “Henry” who will head it; soothsayers have been
making strange prophecies recently about an entirely new emperor to come
out of the provinces. Besides, “Henry” is a Manchu, and China has
reverted after nearly three centuries to the misrule of her own people.
But he is already on the spot, sitting on the vacant throne as it were,
and that is seldom a disadvantage.


One of the first obligations of the foreigner coming to China for any
length of time is to get a Chinese name. In other countries the people
do the best they can, vocally and stelographically, to reproduce the
names we already possess; even Japan, by using one of her modern
scripts, can write all the but the more L-ish Western patronymics so
that they read noticeably like the original. But the Chinese have always
insisted that the outside barbarian adapt himself to Chinese ways,
rather than the topsyturvy reverse. Besides, Chinese is a monosyllabic
language, and naturally any stranger who comes to the country must be
translated into words of one syllable. Unfortunately, even syllables are
limited among the ideographs available to the Celestial brush-wielder,
and names which to our notion are obviously of one become polysyllabic,
to say the least, before the Chinese translator gets through with them.
The result is that they seldom bear even a family resemblance to the
original, and the foreigner who can recognize his own Chinese name,
whether written or spoken, is already in a fair way to become an
accomplished Oriental philologist.

Let me take my own name as an example. Except that it may be racially
misleading, I have always considered it quite a tolerable name, not
particularly difficult to pronounce, or to remember, by those who choose
to do so, and unquestionably monosyllabic. Yet the Chinese scholar to
whom it was submitted divided it at once into three syllables, like an
expert taking apart an instrument one had always believed to be of one
piece and returned it as “Feh Lan-kuh.” The first character stands for
“extravagance,” but all the sting is taken out of that false and unjust
start by the other two, which mean “orchid” and “self-control”
respectively. Only three names are allowed in Chinese; therefore my
given names in my own language were crowded into the discard. To the
Chinese I am “Feh _Hsien-sheng_”—Mr. Extravagance; if they wish to go
further and find out what particular form my wastefulness takes they
respectfully inquire my honorable _ming-tze_, and are informed that my
unworthy personal names are “Lan-kuh,” the Orchid with Self-control. The
trouble is that almost any foreigner whose name begins with an F, or
even with a Ph, is also Mr. Feh. There are a dozen of them within
gunshot of us, surely a thousand in China, most of whose English names
are not in the least like our own.

A few lucky mortals have names that can be put into Chinese just as they
stand, not only leaving them audibly recognizable to their compatriots
but saving their given names from the scrap-heap. There is Mr. Fay, of
course, Mr. Howe and Mr. May, and obviously Mr. Lee is orally at home
anywhere in China, whether the scholarly see him as a “pear” or “clear
dawn.” On the other hand there are names that cannot possibly be put
into Chinese even faintly resembling themselves,—Messrs. Smith and
Jones, for instance. It is quite as necessary to know the Chinese name
of the friend you wish to find in China as to be able to speak Chinese;
more so, in fact, for while the Celestials are the antithesis of their
island neighbors in the rapidity with which they grasp an idea from
signs and motions, it is difficult, unless some outstanding personal
characteristic is involved, to express a proper name by a gesture. You
may go up and down a Chinese city in which he has lived for twenty years
shouting for your dear old schoolmate Kelly, shepherding a flock of
Chinese in the general direction of heaven now, and never find a trace
of him unless chance puts you on the track of his new appellation.
Luckily there are but a hundred or so family names in all China, and as
many characters fit to be used as such, so that one may soon become
fairly expert at guessing.

One must have a Chinese name, not only because one would otherwise be
unmentionable, on respectful occasions, even to one’s own servants, but
because a plentiful supply of visiting-cards is absolutely
indispensable. Fortunately these can be had in China at a fraction of
what they cost at home; because not only are cards exchanged on the
slightest provocation, but one of those hastily printed scraps of paper
is just as important and just as final anywhere within the once
Celestial Empire as in South America. Without a card a millionaire in
evening-dress is a mere coolie; with one the most disreputable foreign
tramp who ever seeped back into the interior from the treaty-ports is a
gentleman fit to dine with a Tuchun.

In the olden days of not so long ago Chinese name-cards were red, the
color for happiness. To have a white card meant that one’s father or
mother had died within the past three years; those mourning the recent
loss of a grandparent had yellow or blue ones. The size of the card
determined the importance of the one whose name it bore, or vice versa,
so that the card of a viceroy or a generalissimo was of the size of a
sheet of foolscap, a blood-red splash that could be seen half a mile
away. Colors and size both cost money, however; moreover China has
become, in name at least, a republic. White cards are now in quite
general use, therefore, and though they still vary in size, I have never
been handed one larger than a coat-pocket. Some remain red on one side
and white on the other, especially among the formal and the wealthy; the
ultra-modern have their English name on one side and Chinese on the
other, like foreign residents. The custom of using both sides seems to
be an old one. Often the formal or “business” name appears on the front,
sometimes with the rank or calling, while on the back, in much smaller
characters, are the _hao_ and the _yuan-ch’i_, the name used only by
intimates, and the ancestral birthplace—which even the father of the man
represented may never have seen. Not a few Chinese use two different
cards. One of them bears the characters meaning, “This is only a
friendly exchange-card”; in other words, it has no import in serious or
business matters. If a Tuchun graciously gives you his “exchange-card”
that does not mean that you can use it to give orders to his soldiers or
borrow money in his name at a bank, though his official card may still
have almost the potency of the signet-ring of a king in the days of
ruffles and feathers.


A play modeled more or less on Chinese lines which went the round of the
English-speaking world some years ago has familiarized us with some of
the peculiarities of the Chinese theater—or, from their point of view,
with those of our own. At least those of us who had the pleasure of
attending that performance know that on the Chinese stage a banner held
aloft by two coolies at opposite ends of it stands for a city gate, and
that when a man has been histrionically killed he gets up, wipes his
nose, and saunters off the stage, quite as invisible to the audience as
are the property-men incessantly wandering about among the actors with
the ultra-bored expression of men more completely surfeited with things
theatrical than all the first-nighters and dramatic critics of
Christendom rolled into one. But the Chinese stage has other points
which were not included in that delightful effigy of it, partly because
to make it too Chinese would have been the surest way to drive away any
Western audience, partly because invention advances day by day. I enjoy
the casual, lackadaisical, “invisible” property-men of the Chinese
theater, but I find the man with the thermos bottle still more
beguiling. For “props,” dressed not in black, as the imported version of
Celestial theatrical life would have us believe, but in the hit-or-miss
costume of the Chinese laboring-class, with blue denims very much the
favorite, is after all at home in the theater and soon becomes even to
the foreign eye as natural a part of the decorations as does the
omnipresent coolie in or out of doors. I wonder if their property-men
are not really invisible to the Chinese, for do they not always have
servants and attendants flocking incessantly about them anywhere,
everywhere, on the most solemn as well as the most trivial occasions?
But I have never quite gotten used to the thermos-bottle man and able to
look upon him with complete equanimity. He is no theater employee, but
the personal servant of this or that important actor, which actor often
does not remain more than an hour or two at a time in one theater;
hence, at least in Peking in the winter season, the man who brings his
master his indispensable tea at the climax of every histrionic flight
wears overcoat, fur or knitted cap, and all the rest of the midwinter
equipment, so that, bursting suddenly but casually in upon a court
ceremony or a battle scene set in the color-splashed days to which
Chinese dramas hark back, he suggests an experienced and unexcitable
arctic explorer come to succor with the latest contrivance a group of
Martians enjoying an equatorial holiday.

The thermos bottle was, of course, unknown to those actors of some
generations or centuries back who refused to be deprived even for the
length of a scene of the national beverage, and at the same time wished
to impress upon the audience, itself engaged in satisfying the inner man
quite as freely as if seated at home, that they, for all the low rank of
players, were just as important, thereby establishing a custom that is
all but universal on the Chinese stage. Old-fashioned actors, or those
less generously subsidized by the box-office, also have their tea at the
end of every crisis; but it is brought, not in the latest triumph of
science and by a personal retainer, but by one of the omnipresent
“props,” by a disengaged “super,” or by one of the beggarly loafers that
seem always to be hanging about behind the scenes—if they can be called
such—of a Chinese theater. They, too, sip the uninebriating cup held up
to them while half turning their backs or holding an edge of their
always voluminous costumes over a corner of the mouth, a conventional
pretense which is supposed to make the act invisible to the audience,
and which so far as outward appearances go seems actually to do so.
Besides, why should an act as general and almost as continuous among the
Chinese as breathing attract the attention of a generation that has
probably associated it with every dramatic climax since the oldest man
among them first paid an admission fee? If so slight a thing as this
brought inattention to the play, what would not the orchestra accomplish
in the way of distracting from the plaudits due the actors, scattered as
it is about the stage itself, maltreating its strange instruments or
refraining therefrom in the most casual manner, to light a cigarette, to
scratch itself, to ply a toothpick, or strolling individually on or off,
in any garb at any moment of the afternoon or evening that happens to
suit the individual fancy.

There is a theater in the heart of the Tartar City completely
Westernized in architecture and general arrangements, yet where
perfectly Chinese plays are given; but the foreigner who wishes to get
the complete atmosphere must go “outside Ch’ien-men” into the Chinese
City. For after all it is the audience and what takes place in front of
the stage as much as what goes forward upon it that repays the Westerner
for visiting a Chinese theater. In this busiest part of Peking, among
the blocks where the singsong-girls ply their popular trade, are
scattered many genuinely native playhouses, and farther on there are
numerous makeshift ones hastily thrown together of boards, mats, and
sheet-iron, stretching beyond the _T’ien-ch’iao_, the “Heavenly Bridge”
with its swarming outdoor markets, across which emperors were carried
for centuries to the near-by Temple of Heaven. Out there one may hear
much of the play and more of the “music” than he cares to, while merely
riding past in the afternoon—for genuine Peking theaters are in full
swing from about noon until long after midnight.

Perhaps on the whole the visitor will get the most for his money at any
of those playhouses lost in the maze of narrow streets not far outside
Ch’ien-men, without earning the ill will of his rickshaw-man by driving
him ’way out to the Heavenly Bridge. Here he will find himself, though
perhaps not without Chinese help, entering what looks much like a
warehouse or a wholesale establishment, a roofed court overcrowded with
crude, narrow, painfully upright benches black with time and the food
and drinks that have been spilled upon them for generations from the
little shelves protruding along the back of each for the use of the row
behind. The foreigner is so far out of the orbit of his kind in one of
these establishments that, though the Legation Quarter is barely a hop,
skip, and jump away, just beyond the mammoth Tartar wall, and those two
of the Peking railway stations out of which emerge almost all foreign
visitors to the capital are still nearer, he will probably not be seated
before what looks like a coolie comes to ask his name, preferably to get
his card, explaining, if there is any common denominator of words in
which to do so, that every _wai-guo-ren_ who enters the place must be
reported at once, so that a policeman may be sent to protect him. Yet it
is years since a foreigner has needed individual police protection
anywhere within the Chinese City half as much as the unpaid gendarme who
will keep an eye upon him throughout the performance needs the tip which
he will not refuse if it is properly forced upon him.

Strictly speaking the foreign visitor does not find himself a seat, any
more than he discovers the theater without help. He is, _ipso facto_, a
“possessor of money,” and nowhere that he stirs in China, least of all
in a theater, are there lacking men eager to take as much of that
commodity away as can be bluffed or wheedled out of him. Hence the
conspicuous new-comer is beset from the very entrance by a flock of men
in the all too familiar garb of unwashed coolies, each eager to lead him
to some different section of the house. If he is easily led he will find
himself installed before he knows it in a rickety chair in one of the
little pretenses of boxes around the narrow balcony, the only part of
the house where women spectators may sit. The prices are higher up
there, and the inevitable rake-off of his guide correspondingly larger.
If he is wise he will insist upon remaining in the pit, not too near the
uproarious orchestra and not so close to the back as to interfere with
the throwing arms of the towel-men. When at last he has settled down as
the protégé of a man who seems suddenly to grow superciliously
patronizing toward him the moment he is sure of keeping him in his own
section, and has apparently made lifelong enemies of all the others who
tried to seat him elsewhere, he becomes at once the prey of the
innumerable hawkers of this and that who wallow and shout their way
through the audience quite irrespective of a possible interest in the
stage. Perhaps it occurs to him that he bought no ticket, and was asked
for none at the door. No one does as he enters the purely Chinese
theater. By the time each auditor has adjusted himself as well as his
bodily bulk will permit to the impossible seats behind the tippy
shelves, a man comes to sell him a ticket and to take it up with one and
the same motion. Prices are not high, sixty to eighty coppers at most,
including the percentage that is almost sure to be added out of respect
for his alien condition; even in the Westernized theater within the
Tartar City a seat anywhere in the pit or parquet rarely reaches the
height of a “Mex” dollar. Then a man who thinks he chose his seat for
him must also have his “squeeze,” but this by no means amounts to the
sum subtracted by the old ladies who pose as ushers in the theaters of
Paris. Long before these formalities are concluded, simultaneously with
his sitting down, in fact, the countless dispensers of food and drink
are taking his patronage for granted. A tea-cup sadly in need of an
hour’s scouring with sand is placed top down on the unwashed seat-back
before him, soon to be followed by a tea-pot the spout of which, if he
is observant, he has probably seen some unsoaped neighbor sucking a
moment before, now refilled with boiling water. Little dishes of
shriveled native peanuts, of pumpkin-seeds, of half a dozen similar
delicacies which he has often seen along the outdoor markets and in the
baskets of street-hawkers without ever having felt a desire to make a
closer acquaintance with them, probably also a joint of sugar-cane, will
likewise be set in front of him before he can say his Chinese name,
unless he waves all these things aside with a very imperative gesture.
None of the hawkers catch the meaning of this at once, at least
outwardly, and when they finally do their resentment often reaches the
point of what sounds unpleasantly like more or less subtle vituperation.
Whoever heard of going to a theater without sipping tea and cracking
pumpkin-seeds? Why does this wealthy barbarian come and occupy a seat if
he is going to cheat the men who supply that part of the house out of
their rightful and time-honored selling privileges?

By and by one may be able to turn one’s attention to the stage, though
one has certainly not been unconscious of it, auricularly at least,
since entering the door. The stage is nothing but a raised platform with
a low railing on all four sides, such as might have been the
auction-place in the days when the building was perhaps the warehouse it
looks as if it must have been. Whatever serve as dressing-rooms at the
rear, which according to the space there cannot be much, are separated
from the stage by an alleyway across which the exiting and entering
players hop. The antics on the stage are in no noticeable way different
from those at the Westernized Peking theaters regularly patronized by
foreigners. The masks and wigs and terrifying costumes are probably
cruder, less splendid, and worse adjusted; the lean and bathless coolies
who come on at frequent intervals in orderless groups undisguised as
soldiers, courtiers, and who-knows-what are if anything a trifle more
abject and bovine; there may not appear a single thermos bottle during
the whole evening, though there will be as incessant a consumption of
what passes for tea among the great mass of the Chinese. Certainly there
will be no scenery in the Western sense, though there may be a few
curtains half shutting off the inadequate dressing-room space, and some
pretenses of city gates, thrones, and the like improvised on the spur of
the moment by the bored property-men out of strips of cloth and
half-broken chairs. The conventionalized things which take the place of
scenery, the strange whips carried by those who are supposed to be
mounted, and the something which tells the audience that the bearer is
riding in a boat are somewhat the worse for wear, while the cushions
which “Props” disdainfully throws out in front of the stars when it is
time for them to kneel are almost slippery with the grease of
generations. But the tumbling and the juggling which imply that one of
the frequent battles is going on will be quite the same, except that it
will not be so well done, as inside the main city, and the uproar will
be just as constant and if anything a trifle more deafening.

One theater outside Ch’ien-men has only female players; but they appear
in the same rôles, in exactly the same time-honored plays, as the
all-men casts in other theaters, and act as nearly as possible in the
same way, equally dreadful even in the atrocious falsetto which is the
Chinese actor’s specialty, as noises from the pit of the stomach are of
those of Japan. There may be many a guttural “Hao!” from the men in the
audience for the juggling feats of the stars, winning their battles thus
after the time-honored manner of stage generals or emperors; perhaps
even greater signs of approval for some fine point skilfully rounded in
the old familiar themes, which escapes the foreigner entirely; but there
is never a suggestion of the thought of sex, not a hint, except in their
general appearance, that the players are women and not men. Some of the
unwashed girls who fill out the cast, looking like nothing so much as
kitchen wenches in odds and ends of old finery, are quite as clever
acrobats, in battle-scene tumbling at least, as the men at other places,
though they get less a month than a Broadway chorus-girl spends on
chewinggum in a week.

It will be an imperturbable foreign visitor, however, who can keep his
attention fixed on the stage long enough to note all this at once. The
goings-on in the audience will probably prove more comprehensible,
certainly more amusing. Without going into endless detail it may suffice
to say that the climax of all those things which a Chinese audience does
and a Western one does not is the demand for hot towels during the
performance. One or two towel-men stand over a steaming tub in a far
corner; as many as a dozen others are scattered about the hall, though
their presence may not be suspected by the inexperienced until the
bombardment of towels begins, about the end of the first round of
pumpkin-seeds. All at once the air overhead is crisscrossed with flying
white objects, which on closer attention prove to be bundles of hot, wet
towels tightly rolled together. A man near the tub is throwing them to a
colleague somewhere out in the house, who relays them on to others
dispersed about, these doling them out along the rows of spectators,
collecting them again after they have been used—not to give the ears a
respite from the ceaseless uproar but to deceive the face and hands with
the ghost of a washing—bundling them together once more to start them
hurtling back high over head to the point of origin. The most expert
venders of double-jointed Philadelphia peanuts at our national games
cannot equal Chinese towel-men in the number of throws and the narrow
margins of safety without injury to a spectator. Evidently the
towel-service is included in the price of admission, unless the hawkers
and the section guards band together to supply their clients this
apparent necessity. Therefore the foreigner who gracefully declines this
gracious attention, after noting that the returned towels are merely
immersed and wrung out again as a bundle and once more sent the rounds,
does not win the ill will that would accrue to him if there were a
copper or two of _cumshaw_ involved, and does no other damage than to
block the wheels of progress long enough for information concerning his
strange conduct to be relayed back to the tub-men and commented upon at
least throughout the section he makes conspicuous by his presence.

The bombardment of towels goes on periodically from early afternoon
until early morning, like all the rest of the performance. Where one
play ends another begins with barely the interval of a sip of tea, and
though some spectators are constantly coming and going, like the casual
members of the orchestra and the undisguised “supers,” the endurance of
the mass of them is phenomenal. Some time between five and seven o’clock
many spectators vary their incessant munching and sipping by ordering a
full meal from the runners of the adjoining tea-house, and the click of
chop-sticks may now and then be heard above the louder clamor. But the
spectacle, both on and off the stage, goes unconcernedly on.

It would require much more Chinese than I can so far understand to catch
any of the dialogue—if that is the word for it—of a typical Chinese
play. The inexperienced Westerner will seldom have the faintest idea
what it is all about, or even who the characters stand for, so
unintelligible to him are the signs and symbols by which the native
spectator recognizes them and their doings. For that matter the average
Chinese would not understand much unless he had imbibed all these old
stories almost with his mother’s milk. The old, poetic, and often
obsolete words in which the Chinese actor speaks—or rather “sings,” to
use the misleading Chinese term—would be obscure enough in a sane and
ordinary tone of voice; in his successful imitation of ungreased
machinery his actual speech is probably of little more import to the
hearers than are the words of an Italian opera to a Chicago audience.
Like the Japanese the Chinese prefer to hear the same old historical
themes and see the same old pageants over and over again, however, or at
most to have new variations upon them, generation after century. Hence
even the illiterate can often follow a play word by word without
understanding a line of it. We have discovered that by having our
teacher tell us the story beforehand we can guess the meaning of a
considerable part of the action, thereby finding the Chinese theater
much less of a bore than most foreigners report it. To every people its
own ways; certainly the attempt to ape Western theatricals which was put
on during the winter by a club of native élite, with traveled young
Chinese of both sexes prancing about the stage in frock-coats and scanty
gowns, not to mention bobbed hair, was more terrible than anything
genuine Chinese actors ever perpetrate. Personally I have even become
reconciled to Chinese “music”—in the olden days plays were given
outdoors, hence the deafening quality of this—and in certain moods even
to enjoy it, briefly, as one sometimes enjoys a crush in the subway or a
rough-and-tumble mingling with the Broadway throng; and we have both
grown very fond of seeing, if not of listening to, Mei Lan-fang.

Mr. Mei—whose family character means “peach blossom” and who is related
to us to the extent of including an orchid in his given name—is China’s
most famous and most popular actor. Like his father and grandfather
before him he plays only female rôles, and while even his falsettos may
grate on a Western ear, many is the foreigner who pursues him from
theater to theater merely to watch his graceful movements, his
inimitable dancing or simply the manipulation of his beautiful hands.
Scrawl the three characters by which he is known on the bill-board or
the newspaper space of any theater, inside Ch’ien-men or out, anywhere
in China for that matter, though he has no need to tour the provinces,
and the man in the box-office has only to order any suggestion of vacant
space filled with chairs and lean back in perfect contentment. Mei
Lan-fang carries his own troupe, like a Spanish _matador_ his
_cuadrilla_, even his own orchestra, and the arrangement of Chinese
performances is such that he can play in several theaters on the same
night, from eleven to midnight inside the Tartar City perhaps, where the
doors close ridiculously early, the rest of the night among the better
establishments outside the main wall. Seldom does he deign to appear
earlier than that, unless at some special matinée in the Forbidden City
or at the presidential palace, and he is under no necessity of appearing
every night merely to keep the wolf from his door. By Chinese standards
his income rivals that of any opera singer.

The Chinese are fond of complications of character in their plays, and
some of Mr. Mei’s greatest successes are as a man playing a girl who in
turn disguises herself as a man; but there is never a moment in which
the basic femininity of the part does not stand clearly forth in the
hands of this consummate artist. I had the pleasure of spending an
afternoon with him once. His house out in the heart of the Chinese City
is outwardly commonplace; but the touch of the genuinely artistic
temperament is nowhere missing inside the door. The delicate, almost
white-faced man still in his twenties, sometimes looking as if he had
barely reached them, proved to be one of the most gracious and at the
same time most unobtrusive hosts I have ever met. His manner had not a
suggestion of the financially successful, the popular idol, as it would
manifest itself in the West. He was as simple, as unassuming, as wholly
untheatrical as are the objects of Chinese art on which he spends his
surplus wealth and time inconspicuous with real distinction. Among his
treasures were many thin-paper volumes of classics, of old plays, some
of them several centuries old, with annotations in the margins by bygone
but not forgotten actors indicating tones, gestures, movements down to
the crooking of a little finger. Mr. Mei makes much use of these, though
not for slavish imitation. His entourage includes a scholar of standing
whose task it is to weave new stories about the old themes, and from
them the actor evolves new dances—which is not the word, but let it
stand—and new ways of entertaining his crowded audiences without losing
touch with the distant centuries to which they prefer to be transported
within the theater. Mei Lan-fang does not drink tea on the stage. It is
an arrogance of the profession to which his famous family never
descended. Nor, one notes, do property-men trip unnecessarily about
under his feet when he is performing. I have Mr. Mei’s word for it that
the throat does not suffer from the constant unnatural tasks put upon it
by his profession; but only from a man of such self-evident truthfulness
could I believe it. Certainly there was nothing in his soft home-side
speech to belie that surprising statement, as there was nothing in his
modest manner to suggest that wherever he plays the streets are filled
as far at least as the eye can see by night with waiting rickshaws.


Russians have occupied the extreme northeast corner of the Tartar City
for centuries. Away back in the reign of K’ang Hsi, to whom all those of
the white race were indeed outside barbarians, an army of the czar was
defeated in what is now Siberia, and the captives brought to Peking were
made into a defense corps after the style of the Manchu-“bannermen.”
Gradually the Manchu warriors disappeared from the enclosure that once
housed them only, as they grew weak and flabby and penniless under
imperial corruption and sold out family by family to the Chinese, until
to-day the Tartar City is that merely in name and in memory. But the
Russians remain just where the victorious emperor assigned them. Two
garish Greek Orthodox structures thrust their domes and spires aloft
from within the large walled area which makes that corner of the city
somewhat less of an open space given over to garbage-heaps, rag-pickers,
and prowling dogs than are the other three. The Son of Heaven was
graciously moved to permit his Russian bannermen to have their own
religious teachers, and the Orthodox priests sent from Russia became not
only missionaries to the surrounding “heathen” but the unofficial
diplomatic agents of the czar. In time, when the powers saw fit to
disabuse the occupant of the dragon throne of the impression that all
the rest of the earth was tributary to him, the Russians also
established their official minister in the Legation Quarter, with
pompous buildings and another Orthodox church within a big compound.
To-day, by consent of the Chinese, representatives of the old czarist
régime still informally occupy this, while the unrecognized envoy of the
Soviet finds his own accommodations, like any other tourist. But the
establishment in the further corner of the city survives, boasting not
merely a bishop but an archbishop, and numbering by the hundred the
Chinese converts clustered in that section.

A Russian church service with a mainly Chinese congregation is worth
going some distance to see. Nowadays the converts hardly outnumber their
fellow-worshipers, so many are the destitute Russian refugees who have
drifted to that distant northeast corner of Peking. They live thick as
prisoners in the stone-walled cells of the old monastery where once only
Orthodox monks recited their prayers,—frail women and underfed children
as well as men bearing a whole library of strange stories on their gaunt
faces. Groups of refugees who came too late or have not influence enough
to find room in the cells live packed together in stone cellars, some
still wearing the remnants of czarist uniforms, or of the various
“White” armies that have gone to pieces before the advancing “Reds,”
some still unrecovered from war-time wounds and sundry hardships.

The orchestra which enlivens the nights of the more fortunate foreigners
in the frock-coat section of the city huddle together here on improvised
beds that would hardly be recognized as such; in these ill smelling
dungeons there are men who have not garments enough, even if they had
the spirit left, to go forth and look for some possible way out of their
present sad dilemma.

But one’s sympathy for the dispossessed Russians in China always soon
comes to a frayed edge. Their scorn of manual labor even as an
alternative to starvation, the unregenerate selfishness of their exiled
fellow-countrymen in more fortunate circumstances, their lack of
practicality, of plain common sense from the Western point of view, in a
word their Orientalism, so out of keeping with their Caucasian exterior,
tend to turn compassion to mere condolences which in time fade out to
indifference. Perhaps any of us suddenly come down as a nation, like a
proud sky-scraper unexpectedly collapsing into a chaotic heap of débris,
would find ourselves bewildered out of ordinary human intelligence; but
it is hard to avoid the impression that these individual weaknesses were
there before the debacle, and that they are incurable, at least in the
existing generation. A few such enterprises as printing, binding, and
leather tanning have been started in the former monastery, but it was
noticeable that almost all the actual work was being done by Chinese.
Sturdy, even though possibly hungry, young men loafed about their cells
and cellars complaining that they could not hire some one to rebuild
their simple brick bathing-vat and cooking-stove. Chinese officials,
especially of the petty grade, have not been over-kind to the groups of
refugees that have fallen into their hands; but they rank at least on a
par with the Russian archbishop of Peking, who considers the northeast
corner of the city his personal property and demands the abject
servility of the Middle Ages toward his exalted person from those of his
fellow-countrymen whom he graciously admits to floor-space there in the
shadow of his own spacious episcopal residence.

These ostentatious forms of Christianity seem much more in keeping with
the Chinese temperament than the austere Protestantism of innumerable
sects, which has dotted Peking, as it has all China, with its schools,
churches, hospitals, and missions pure and simple. It is not at all hard
to find resemblances between the services of the Russians and those in
the lama temple a little west of them, in any joss-burning Chinese place
of worship, or for that matter between these and high mass at Pei-t’ang
to the northwest of the Forbidden City. The Catholics, too, go back for
centuries in the life of Peking, to Verbiest and his fellow-Jesuits who
served the Sons of Heaven in secular, as well as their subjects in
religious, ways.

In the Boxer days Pei-t’ang was scarcely second to the British legation
as a place of refuge against the bloodthirsty besiegers; on Easter
Sunday, at least, it rivals even in mere picturesqueness any temple in
the capital. Red silk interspersed with Maltese crosses in imperial
yellow wrapped the pillars; artificial flowers—where real ones are so
cheap and so plentiful—added to the Oriental garishness of the interior;
the mingled scent of incense and crowded Chinese made the scene
impressive not merely to the sight. Mats on the floor held more
worshipers than did the benches. The women sat on one side, the flaring
white head-dresses of the nuns forming a broad front border to the sea
of smooth, oily Chinese coiffures. Near the center hundreds of “orphan”
boys in khaki made a great yellow patch. In front, at the foot of the
choir-stalls backed by the gorgeous altar, the assemblage was gay with
French and Belgian officers in full bemedaled uniform, with a scattering
of European women—there are other Catholic churches in Peking that are
not so far away for most foreigners—their prie-dieus conspicuous in rich
silk covers. Even the raised place at one side, theoretically reserved
for Caucasians, was crowded with Chinese, hardly a dozen more of whom
could have been driven into the church with knouts or bayonets. Yellow
faces, high above any casual glance, peered from behind the pipes of the
big organ. Chinese acolytes in red wandered to and fro, swinging
censers; the music, while not unendurable, was screechy enough to prove
the unseen choir of the same race, boys echoing men, with the organ
filling in the interstices. Children ran wild among the rather orderless
throng; some of the congregation stood throughout the service; large
numbers of Chinese men kept their caps on. But a thousand Chinese
fervently crossing themselves at the requisite signals from the altar,
where two Chinese priests in colorful robes worthy at least a bishop
functioned on either side of the white-haired European in archiepiscopal
regalia, had about it something no less striking than anything Buddhism
has to offer. On week-days old Chinese women, just such bent, shrouded
figures as may be seen in any cathedral of Europe, come from the maze of
_hutungs_ about Pei-t’ang to bow their heads in silent prayer in its
perpetual twilight, with gaudy saints and images of here and there a
somewhat Chinese cast of countenance looking down upon them.


Preparations for the Chinese New Year began on the twenty-third of the
twelfth moon with the burning of the kitchen god still to be found in
nearly every home. Some of our neighbors, especially those whom lack of
a courtyard drove out into the _hutung_ for this ceremony, did it half
furtively, as if they were pretending, at least when foreigners looked
on, that this was only an ordinary wad of waste-paper. But we knew that
before he was torn down incense had been burned before the flimsy,
smoke-dulled god, with a little straw or _kaoliang_ for the horse that
is shown waiting for him, and even our neighbors admitted that they
stuck a bit of something sweet on his lips before sending him to heaven,
by the fire route, to report on the actions of the family during the
year. A little opium serves this purpose still better, or best of all is
to dip the whole half-penny lithograph in native wine just before the
burning, that the god may be too drowsy or too drunk to tell the truth
when he reaches headquarters.

[Illustration:

  Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and
    grandfather before him, plays only female parts
]

[Illustration:

  In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven
]

[Illustration:

  Over the wall from our house, boats plied on the moat separating us
    from the Chinese City
]

[Illustration:

  Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night-soil of the city,
    brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer
]

It is a seven-day journey to the Chinese heaven and back, so that people
have a little respite from the irksome surveillance of the god of the
kitchen. During that week there was a furor of house-cleaning, as the
Chinese misunderstand the term; the well-to-do renewed their paper
windows; those who could afford it went so far as to have the wooden
parts freshly painted. Especially on the last day of the year much
shaving, washing, and bathing went on; the baths outside the southern
gates of the Tartar City were crowded as they never are at ordinary
times, when a two-to-ten copper bath once a month is considered ample.
All that last day, too, the _chop-a-chop_ of food, especially of meat
dumplings, being prepared for the many guests of the following days,
when such work would be taboo, sounded from every house that was not a
poor man’s home indeed. Faded old scraps of paper came down everywhere
and bright new ones went up, particularly those long upright red slips
opposite each door, bearing the four familiar characters for _K’ai men
chien hsi_—“Open door see happiness.” Some of these were put up by the
householders themselves, some by poor neighbors who hoped for a slight
remembrance from the inmates. One saw them all over China for months
afterward. The most miserable little hovels far outside the walls put up
new paper gods that made brilliant splashes on doors and mud façades.
Perhaps the saddest thing about the Chinese New Year is that all debts
are expected to be paid before it breaks, which was particularly hard on
what is still recognized abroad as the Chinese Government, months in
arrears with every one except its Tuchuns and high employees of special
influence. Two men at least I saw next day wandering about with a
lantern, a pretense that it is still night and dunning still
permissible.

New Year’s day is everybody’s birthday in China; so there is a double
reason for new clothes appearing everywhere. Even beggars and
rag-pickers seemed to have them, or at least well washed and mended
ones, and the populace presented such a sight of approximate cleanliness
as it will not until another year rolls by and compels it to change
again. A new kitchen god, gaudy on its thin paper, is put up during the
first hours of the new year, with a little shrine, and firecrackers and
incense welcome him. Firecrackers, indeed, were the most conspicuous
part of the celebration. They boomed all night, close under our back
walls and all over the city; even “Ha-li” was restless with the
incessant uproar. This was partly in honor of the kitchen gods, but
largely to frighten off the evil spirits lurking about to contaminate
the new year at the start. Among the Chinese there was no attempt to
sleep that night; even our _ama_ asked permission to go home, and said
that she would sit up all night, eating meat dumplings from about two in
the morning until daybreak—yet she is a woman of unusual common sense
for China, with the utmost scorn for those who still bind their feet.

For the first five days of the new year women are supposed not to leave
home or to enter that of another, though in Peking many disobey at least
the first half of this ancient rule. The men, on the other hand, go out
early and often, not only on the first but on the succeeding days, to
call upon all their friends, particularly on the mother-in-law who
reigns over each household, to give greetings, and incidentally to fill
themselves beyond nature’s intention with meat dumplings. Our teacher
was still weary from this ordeal when he again reported for duty.
Rachel, however, was strictly enjoined by the _ama_ not to call on a
neighbor at whose house she had attended a wedding during the winter; it
would be even worse form than not to have a mother-in-law present to
receive those who called upon us. As in France, New Year’s is the time
for giving presents; no sooner had we distributed a dozen silver dollars
in red envelopes among the servants than they despatched the _ama_ to
get us presents,—food dainties for us adults, toys for “Ha-li.” Of all
the celebration, however, perhaps the detail that looked strangest was
to see the shops closed, long row after row of them blank-faced with
board shutters where we had never seen them before. Drums and
firecrackers sounded inside—some say that gambling goes on apace—whether
to scare off devils or merely for the joy of making a noise; probably
both motives existed, depending on the individual temperament.
Foreigners sometimes accuse the Chinese of laziness because they take as
much as a week’s rest at New Year’s, as if this were anything compared
with our fifty-two and more holidays a year. Besides, even the shops are
in few cases really closed; trust any Chinese merchant not to miss a
possible stroke of business. There is almost always a peep-hole, if you
know where to look for it, and one man inside who will make a special
exception in favor of any one who finds it. Merchants can send their
goods to the fairs, anyway; these spring up everywhere, especially in
temple grounds, in and outside the city, where every one comes to burn
joss-sticks by the bundle, until many a huge urn before the gods runs
over with ashes. These are the gayest of markets, with peep-shows,
acrobats, coolies, posing for the day as sword-swallowers,
story-tellers, and musicians, with amateur and professional theatrical
performances indoors and out, with every conceivable gambling device,
men, women, and children crowded around them, with all manner of
playthings for sale,—singing “diavolo” tops reaching almost the size of
drums, pink bottles of _chianti_-shape which reward the blower with a
peculiar noise, clusters of toy windmills on one handle that spin in
chorus as the holder rides homeward in his rickshaw or his Peking cart,
kites of every description, some fully man-size, of bird, beetle,
airplane shape. There are no age-limits among the Chinese in the use of
New Year’s toys; even solemn old men fly kites all over the city at this
season, among the swirls of pigeons following their whistle-bearing
leader about the cloudless heavens.

All this went on for a week or more, though with diminishing ardor; for
some soon tire of so long a holiday, and many would starve if they
celebrated it all, so that gradually men went back to work, though not a
few stuck it out. We hardly noticed a lack of rickshaws even on the
first day, and the calls of street-hawkers never completely died out. If
our servants went out more than usual we missed none of their usual
services, and certainly the cook must have found the markets open. The
real New Year’s duty of every Chinese, of course, is to go home, though
it be across ten provinces, to put paper “cash,” such as flutter along
the route of every funeral, on the graves of his ancestors, and to
prepare them special food, preferably duck or chicken, of which they can
eat only the “flavor,” leaving three guesses as to what becomes of the
rest. Many do go home, but in modern days it is surprising how many find
this imperative journey quite impossible. At length the celebration
petered out, though crowded carts of people in their best garments could
be seen plodding toward the temples outside our East Wall up to the
last, and Peking settled down to its industrious seven days a week
again.

With the republic, China officially adopted the Western calendar, as
Japan did long ago; but the masses cling to the old one, with its animal
names for the twelve years that are constantly recurring. Like
Christianity, the new calendar is considered something foreign, which is
quite enough, even leaving the tenacity of old custom aside, to condemn
it among many Chinese; and even in official circles the lunar New Year
is celebrated more thoroughly than the other. The result is that no
government employee has to come to office on the foreign New Year, and
no one does on the old one, when even cabinet members go to their
ancestral homes or on a spree to Tientsin or Shanghai. Nor is the cult
of cyclical animals by any means dead among the Chinese. Almost over our
head on the East Wall stand the famous astronomical instruments, some of
them made by Verbiest himself, which the Germans carried off in 1900 and
very recently returned in accordance with a clause in the Treaty of
Versailles; and just beyond them is an old temple, the occupants of
which include among their duties the annual task of compiling the
popular almanac. One may see original or reprinted copies of this
everywhere in China, for it is indispensable to the fortuneteller, the
geomancer, and all their innumerable ilk, if not to the mass of the
people themselves. Here are set forth the lucky and unlucky days for
marriages or funerals, for washing the hair, for beginning a new
building, for every act of importance in the Chinese daily life. Without
it how could match-makers know whether or not the birth-years of
possible brides and grooms conflict? Obviously if one was born in the
year of the rabbit and the other in that of the dog, or in the years of
the tiger and the sheep respectively, the result of an alliance would be
a sorry household.

This year the almanac concocted by our priestly neighbors has a pig as
“running title” from cover to cover, as well as the frequent recurrence
of this motif throughout its pages. For this is the Year of the Pig,
which began on our own February 16, and for twelve moons—this year there
does not happen to be an intercalary thirteenth—the millions of
Mohammedan Chinese must express themselves on that subject by using some
such subterfuge as “Black Sheep.” Moreover, it is the end of a cycle of
Cathay, the pig being the last of the twelve cyclical animals which pass
five times to make such a cycle. This, it seems, presages the worst year
of the whole sixty, and the soothsayers enlivened this New Year’s with
the most pessimistic predictions. According to the street-side
necromancers, who make their livelihood, such as it is, by telling the
fortunes of individuals or of nations, much calamity is due China before
this Year of the Pig is done. Millions, perhaps, will die of war,
pestilence, or famine, or a combination of these—one fellow went so far
as to assure his listeners that three fourths of the population of
Peking will be wiped out. Great disasters are promised all over the
country, particularly in the province of Shensi, which must suffer
especially for the privilege of being the birthplace of the next
emperor, whom the necromancers assert is already approaching man’s
estate there. It is hopeless, therefore, runs the gossip, to expect a
settlement of China’s crying difficulties during the twelvemonth of the
Pig—some of us wonder if the foreign legations have been imbued with the
same spirit. That is the evil of superstitions particularly in a land
where the majority is still influenced by them; the mere fact that large
numbers of people believe all this market-stall nonsense causes at least
a psychological depression, and probably increases the likelihood of the
beliefs being realized.

However, these popular oracles go on, after this year conditions will
rapidly improve, and it is almost certain that with the new cycle will
come a return to order and prosperity. Every friend of China sincerely
hopes so, for she certainly needs just that very badly, whether she
deserves it or not. No doubt the next cycle of sixty years will bring
something of the sort, even though it is difficult to think of China’s
calamities abruptly ceasing with this inauspicious porcine year.

There are good as well as unkind things to be said of the Chinese lunar
calendar. It is easy, for instance, to tell the time of their month
merely by glancing at the sky on any unclouded evening, and no one need
ask what day the moon will be full. By the old system of reckoning the
Chinese have a whole list of dates fixing changes of weather, and if one
year’s experience is a fair test these are more accurate than the
prophecies of our highest salaried weather men. Some weeks after the
lunar New Year comes the “Stirring of the Insects”; the “Corn Rain” is
set for one of the first days of the third moon—that is, late in our
April; there are the fixed days of “Sprouting Seeds,” the “Small Heat”
and the “Great Heat,” the “Hoar Frost,” the “Cold Dew,” the “Slight
Snow” and the “Great Snow”—though the last rarely reaches Peking—and so
on around the eternal cycle again. But “Pure Brightness,” otherwise
known as Arbor day now, on which the president himself came to plant
trees almost next door to us, has come and gone; _pengs_ are springing
up everywhere, shading the courtyards, forming whole new roofs and
fronts over the better shops, and implying that it is time we were
moving on, for the “Great Heat” is no misnomer in Peking.




                              CHAPTER XIII
                           A JOURNEY TO JEHOL


The Great Wall at its greatest, thirty-odd miles northwest of Peking,
with the Ming Tombs thrown in, is well worth the journey, both by train
and foot and by airplane—the one in two days and the other in as many
hours. There is a Trappist monastery within reach of the capital, and
the Western Hills are full of interest to the tramper; in fact merely to
name the excursions which the visitor to Peking should not on any
reasonable account miss would be to draw up a long list. But there is
one of these that had a particular attraction, because it is farther
away, over a difficult road devoid of any of the aids of modern times,
so ill of repute that certainly not one foreigner in a thousand who
comes to Peking ever dreams of really attempting that journey. To cap
the climax the Wai-chiao-pu gave official notice just as I was preparing
to start that no more permissions to visit that area would be given to
foreigners, because it was overrun with bandits. Obviously the antidote
of too much comfort and civilization in Peking was the trip to Jehol.

Those who are wise make the outward journey by way of Tung Ling, the
Eastern Tombs, thereby doubling the reward. This means that the first
stage is to Tungchow, by train or almost any known form of
transportation, twelve miles east of the capital, of which it was for
centuries the “port.” For it lies on the river that joins the Grand
Canal at Tientsin, and the tribute grain from the south was transferred
here to narrower canals that brought it to the imperial granaries now
falling into ruin almost within a stone’s throw of our Peking home. I
might have been disappointed to find the donkeys that had been engaged
for me unavailable until next morning if it had not been my good fortune
to spend the intervening time with the venerable author of “Chinese
Characteristics” and “Village Life in China.” Tungchow itself has
nothing unusual to show the visitor of to-day, unless it is that rounded
corner of its half-ruined wall. This is a sign of infamy, for it means
that some one within was once guilty of the, particularly in China,
unpardonable crime of patricide. The city which merits four such corners
was by imperial law razed to the ground.

Long before dawn, early as that is on the first day of May, the three
donkeys reported for duty. They were smaller and leaner than I had
hoped, of course, but their owner and driver, deeply pock-marked and
already showing the cataract that will in time blind his remaining eye,
turned out to be all that a much more exacting traveler could have
asked, and a real companion to boot. I wish I could say as much for the
“boy” I brought with me from Peking; truth must prevail, however, at all
costs. My journey to Jehol was made at a later date than those longer
ones subsequently to be chronicled; I had already been eight months in
China, entertaining a teacher an hour a day during nearly half that
period, and it seemed high time to depend on my own meager knowledge of
Mandarin, to make this a kind of test for similar, but more extensive,
experiences to come. I had deliberately refused those applicants with a
smattering of English, therefore, and hired this single servant for his
alleged familiarity with foreign ways, particularly of the kitchen. He
might have known even less of what we understand by the word
“cleanliness,” for the depths of ignorance in that respect are
bottomless in China, and his familiarity was rather of the sort which
too indulgent missionaries produce among Chinese of his class. Were the
trip to be repeated I would depend upon _k’an-lü-di_, my companionable
“watch-donkey-er” from Tungchow, to do the swearing and bring me boiled
water at the inns, and do the rest myself. But at least the “boy” spoke
only the tongue of Peking, and from Tungchow back to the capital I had
the advantage of hearing not a word of any other except from the two
British families in Jehol itself.

We were crossing the river by chaotic poled ferry by the time the sun
was fully up, and jogging away across a floor-flat, fertile plain,
intensely cultivated yet almost desert brown, like so much of northern
China except at the height of summer, before the first of the many towns
along the way was fully astir. It was manure strewing time, and the
season when the peasants of Chihli patiently break up the too dry clods
of earth covering their little fields by beating them with the back of a
Homeric hoe or dragging a stone roller over them by boy-, man-, or
donkey-power. Others were hoeing the winter wheat, growing in rows two
feet apart, but with _kaoliang_ already sprouting like beans or radishes
between them, which it was hard to realize would be above a horseman’s
head by August. Green onions enough to have fed a modern army went
balancing by from the shoulder-poles of coolies passing in both
directions. It is as incomprehensible to the mere Westerner why
identical produce must change places all over China as it was to
understand why onions grown at least to boy’s estate would not be better
in a perpetually hungry land than these tiny bulbless ones. But the
scent of young onions was seldom absent during our first two days, on
which we ran the gauntlet every few hours of a market-town green from
end to end with them. Next in number were the coolies carrying two low
flat baskets with open-work covers through which could be seen hundreds
of fluffy, peeping chicks being peddled about the country. The rare
trees were decked out in new leaves; far as the eye could strain itself
the brown, sea-flat earth was being prodded to do its best for
countless, already sun-browned tillers.

At the unprepossessing country town where we spent the night my “boy”
came in with a horrified look on his face to report that the innkeeper
wanted sixty coppers, which is fully fifteen cents in real money, for
the two good-sized rooms, new and well papered, extraordinarily clean
for China, which the three of us occupied. A chicken, too, cost a
hundred coppers, whereas in Peking it was only seventy! I gave outward
evidence of horror at this incredible state of affairs, lest the
opposite bring the impression that the customary “squeeze” might be
doubled with impunity, and then advised payment rather than a dispute on
this, our first day out. Perhaps it was the painful price of chickens
that made the town willing to consume some of the things it does, though
I believe the same omnivorous tendency prevails throughout this
overpeopled country. The squeamish, by the way, should skip the next few
lines; but one cannot always be nice and still tell the truth about
China.

A camel bound to Peking with a train of his fellows had died just in
front of our inn. The townsman to whom the carcass had evidently been
sold made a deep cut in the throat and then with his several helpers
proceeded to dismember it. When I stepped out into the street again soon
after dark everything except the head, the tail, and the four great
padded feet, cut off at the knees, had been sold as food to the
villagers. The hide and these odds and ends were evidently to yield
their portion of nourishment also, for they were carried into a
neighboring kitchen, while two other men went on disentangling the
heaped-up intestines, carefully preserving their contents as fertilizer
and to all appearances planning to use the entrails themselves as food.

There was double excitement in the town that evening, triple, counting
the foreigner, a date to be long remembered. Down the road a little way
from the disgusting front of the inn there was a theatrical performance,
not of flesh-and-blood actors, but what might be called a shadow-show.
Stage “music” in the Chinese sense was drawing the whole town, less the
camel carvers, thither; women hurried slowly through the dust on their
crippled feet; the younger generation, with the usual Chinese redundancy
of boys, swarmed; staid old men took their own chairs—that is, wooden
saw-horses six inches wide—with them. The theater, which had been thrown
up that afternoon in a corner of the highway, was little more than a
crude platform on poles, partly walled and roofed with pieces of cloth.
But it was a complete stage, almost better than a real one, in fact, for
there was about it a certain hazy atmosphere of romance that is
impossible in the matter-of-fact presence of mere human actors. There
were even actual fights on horseback, which the real stage can only
pretend by symbols to give; thrones, city gates, battles, petitioners,
men shaking their spears and themselves with rage at one another, all
the scenes with which the theater-goer in Peking is familiar, and more,
were there. Nor was speech lacking; these shadowy personages expressed
themselves in the same classical falsetto as do Mei Lan-fang and his
colleagues.

When I had mingled for a time with the audience that crowded a whole
section of the moon-flooded roadway, interspersed with the inevitable
hawkers of everything consumable under the circumstances, I went around
behind the scenes to see how these results were achieved with such
slight apparatus. You can always look behind the scenes in China without
arousing a protest, though you may not be any the wiser for doing so. A
flock of boys were hanging about on the pole structure, wholly open at
the back, the three showmen appearing to be quite unconscious of them so
long as they did not physically cramp their elbows. These men produced
their results with a black curtain, three kerosene lamps a foot or more
back of it, and a confusion of little colored figures hanging on either
side in what might be called the wings. Wearing as bored an expression
as any property-man on a real Chinese stage, the showmen picked these
figures down as they were needed and flourished them along between the
lights and the curtain. To each figure was attached a handle long enough
to keep the hand of the holder out of sight from the audience, and as
the gaudy, flimsy little manikins dashed and pranced and waddled to and
fro, according to their individual temperaments and their momentary
emotions, the bored manipulators poured forth the story in the awful
voice of the Chinese actor. That was all; yet the whole town stood or
sat enthralled by the performance, and I could hear the falsetto far
away in the moonlight until I fell asleep.


Beyond Manchow next afternoon cultivation thinned out and bare mountains
grew up on the horizon, while round stones of all sizes became incessant
underfoot. Walking had really been easier than bestriding my little
white donkey, but I had soon found it sympathy wasted to try to make
life easier for him. Your Chinese donkeyteer does not believe in letting
his animals grow fat with ease, and never did I look around a moment
after slipping off the padded back of my hip-high mount that his owner
was not already swinging his toes along one or the other side of him.
The other two donkeys, bearing our belongings and my “boy” respectively,
had, of course, even less respite. Incredible little beasts! Subsisting
on a little of nothing and still able to jog incessantly and
indefinitely on under loads of almost their own weight, they are the
true helpmeets of the industrious, ill fed Chinese countryman.

The usual time from Tungchow to Malanyü is three days, but we had gotten
an excellent start each morning and a bit of pressure induced the
_k’an-lü-di_ to push on past what most travelers to the Eastern Tombs
make their second stopping-place. A gate in the mountains that might
almost have been cut by hand rather than by the river that even in this
dry season filled all of it except a stony bank, crowded now with cattle
and flocks of goats making their way westward, let us out at sunset upon
an enormous plain completely enclosed in an amphitheater of high hills.
Across this, through the evergreen trees that thickened farther on into
an immense forest, we saw far ahead the first tomb of Tung Ling, a
golden-yellow roof standing well above the highest tree-tops. For nearly
two hours we plodded on among venerable pines that in China at least
were thick enough to merit the name of forest, amid scents that are all
too rare in that denuded land, foot-travelers to and from the various
tomb-guarding villages growing numerous and then thinning out again
before we sighted at last the dim lights and aroused the barking dogs of
Malanyü. The yard of its best inn was noisy with eating animals,
tinkling mule-bells, and the drivers, dogs, and roosters that always
make night hideous in such a place, while the best room facing it would
hardly be mistaken in any Western land for a human habitation. But that
is what the traveler in China expects in almost any town off the
railroads where there are no foreigners to offer him hospitality. At
least, if accommodations are not princely, neither are the charges.

While the donkeys drowsed through a well earned but unexpected holiday,
I spent half the morning, with the “boy” trailing me, chasing the man
who could open the tomb doors for me. Even with two tissue-paper
documents daubed with red characters from men of standing in Peking
local permission was not easily forthcoming. First there was a hot and
dusty ten-_li_ walk to the little garrison town of Malanchen on the very
edge of intramural China, where the commander commonly reputed to be
stationed in Malanyü read and retained my letters, offered tea, and at
length sent a soldier back to the city with us with orders to run to
earth the chief keeper of the tombs. He was not easily found and he in
turn had to run to earth several subordinates, each of whom lived far up
labyrinthian alleyways in the utmost corners of town, and when at length
we shook off the throng that kicks up the dust at the heels of any
foreigner so bold as to step off the beaten path of his fellows in
China, there was still an hour’s tramp back through the thin evergreen
forest to the tombs themselves.

Though it should be funereal, Tung Ling is one of the most delightful
spots in North China, almost atoning for the wastefulness of its two
hundred square miles given over to nine tombs. The soughing of the
breeze and the singing of the few birds in the scattered but extensive
evergreen forest were joys that one almost forgets in this bare land;
for China there were comparatively few people within the enclosure,
though trail-roads wandered away in all directions among the trees, with
donkey-bells tinkling off into the distance; it was particularly a joy
to leave even the trails and walk on grass again, strolling at random on
and on, to climb the hills, though this is technically forbidden, since
the living commonalty should not look down upon the illustrious dead.
Whatever they may not have done for their subjects the Sons of Heaven
were experts in choosing their last resting-places.

There was no roaming at will, however, until I had shaken off the
procession of keepers and hangers-on whose duty, curiosity, or suspicion
did not begin to flag until well on in the afternoon. It is a serious
matter to protect an emperor and his consorts even centuries after their
death. Every one of the nine tombs of Tung Ling has a walled town in
which its guardians and their families, all Manchus, of course, live to
the number certainly of several hundred each, if not of more than a
thousand. Their support devolves upon the Chinese people, through the
Government which guarantees, even though it does not fulfil its
promises, the upkeep of the tombs, as well as of the survivors, of the
Ch’ing dynasty. Before each tomb, which is no mere mausoleum in the
Occidental sense but an enclosure many acres in extent, quite aside from
the great wooded tract surrounding it, where half a dozen great
buildings and a flock of small ones have ample elbow-room, stands a
keepers’ lodge. From this, blackened with the smoke of generations of
cooking and tea-brewing, emerge as many as a dozen idlers whose sole
duty in life is to see that no unauthorized disturbance troubles the
royal dead within. No one of these guards is intrusted with power enough
to open the tomb alone; there are things inside that would bring
pilferers several Chinese fortunes. When the authorized visitor—or, one
very strongly suspects, any other capable of clinking silver—appears,
shouts arise in the lodge and its vicinity until at length men enough
are awakened from their perpetual siestas to make entrance possible.
This requires from four to six, sometimes more, bunches of mammoth keys,
each of which is in the personal keeping of a single individual or,
since man must sleep, a pair of them. When at length the whole unshaven
group is assembled, a pair of ordinary coolies is also needed to bring a
step-ladder, since the tomb doors are trebly secured with enormous
padlocks at top and bottom in addition to the great bolts operated
through the ordinary keyholes. The keys of Chinese tombs, by the way, do
not turn; they merely push open the crude yet complicated locks. There
are often several such doors to be passed, so that the time required to
gain admission is much more than the average visitor cares to spend
inside.

Fortunately there is really nothing to be gained by having oneself let
into more than two of the nine tombs of Tung Ling. The others are so
much like these that a passing glimpse is enough. After all, it is the
great wooded amphitheater itself, backed by the magnificent sky-line of
mountains, and the exterior vista of the tombs, towering in imperial
yellow high above not only the towns of their guardians but the
enclosing forest itself, that is worth coming so far to see. Besides, by
the time one has distributed fees among all the hangers-on of two tombs,
and satisfied the flock of attendants who have insisted on coming all
the way from town with him, there is another good reason for being
content with the exteriors of the others.

The oldest and the newest are most worth admission, the beginning and
the end of the Manchu dynasty as far as Lung Ling is concerned. K’ang
Hsi, second of the Ch’ing line, has a fitting mausoleum, its approach
flanked by mammoth stone figures not unlike those of the Mings, and the
softening hand of time has added much, for it is just two centuries
since the occupant went in quest of his ancestors. But the most
magnificent of the Eastern Tombs, perhaps the finest one in all
tomb-ridden China, is more than the world at large would have awarded
the notorious old lady who lives within, for she is none other than Tsu
Hsi or Tai Ho, known to the West as _the_ Empress Dowager, moving spirit
of the Boxer uprising and the greatest single cause of the downfall of
the Manchu dynasty. Within the spirit chamber of K’ang Hsi there are
five chairs draped in imperial yellow silk, for his four concubines
stick by him even in death; but it is quite what one would expect to
find the famous Dowager alone in all her glory. For while she had a
husband once, who is also buried at Tung Ling, he was of small
importance by the time she relieved China of her earthly presence, three
years before the downfall of the Manchus, whatever he may have been as
Emperor half a century before. Even starting as a mere concubine, Tsu
Hsi needed no husband to make herself an empress in fact if not in name.
An identical tomb, which the caretakers asserted is that of her sister,
stands close beside that of Tai Ho, with a low wall between them; but in
her magnificent throne-room there is no suggestion of rivalry. Of the
richness of this interior, its walls and ceilings decorated in many
colors with innumerable figures large and tiny of the most intricate
form, great bronze dragons climbing the huge pillars; of a thousand
details, artistic withal, which mean nothing to us of the West but much
to the Chinese, words would give but little impression.

I had a note of introduction to the head-man of the Manchu village that
watches over the Dowager’s tomb. Within its brick wall the populous
hamlet was much like any other Chinese town of like size, rather overrun
with pigs and children, crumbling away here and there with poverty or
inattention, careless in sanitary matters. Few heads of many times
greater cities of the Occident, however, could have received a chance
visitor with the perfect grace, the prodigal-son cordiality quite devoid
of any hint of dissimulation, of the Manchu with whom I was soon sitting
at a little foot-high _k’ang_ table laden with Chinese dainties, sipping
tea and struggling to express in my scanty mandarin a few thoughts above
the eating and sleeping level. As luck would have it the family, which
with its ramifications seemed to number at least a hundred, with
children for every month as far back as months go, was celebrating the
birthday of the mother-in-law. In China only those who have reached a
respectful old age commemorate their individual birthdays—and they
receive many toys among their presents. Over the outer entrance to the
rambling collection of houses hung two immense flags, not the dragon
banner of the Manchus but the five-bar one of the Chinese Republic. Back
in the innermost courtyard the old lady, of a charming yet authoritative
manner which attested to long years of efficient rule over the
household, was surrounded by all the female members of the family,
decked out in their holiday best. The finest silks covered them from
neck to ankles—trousers, like bound feet, are for Chinese women—the
elaborate Manchu head-dress was made more so by immense and tiny flowers
added to it in honor of the occasion, and the faces of the young women
were painted with white and red, as formal occasions demand, until they
looked like enameled masks. Several of these were evidently the wives of
my polished host, and when I asked permission to photograph one of them
alone for the details of the gala costume there was no hesitation as to
which one it should be: though she was probably the youngest of them
all, and for that reason almost obsequious toward the others, she had
born her master a son, who must also be included in the picture. Women
and men were constantly coming to bend the knee or kowtow to the lady of
the occasion, according to their rank. The men with few exceptions wore
the complete Manchu court costume, including the inverted-bowl straw hat
covered with loose red cords, with various individual decorations. When
I at last succeeded in taking my leave without causing a sense of
discourtesy, my host insisted that my “boy” carry away for me, in honor
of the felicitous occasion, a big box of _dien-hsin_, assorted Chinese
cakes that lasted all three of us the rest of the outward journey.

There seems to be no ill feeling between the two peoples populating Tung
Ling and the vicinity, if indeed they themselves recognize any real
dividing-line. In large numbers congregated together one could see a
difference between the Manchus and the Chinese; the keepers of the
Eastern Tombs were slightly larger, stronger-looking men, a trifle less
abject in their manner, than the people about them, a kind of half-way
type between the Chinese and the Mongols. The older and poorer of them
still wore their cues; the rest had sacrificed to the republic a badge
of nationality the origin of which is lost in the prehistoric mists, as
the subjected Chinese adopted it three centuries ago at the behest of
their Manchu conquerors.

Early next morning we left the inn laboring under the impression that we
were returning to Peking, skirted the garrison town by unfrequented
paths, and were soon outside the Great Wall, one of the passes of which
Malanchen straddles and guards. I had warned my companions not to
mention the final goal of our journey, lest the newly promulgated order
be cited as an excuse for turning me back, which would also mean the
abrupt ending of their jobs. Apparently they succeeded in performing the
un-Chinese feat of keeping their mouths shut, for no one came to
interfere with my plans. The wall at Malanchen was grass-grown, smaller,
and in greater disrepair than at Nankow Pass, where most foreigners see
it, even less imposing than where it descends to the sea at Shanhaikwan.
Geographically we had passed from China proper into Inner Mongolia, and
as if to mark the change the soft level going turned almost instantly to
stony uplands that became foot-hills, swelling into veritable mountains
so suddenly that all six of us were panting for breath on all but
perpendicular slopes scarcely an hour after setting out across the plain
now far below. For centuries these mountain ranges behind Tung Ling were
an imperial reserve, densely forested and inviolate, meant to preserve
the _feng-shui_ of the Eastern Tombs, to protect them from evil
influences, which in China always come from the north. The republic,
however, opened this great uninhabited region to settlers, with the
result that here there may still be seen sights utterly unknown in the
rest of China, pioneering conditions completely out of place in that
densely populated, intensively cultivated land, and at the same time a
demonstration of what must have happened many centuries ago on an
infinitely larger scale to make North China the dust-blown, denuded area
it is to-day.

Settlers poured in from the overpopulated country to the south as air
rushes to fill a vacuum. An efficient Government would have seen that
the windfall was exploited to the best advantage; in the absence of one
it was ruthlessly looted. Precious as are trees and wood in China these
great forests hardly a hundred miles from Peking were wiped out as
wantonly as those of southern Brazil, as those of virgin Cuba lying in
the path of advancing cane-fields. Half-burned trunks littered the
hillsides; acres of fire-blackened stumps, wood that might have been
turned into lumber enough to supply several provinces felled and left to
rot or burn where it lay, men grubbing at slopes that had never before
known the hoe were things that could not be reconciled with China.
Alpine valleys filled with pink blossoms, of which cued coolies wore a
cluster behind each ear, untainted mountain streams purling down across
the trail, provided here and there with solid timber bridges instead of
mats and branches sagging under their covering of loose earth, seemed as
out of place in this part of the world as did the pungent scent of
burning woodland that carried me back to a rural childhood. It was the
most delightful day’s tramp in North China, and hardly once did I think
of evicting my one-eyed companion from the white donkey.

But it was China after all, with many of its national characteristics.
Streams of friendly, cheerful coolies climbed the defiles with their
earthly possessions, consisting of a grub-ax and a few rags, ready for
any task offered them, or in lieu of it prepared to gather a bundle of
brush and carry it to a market many miles away; they realized that
already this new land is so thickly peopled that it has no real openings
for them. To see a line of men and boys, elbow to elbow, scratching one
of these stony, thin-soiled, more than half-perpendicular hillsides,
made the crowding of population a more living problem than a shelf of
books could. There were a few pioneer shacks of split rails, but with
unlimited logs and mighty boulders everywhere this imported generation
of mountaineers built their huts mainly of mud, at best of unshaped
stones and sticks. Burnt-log stockades surrounded many of these new
homes, for you cannot break the Chinese of their habit of building walls
merely by transplanting them to where walls are entirely unneeded. The
Chinese birthright of the most laborious forms of labor still prevailed.
Plows were home-made affairs drawn by a boy, a woman, or a donkey, and
were so crude and small that the man who held them was bent double as he
shuffled along. Thousands of roughly squared timbers nearly twice the
size of a railroad-tie lay blackening and rotting along the trail, and
every little while we met a man with two of these roped to his back
picking his way down slopes rougher and steeper than any stairway
disrupted by an earthquake. Goiter was more prevalent and reached more
loathsome proportions in all this region than I have ever seen it
elsewhere. New territory, new homes, new opportunities, all was as new
as a new world, except the people, as soil- and custom-incrusted as if
they had lived here a thousand years. The thought persisted that these
beautiful mountains should have been left clothed in their magnificent
forests instead of being enslaved to what can scarcely be called
agriculture. At most they offer steep little strips of very stony
patches, and the population these support is hardly worth the trees it
has displaced. Human beings grubbing out an existence which hardly seems
worth the effort may be seen anywhere in China; such primeval forests as
have so recklessly been reduced to charred rubbish and clumps of trees
only on the most inaccessible peaks and ridges behind Tung Ling are rare
and precious there.

[Illustration:

  For three thousand miles the Great Wall clambers over the mountains
    between China and Mongolia
]

[Illustration:

  One of the mammoth stone figures flanking the road to the Ming Tombs
    of North China, each of a single piece of granite
]

[Illustration:

  Another glimpse of the Great Wall
]

[Illustration:

  The twin pagodas of Taiyüan, capital of Shansi Province
]

Toward the end of the afternoon a kind of cart-road grew up underfoot
and carried us over the steepest and last ridge of the day to Hsin Lung
Shan. “New Dragon Mountain” is a brand-new pioneer city in the heart of
the former reserve, Chinese in its main features, but so fresh and even
clean that one might easily have doubted its nationality. The inn itself
had not found time to convert its yard into a slough or a dust-bin or
its rooms into crumbling, musty mud dens. Imposing shops lined the
principal streets; the chief official, with whom I exchanged calls of
respect, was a man of culture as well as authority—and he seemed to have
had no special orders concerning foreigners.


Great masses of white clouds drifted through the streets when we set out
next morning along the stony river that gives Hsin Lung Shan its
setting, and were responsible for a curious illusion. The sun had
evidently just topped the mountain ridge close above the town, and the
single irregular row of trees that had survived at the crest showed one
after the other through a little rift in the moving fog that covered
everything else, so that it looked exactly as if the sun itself were
having a procession of trees across its surface. A fairly broad valley
of palpably fertile virgin soil lasted all the morning and somewhat
reconciled one to the destruction of the forests. Here it was less
stony, or better picked up, and supported rather a numerous population
in reasonable style. The mist continued to play queer pranks until it
had been burned away by what remained a blazing, despotic sun. Field
boundaries of stone, also of single logs laid end to end, warned the
road against trespassing. There were stone-heaps in great number, but no
graves to interfere with the husbandman. Four prisoners tied together
with ropes and flanked by two policemen in the usual black uniform
plodded past toward the new city, implying that this virgin region is
after all no sinless Eden. Twice that morning we met strings of camels
stepping softly westward, though how they crossed the ranges that shut
in the valley on all sides was a mystery which their surly drivers, so
unlike the simple, almost obsequious settlers, except in their avoidance
of soap and water, would not pause to answer. Many a camel-train
stalking with supercilious mien past our Peking home goes on to Jehol,
but they take the direct route worn deep with centuries of traffic. In
this May-time the beasts were ugly with the loss of great wads of hair
which made them much worse than moth-eaten, and the drivers had tied
networks of string about their necks to keep them from dropping, or
being pilfered of, this most valuable of their fur.

The valley narrowed at last and pushed us up over another high range,
the third stiff climb of the trip, from the top of which labyrinthian
views blue with haze but brilliant with sunshine spread to infinity in
both directions. But the land had evidently been reclaimed earlier here,
so that there were fewer and fewer pioneering conditions, which on the
third day died out entirely. A miserable mountain inn offered me its
principal room that evening, though it took up more than half the
building reserved for travelers, a flock of evicted coolies picking up
their soiled packs and crowding together somewhere else without the hint
of a protest. I do not know how much they paid for lodging, but it could
not have been any fortune, since the landlord was so eager to replace a
dozen of them, with prospects of more to come, by a lone foreigner whose
bill hardly amounted to twelve American cents. Woven cornstalk fences
increased as the smell of newly cleared land diminished. Twenty-four
hours of valley brought us to another steep _ling_, from the top of
which rows of blue ranges faded away on the distant horizon behind. The
population had been longer established here and was made up of born
mountaineers, simple yet self-sufficient, like mountaineers the world
over. Goiter was almost universal, and nearly every one was deeply
pitted with smallpox, so that there was rarely a good-looking face of
either sex. Round granaries made of wickerwork, of the height of a tall
man, lined with mud plaster and thatched with straw, sat in every yard.
All memories of the royal forest had disappeared by the third afternoon,
and the familiar old China, stony, bare, blowing with dust or reeking
with mud, again surrounded us, though ranges of jagged peaks kept us
fairly close company.

Rain began to fall, putting terror into the heart of my “boy,” convinced
like most Chinese, at least of the north, that he was merely a pillar of
salt—or is it sugar? But the donkey-man was made of sterner stuff. A
positive word was always enough to make him push on, and it was quite
immaterial whether the “boy” followed or flung himself over a precipice.
This time, however, the shower became a deluge that showed no signs of
abating. All the region had fled for shelter. One wrinkled coolie had
monopolized a little wayside shrine, in which he sat in the cramped
posture of the Buddha, literally in the lap of the gods, serenely
smoking his pipe until they chose to let him go on again. By the time we
were soaked through it was evident that we also must take refuge, and
give up the hope of cutting the record from Malanyü to Jehol down to
three days.

The only stopping-place available was a peasant home that offered
accommodations to passing coolies. It boasted the name of Hsiao Pai Shu,
but then, every spot in China where human beings dwell has a name, and
this one after all meant nothing more than “Little White Tree.” If it
had been called “Unworthy Human Pigsty” there would have been less
reason to quarrel with the man who named it. There was a kind of _k’ang_
in one of the three mud stables, but to have demanded that would have
been to drive even my own men out and leave nothing but the bare earth
for a score of fellow-refugees to sleep on. I won the whole race of
outside barbarians a new reputation, therefore, by setting my cot on the
ground at the foot of the _k’ang_ and leaving that free for all the
coolies who could crowd upon it. But I paid for my heroism through other
senses than those of smell and hearing, for not the slightest movement
did I make, not a possession did I withdraw from my baggage, that half a
hundred eyes did not delve into the utmost depths of my personal
privacy. No Westerner who has not himself had the experience can
conceive of the ingenuous meddling which a crowd of low-caste Chinese
can inflict upon him; but it is ingenuous after all, and those few naïve
remarks of which I caught the meaning made me deeply regret that I was
incapable of understanding the respectful chatter that constantly called
attention to my innumerable extraordinary idiosyncrasies.

At Hsi-nan-tze, still sixty _li_ from Jehol, a police soldier was sent
running for more than a mile after me to ask for my card. It was early,
and evidently the town had been slow in waking up to the fact that a
foreigner was passing through. Plainly this was an unusual occurrence,
but there was no suggestion of detaining me, either here or at the
village where we made the usual breakfast-lunch stop from ten to eleven,
in which a similar courteous request was made. A visiting-card, as I
have said before, has a weight in China out of all keeping with the ease
with which any one can have it printed. The fourth hard climb of the
trip, up a trench-like trail slippery as new ice from the rain of the
day before and almost impassable with pack-animals sprawling and sliding
under ungainly burdens, uncovered such a panorama of wrinkled blue
mountain ranges entirely around the horizon as even the perpetual
wanderer seldom sees equaled. Then we descended among bare foot-hills
and plodded the last half-day down a wide sandy and stony river valley,
with one poled ferry and several wadings across the swollen yellow
rivulet which wandered along it. Several earth-and-branch bridges had
been partly carried away and were being repaired in the same
time-honored, inadequate style; that is, the huge baskets filled with
stones that served as almost continuous pillars were having more
branches and _kaoliang_-stalks laid across them and covered with
treacherous loose earth. No other nation has the genius of the Chinese
for doing some things in the worst way. There was a continual
procession, for instance, of carts heavily loaded with grain and drawn
by five to seven mules each, the wickedly exhausted animals staggering
through the deep sand and the deeper rivulet panting as if they were in
the final throes. The Lwan Ho on which the grain is shipped to the coast
washes the edge of Jehol, and the boats could as easily tie up at the
very foot of the warehouses; but the carters’ gild required them to
anchor twenty-five _li_ down the stream! Not even our own labor-unions
could exhibit anything to outrival this sacrificing of the general good
to the selfishness of a group.


Jehol is a compact, unwalled town lying prettily up the slope of a
hollow between two foot-hills, brightened by a few spring-green trees
here and there above its low gray roofs and surrounded on all sides by
beautiful broken ranges. The region is famous for curious natural
features, the most striking of which is the “Clothes’ Beater,” a mammoth
rock looking precisely like that aid to the Chinese washerwomen who
squat at the edges of streams or mud-holes, or an Irishman’s shillalah,
standing bolt upright on its smaller, handle end, and visible more than
a day’s travel away in almost any direction. But while the scenery is
magnificent and the town busy and prosperous, the fame of Jehol is due
to the imperial summer palaces and the lama temples that grew up about
them, as did the town itself. This whole territory, originally Mongol,
was given as the dowry of a Mongol wife to a Manchu emperor of China.
K’ang Hsi, who died just two hundred years ago, was the first of the
Ch’ing dynasty to visit the region, of which he grew very fond. He
hunted throughout it, riding also on an ass—the cost of keeping which is
said to have been paid regularly out of the imperial treasury until the
revolution! Yung Cheng, who succeeded him, met here the mother of his
own successor, the famous Ch’ien Lung, who was born at Jehol. Perhaps I
should say the alleged mother, for there has always been a strong
suspicion that the brilliant Ch’ien Lung was really a Chinese boy
switched at birth for a girl born to the empress or concubine in
question. At any rate the bare, half-ruined cottage in which he is
recorded to have been born is still standing in the wooded hills beyond
the imperial summer palace.

This is enclosed within a great wall on a minor scale which clambers
over the hills as easily as it stalks across broad flatlands, several
miles in extent and still in almost perfect repair. The same can by no
means be said, however, of the former palaces inside it. Time, the
elements, and particularly the wanton hand of man have reduced them to
the saddest state among all the decaying remains of imperial China. The
simpler structures near the gates, no doubt built for minor retainers
and servants, are occupied by the “Tartar General” and his far-famed
“I-Chün” troops, semi-autonomous rulers of this “special area,” and have
been more or less kept up accordingly. But the erstwhile palaces
scattered beyond the immense half-wooded meadows behind these, to which
a soldier guide conducts the few “distinguished visitors” who have
credentials, influence, or assurance enough to pass the gates, are
synonymous with the word “dilapidation.” A single building has remained
comparatively intact, because it is made of solid bronze. Structures
that must in their heyday have equaled except in size anything in Peking
are mere tumbled ruins of rotten timbers, collapsed roofs, and broken
tiles still bearing their glorious Chinese colors. Some of the mammoth
gods with which the place seems once to have been overpopulated have
survived almost intact in more durable shelters, like the remnants of a
fallen dynasty that had their refuges carefully chosen long before the
catastrophe came. Others were less fortunate, or foresighted, and, left
out in the open by fallen roofs, they are gruesome testimonials that the
most brilliant and the most terrifying alike of Chinese gods are but
statues of mud. A striking pagoda still stands high above all else
except the higher hills within the enclosure, but only the foolhardy
climb it now, and the great cluster of temples which seem once to have
risen among the venerable evergreens about it have corrupted almost
beyond the possibility of identification. A carved stone, in the front
rank among Chinese tablets, one whole face of it covered with a Tibetan
text, is the only thing that stands erect and defiant against the forces
of destruction.

Great numbers of the magnificent old trees that once made the parks a
forest have been recklessly destroyed, but the velvety stretches of
grass survive, and on this graze the descendants of deer brought here
long before America had thought of throwing off European allegiance. No
one was agreed on the number that dot the enclosure, for statistics are
not at home in China; but the average of the guesses was about seven
hundred, of which I certainly saw half in my stroll through the grounds.
There must surely be some powerful superstition as well as mere orders
against their destruction, in a land where even dead camels are consumed
with such apparent relish. There is a shallow lake within the palace
wall, on which some of the sturdier emperors are reputed to have tried
their amateur skill at paddling and poling, but one suspects that they
spent more time on the little island with its artificial rock hillocks
and soughing pine-trees overlooking it. There is a warm spot in this
lake which never freezes over, it is said, whence the name Jehol, which
means “Hot River,” and, thanks to the often inexplicable Romanization of
Chinese which has come down to us from an earlier generation of foreign
residents, is pronounced “Jay-hole” by tourists and uncorrected
bookworms; others do their best to approximate two guttural Chinese
noises which might somewhat better have been spelled “Ruh-Hur.”


The dozen or more great temples scattered along the valley across the
river from the palace grounds are still occupied by a few lamas and are
in a somewhat better state of preservation. Ch’ien Lung built most of
them, beginning just beneath his birthplace and stretching on into the
hills, whence delightful views of Jehol and all its region may be had
for the climbing. The emperors who summered out here beyond the Great
Wall were Manchus, kin to the race of Kublai Khan, and the temples are
not Chinese but Mongol, which means a world of difference in spite of
many similarities. Lamas who still claim to be Mongol, and who certainly
are not purely Chinese either in features or manner, dawdle through
their useless lives in them, making out as best they can without the
imperial aid that disappeared with the revolution, including such sums
as they can wheedle or bluff out of the baker’s half-dozen of foreign
visitors a year, including anything, in fact, this side of actual work.
In their halcyon days these temples must have been more than impressive;
they are still that in their decline. In the “Temple of the 508 Buddhas”
that number of life-size wooden images gilded to look like well aged
golden statues stretch away down dark aisle after dim musty passageway
to approximate infinity. There are fat and merry, thin and esthetic,
sour and licentious, imposing and silly Buddhas among these 508
yellow-robed figures seated with their spirit-tablets and incense-bowls
before them; every vice and virtue, every mental, moral, and physical
characteristic of the human race is depicted here as exactly as the art
and the breadth of experience with mankind of the Oriental artificers
made possible. There is a temple filled with similar figures near
Peking, but it is small compared with that of Jehol. Mammoth gold
dragons gambol up and down the golden roof of another sanctuary; one
entire building is taken up by a gigantic female Buddha riding a
dog-like monster; figures that would terrify a nervous child out of its
wits glare out from many a half-lighted interior; a man whose tastes and
training ran that way could easily find material for a whole fat volume
on Tibetan-Mongol art and lamaism within this stretch of a mile or two
along the Lwan Ho. The tallest of the temples contains a standing Buddha
several stories high, with forty-two hands, each bearing a different
gift—whether for mankind as a whole or merely for the lamas was not
clear. The figure, said to be made of a single tree-trunk, is larger
than that which so often startles tourists at the Lama Temple in Peking,
and it is identical, according to the reasonably intelligent chief
guardian, with those of Urga and Lhasa. The face is of the same maidenly
simplicity as that in the Mongol capital, but the edifice was much less
filled to semi-suffocation with the almost gruesome paraphernalia which
makes the ascent of Ganden like a peep into the barbaric heart of the
Tibetan-Mongol religion.

The climax, however, of the sights about Jehol, at least to the average
Westerner, is the Potalá, said to be an exact copy, on a smaller scale,
of that great heap of buildings in Lhasa which so few white men have
seen. It stands just over the river from the palace grounds, a striking
feature in a notable landscape. There must be a dozen structures in all,
so close one above another as to seem, until one is among them, joined
together into one mammoth pile covering a whole hillock. In general
color they are pinkish, except where the plaster has fallen off, with
the huge square structure at the top a dull, weather-worn red. This is
in appearance five stories high, with as many large superimposed shrines
and long rows of false windows on the face of it; and, the visitor finds
at last, when a dozen lamas with as many bunches of medieval keys have
escorted him to the summit of the long climb, it is roofless, a mere
wall surrounding the most sacred of the temples. Within, if the seekers
after _cumshaw_ who constantly surrounded and kept their eyes upon me
are truthful, two services a day have been held without a break since
Ch’ien Lung built the Potalá a century and a half ago. Two of the older,
half-dignified lamas claimed to have been in Lhasa, and they asserted
that even in its minor decorations this was an exact replica of the
chief temple of the Dalai Lama, pointing out the spots where he stood or
sat during ceremonies in the original. The holy of holies, which opened
at the gleam of small silver, may indeed be the equal, except in size,
to anything in Lhasa; with its remarkable tapestries, its enamel pagoda,
golden Buddhas of every size, and all the sacred paraphernalia of
lamaism, there is an impressiveness about it that is in keeping with
what the imagination pictures the mysterious Tibetan capital to be.

Two emperors of China died at Jehol, and the court fled here when the
Allies entered Peking in 1860, as that of the Dowager and her favorite
eunuch did to Sian-fu in 1900. Hsien Feng, half-forgotten husband of
that notorious old virago of Boxer days, was the second _Hoang-ti_ to
die here, just as our Civil War was beginning, and no emperor has ever
come to Jehol since the son who succeeded him at four years of age fled
a place of such sad memories and evil spirits. Thus the once favorite
summer home of the Manchu emperors, tossed aside like a plaything of a
petulant child with too many toys, has fallen into the decay in which
the rare visitor of to-day finds it.


If there is one thing more than another that arouses my ire it is to be
mistaken for a person of importance; yet that is exactly what happened
to me in Jehol. Perhaps any foreigner so far off the foreign trail,
particularly after he and his kind had been specifically warned to keep
away, would have been considered somebody, but to make matters worse I
had been officially requested, just as I was leaving Peking, to allow
myself to be called a special investigator of the antiopium league. I
should not be expected, it was explained, to do anything more than bear
the title; no one would dare actually to investigate the mountain
recesses beyond Jehol in which every one knows the stuff is grown, let
alone a new-comer who could not tell a poppy-sprout from a radish. But
the League of Nations wanted to be told that a foreigner had been sent
to visit each suspected district, and as no one else seemed to be going
that way my name would fill the dotted line as well as any other.

[Illustration:

  The three _p’ai-lous_ of Hsi Ling, the Western Tombs
]

[Illustration:

  In Shansi four men often work at as many windlasses over a single well
    to irrigate the fields
]

[Illustration:

  Prisoners grinding grain in the “model prison” of Taiyüan
]

That would have been the end of the matter if Peking had not notified
Jehol that the honorable investigator was coming. When I arrived,
therefore, long after my mind had purged itself of any thought of my
putative official capacity, I was startled to find that Jehol insisted
on taking me seriously, even in the face of the scantiness of my
wardrobe and the donkeyness of my escort. A day or two before, the
official Chinese investigator also had come, by the direct route, with a
fat English-speaking secretary and suitable retinue, in _chaotze_ gay
with red pompoms between mules important with jingling bells. He would
remain a month or so, though also taking care not to be caught by the
inhospitable poppy-growing peasants or their military beneficiaries and
protectors up in the hills. We could both make our reports just as well
without risking our lives, without ever coming to China, for that
matter, so far as any real results through the League of Nations is
concerned, so long as one of the nations bulking largest in that league
continues to supply China with opium from her principal colony by a
roundabout, oval-eyed route, though every poppy-plant in the erstwhile
Middle Kingdom were uprooted.

But there is centuries-old precedent for feasting all “censors” or
special investigators sent out from Peking, and this serious part of the
affair Jehol did not overlook. My distinguished Chinese colleague and I
had already met across the board before blood-red invitations a foot
long confirmed the verbal rumor that we were to be honored with a feast
by the “Tartar General” himself. Delightful little Mi Ta-shuai, with his
chin-tickling mustache-ends and the inherent good nature that bubbles
out even through his formal demeanor, is no more a Tartar than I am a
Turk; he is an exact picture of a Chinese mandarin of the T’ang dynasty,
in somewhat modernized garb. But the ruler of the special extramural
district of Jehol has borne that title for centuries, just as his troops
continue to be considered the native _I-Chün_, though they come chiefly
now from Anhwei and Honan. Three of the four brand-new rickshaws that
had just introduced that innovation into Jehol delivered the three male
foreigners in town at the gate of honor of the former summer palace,
more jolted than seriously hurt after all, and the eight or ten most
distinguished Chinese officials joined us in one of the score of long
low buildings through which the entrance to almost any yamen of
importance stretches on and on, like a half-lighted tunnel.

The feast—but why go into unnecessary details? A Chinese feast is just
what the name implies, with variations of no importance according to the
latitude and the ability of the feaster’s cooks to give it such hints of
foreign ways as their master may be able to specify. Suffice it to say
that we gathered soon after four in the afternoon and were gone again by
seven, that much more food was carried out again than was consumed by a
company that did not rise needing a bedtime snack, and that I had no
assistance whatever from the other two representatives of the Western
world in replying to the toasts that were incessantly poured into our
slender glasses, though they hailed respectively from Ireland and
Scotland. There were several men worth talking with in the general’s
suite, too, and all in all my official capacity was more endurable than
it might have been suspected as we jolted homeward between unbroken
lines of peering yellow faces eager for a closer glimpse of Jehol’s
distinguished foreign guest.


The “Tartar General” insisted on sending two mounted troopers of the
_I-Chün_ with me on the way back to Peking. There was something in the
bandit stories, it seemed, and though they were operating well to the
north, the scent of a possible foreign hostage might give their legs
double speed. No doubt the general knew as well as I that two lone
Chinese soldiers, even of his unusually soldierly _I-Chün_, would be
more likely to add two rifles to the arsenal of any respectable gang of
brigands than to protect me from them, and he certainly knew that such
escorts expect to live on the traveler’s bounty for at least twice as
many days as they accompany him; but it would have been unseemly, of
course, to let a special agent of the League of Nations, nebulous as
that body may be to the mind of a Chinese militarist, depart without
suitable honors.

The best way back to Peking would have been to float down the Lwan Ho,
with its striking cliffs and gorges, to the railway, well north of
Tientsin. But low waters made this trip uncertain, and boatmen were too
busy with grain to give a lone traveler much attention. I turned
regretfully back, therefore, along the direct main route, worn with
centuries of travel, by the feet of man and his beasts, though never
aided by his hands. The scent of lilacs, white and of the more usual
color, filled the air as we left the city. Inconspicuous on the white
donkey or on foot beside the troopers astride good horses and beneath
their big straw hats, I scarcely caught the eye of travelers drowsing in
the mule-litters that passed so often, to say nothing of attracting
bandits out of the north. We crossed two passes and forded the Lwan Ho
on the first day and on the morning of the second sighted a high cragged
range stretching from infinity to infinity across the horizon ahead,
with little unnatural-looking promontories, like knobs on a casting,
dotting it at frequent intervals. They were the towers of the Great
Wall, it turned out, climbing like a chamois from one lofty peak to
another, but it was blazing noon before we passed through it at the
much-walled town of Kupehkow. Coolies carrying down to Jehol brushwood
and even roots had passed us all the first day; naked children were
everywhere; men, and once or twice, unless my eyes deceived me, women,
stripped to the waist toiled in the dry fields, sometimes waded
knee-deep in the liquid mud of little patches that in another month
would be pale green with rice. Graves grew numerous again inside the
Great Wall; half-ruined _yentai_, “smoke-platforms” from the tops of
which news was sent from the capital in olden days, towered above us at
regular intervals; the peddlers of fluffy chicks and coolies carrying
green onions to market once more appeared; and the caricature of a road
became almost a procession of travelers in both directions.

It was an atrocious road nearly all the way, plodding along sandy, stony
river-beds except where it clambered laboriously over another mountain
ridge, the sun beating ruthlessly down upon us from its rising to its
setting. Babies with shaved heads apparently impervious to its rays
rooted in the dirt with the black pigs, or stood on sturdy legs suckling
even more soil-incrusted mothers. There ought to be very few weeds in
China; the whole family is incessantly after them, just as every usable
form of filth is promptly gathered. The most common sight in China is of
men and boys, sometimes women and girls, wandering the roads and trails
with a fork or shovel with which to toss the droppings of animals into a
basket over their shoulders, whence it will later be spread on the
fields. Each night we put into an inn-yard, where the best available
room was quickly assigned me; my cot and a foot-high table were set on
the oiled cloth with which I covered the _k’ang_, and after as nearly a
bath as can be had in a basin of hot water there was nothing left to do
but to wait patiently for whatever supper my not too adaptable “boy”
chose to serve me. The escort had reduced itself to one soldier at the
first relief, and at noon on the third day it disappeared entirely. At
length the stony sand changed to the fertile plain of Peking, though the
road was nothing to boast of up to the last, and while rain and two
splittings of my little party at forks of the route all but spoiled my
schedule, the afternoon of the fourth day saw us filing through one of
the eastern gates of the Tartar City.




                              CHAPTER XIV
                      A JAUNT INTO PEACEFUL SHANSI


It is a simple matter to visit Hsi Ling, the Western Tomb, where all the
Manchu emperors not at Tung Ling are buried. A short branch of the
Peking-Hankow line sets the traveler down, four leisurely hours from the
capital, within strolling distance of the newest of them, housing the
remains of the hapless Kuang Hsü. This is quite as extensive and
sumptuous as if the imprisoned puppet had been a real ruler, but it is
still glaringly new, the trees that will some day form a forest about it
barely head-high, for it is only fifteen years since this effigy of an
emperor and the powerful Dowager who manipulated him simultaneously made
way for the present occupant of the Forbidden City. No doubt he is glad
to be so far away from the oppressive old lady at last.

Bare hills lie between the older tombs, their roofs of imperial yellow
hidden in venerable evergreen forests that seem to know nothing of
bustling modern times. Yung Cheng, third Manchu emperor of China, sent
men to choose this spot for him in 1730. When his successor, Ch’ien
Lung, came to die, however, he expressed a preference for the Eastern
Tombs, saying that if he, too, were buried in the west it might become a
habit and the first two emperors of the dynasty would remain in gloomy
solitude. He instructed his successors to alternate between the two
places, and all of them did so except Tao Kuang, who refused to be
separated from his father even in death. Five emperors, three
dowager-empresses, many _fei_, or imperial concubines—whose tombs are
blue rather than yellow, because they never had royal title—and a host
of princesses in clusters within single tombs, lie scattered through the
forests of Hsi Ling. Like all royal burial-places in China the site
backs up against the mountains, here the Hsi Shan, the Western Hills,
which stretch far to the north and south in rugged, clear-cut ranges
close behind the tombs. Delightful paths wander through the evergreen
woods, where here and there ill fed Manchus forage for firewood to keep
the kettles boiling in their dilapidated caretakers’ villages. There are
crowds of loafers guarding each tomb, as at Tung Ling, quick enough to
offer a visitor the ceremonious cup of tea under conditions, invisible
to them, which force him to decline it, but too lazy to open all the
doors even when their unsoaped palms are crossed with silver, to say
nothing of lifting a hand to repair the ravages of time or to cut the
weeds and grass that grow everywhere between the flagstones. After all,
it is better that way; any suggestion of real care would be out of
keeping with the pastoral Chinese setting, and there are sheep and goats
enough to keep the places from becoming impassable jungles.

One may spend all day roaming from forest-buried tomb to mountain-backed
mausoleum; the most mammoth solid stone monuments on turtle bases I have
ever seen in China stand side by side in the main entrance pavilion—the
exit of most visitors; and the other sides of this square are formed by
three _p’ai-lous_, any of which is almost the equal of the famous single
one at the Ming Tombs. But I prefer Tung Ling to its more accessible
alternative, if only because its caretakers see too few tourists to
acquire the manner of street-urchins.


I stopped off at Paoting, long the capital of Chihli Province and
recently the unofficial capital of North China, to see Tsao Kun. But his
secretary brought word that the problems of China had given him a
headache which had sent him to bed—it was at the height of one of the
bandit outrages against foreigners. Those who know this illiterate
sword-shaker and how much he cares about China as distinguished from his
own gains, will appreciate the unconscious humor of the answer. Before
his yamen stood viceregal poles, of cement instead of wood, a hint
perhaps of the fancied permanence of his position. Besides this
manipulator of the puppets of Peking there is nothing especially worth
seeing in Paoting. A few superficial improvements, such as a new garden
for the town to stroll and gamble in, to impress the people with their
lord’s importance and his love for them, are all that distinguish this
from any large old Chinese walled city.

The chief impression of the broad flatlands of Chihli in May is the
windlassing of water for irrigation out of wells dotting the landscape
everywhere, by a man or two with bare brown torso or by a blindfolded
mule. The railway cuts ruthlessly across graveyards, perhaps because if
it did not it could find no place to run at all; old sunken roads have
been turned into gardens, and new ones are wearing themselves down into
the pulverous soil. The narrow-gage line that strikes westward from
Shihkiachuang into Shansi climbs all morning the bed of a clear little
river harnessed for work in many little straw-built mills on the banks
or astride the channels into which the crowded people have divided it.
There is plenty of stone here. Whole towns are made entirely of it;
little fields that can produce at most a peck of wheat are held up by
stone walls at least as extensive as they. Crows and other destructive
birds are as numerous and ravenous as the human population, who paint
scarecrows crudely on the stone walls of the terraces, and hang up straw
ones that look ludicrously like Taoist priests. Perhaps these are more
effective over such evil spirits than laymen scarecrows. In the
mountains well-sweeps instead of windlasses aid the irrigators. Seen on
a level these terraced hills looked horribly dry and arid, a dreary
yellow and brown. But that is the face of the terraces; from above, the
fields are countless patches of spring green, so that the effect from
the constantly rising train was like those street-signs that change face
completely when they are seen at a new angle.

No longer ago than the time of the Mings, history says, the mountains
between Chihli and Shansi were so covered with trees that “birds could
not fly through them.” To-day there is not a sprig of wood left, and the
patient peasants till every terraced peak to the very top. Faintly the
passenger can make out to the north, through occasional openings in the
ranges close at hand, one of the five sacred mountains of China, the
Wu-t’ai-shan. The whole cluster is shaped like a maple-leaf and
resembles the Diamond Mountains of Korea, if not in scenic splendors at
least in the temples and monasteries scattered among them. For many
centuries that region has been a Buddhist sanctuary, both of the
black-robed Chinese monks and the yellow-robed lamas, even the latter
more often natives of Chihli or Shansi than Mongols or Tibetans.
Emperors used to come to Wu-t’ai-shan, and the Dalai Lama himself was
once there.


Beyond the summit of the line, one of the famous passes of China, the
narrow but efficient train snaked its way downward through many tunnels,
past busy villages and towns of stone, between long irregular rows of
cave-dwellings dug in the porous hills, with many a striking view up
terraced gorges which unwooded centuries have given fantastic
formations. On the whole it was a dreary landscape, but the train was
good. These side-lines are better than the principal railroads of China
because they are still under foreign management. Frenchmen and Belgians
operate this one to the Shansi capital, not merely by giving orders from
a central office but by riding the trains to see that these orders are
obeyed. No dead-heads escaped the sharp eyes of the European inspectors
who examined tickets at frequent intervals; the Chinese employees took
care not to honor the rules in the breach instead of in the observance.
One third-class coach had a compartment marked “Dames seules.” On the
main lines this would have been filled with anything but members of the
sex for which it was reserved; here the man who dared sit down in it was
speedily invited to move on.

A Chinese train, on the trunk-lines subject to the Ministry of
Communications, is China _in petto_,—crowded confusion in the third
class that makes up nearly all of it, the second only fairly filled, the
first almost empty, except for the pass-holders, influential loafers,
and important nonentities who congregate there. Petty anarchy reigns,
and “squeeze” rears its slimy head everywhere. The passenger is taxed
for the loading of his checked baggage, and then virtually required to
tip the porters who load it. It is common knowledge that station-masters
consider their salaries their least important source of income.
Particularly are the trains, like the country, overrun with useless
soldiers. They pack the better coaches until the legitimate traveler
often can barely find standing-room; they stretch out everywhere, like a
Chinese type of hobo, on the floors of the passageways as well as of the
compartments; they fill the so-called dining-car to impassability, lying
among their noisome bundles on the tables, the seats, the floors, even
about the kitchen stove, like sewage that has seeped in through every
opening. In theory they have their generals’ permission to travel, and
pay half-fare; in practice the soldier who has a ticket at all, let
alone one of the class in which he is traveling, is the exception. They
not only ride on their uniforms but rent these out to hucksters and
coolies who wish to make a journey. Whole flocks of railway officials in
pompous garb come through the trains, but exert themselves only against
the uninfluential. Soldiers without tickets are sometimes gently
instructed to go back into third class, but no one has the moral courage
to insist that they do so, and they ride on hour after hour, sometimes
day after day. Police with a brass wheel on their arms are in constant
evidence, yet control at the stations is almost unknown. Those getting
on, and swarms of coolies hoping for a job of carrying baggage, sweep
like a tidal wave into the trains before those getting off can escape;
the battle for places is a screaming riot. In winter a car never gets
comfortably warm before the overdressed Chinese throw open the windows.
The cheap joker who mutilated the standardized sign to read, “Passengers
are requested to report to the Traffic Manager any cases of cleanliness
that come to their notice,” replaced an impossible task by a very easy
one. The train that is on time is something to write home about, though
now and then one sticks surprisingly close to schedule.

At Peking and the principal terminals the traveler often finds every
compartment “Reserved.” Officially this cannot in most cases be done,
but any one who knows the ropes can “fix it up,” merely for a tip to the
fixer. Door after door down the corridor bears such signs as “Chi
Wan-tao and Party,” or “Reserved, Member of Parliament,” and even
foreign women may be left to stand in the passageway. Later, if the
traveler is sharp eyed enough to see one of these doors unlocked, he
will find one or two fat Chinese stretched out in the two seats which
placards announce “shall be occupied by eight persons,” and unless he is
by nature aggressive this condition may continue during the whole
twenty-four-hour journey. At the end of the overcrowded train there is
very likely to be a private car surrounded by a respectful throng of
soldiers and railway police, which one learns upon inquiry is occupied,
to give a single example, by a “minister” to some provincial city, who
is “more higher than a station-master.” A sample of the Chinese way of
doing things is the announcement in a time-table in French that has
appeared in the foreign-language newspapers daily for years that certain
“expresses” on one of the most important lines carry first-class,
sleeping-, and dining-cars, whereas the best accommodations the
unsuspecting traveler who takes this statement seriously can discover is
two or three second-class compartments with two bare wooden benches and
not a suggestion of heat. The only salvation of the civilized traveler
is the daily and biweekly expresses respectively on the two lines
between Peking and central China, on which, thanks to foreign pressure,
neither passes, uniforms, nor influence can take the place of tickets.
Even on these, rumor has it, the militarist overlords have of late found
ways to accommodate their henchmen without producing actual money.

It is a relief, therefore, to get off on one of these side-lines which
the Chinese do not yet pretend to have taken over, and which are still
run like railroads. Shansi has her soldiers, too, but they do not spend
their time riding in and out of the province. The simple expedient of
requiring every coolie baggage-carrier to pay six coppers for a
platform-ticket before he can pass the gates makes an astonishing
improvement in the life of the traveler on this sprightly Taiyüanfu
line; at the frontier two of the governor’s “model police” board the
train in spotless khaki and with soldierly bearing escort it on into the
capital.

[Illustration:

  A few of the 508 Buddhas in one of the lama temples of Jehol
]

[Illustration:

  The youngest, but most important—since she has borne him a son—of the
    wives of a Manchu chief of one of the tomb-tending towns of Tung
    Ling
]

[Illustration:

  Interior of the notorious Empress Dowager’s tomb at Tung Ling, with
    her cloth-covered chair of state and colors to dazzle the stoutest
    eye
]

[Illustration:

  The Potalá of Jehol, said to be a copy, even in details, of that of
    Lhasa; the windows are false and the great building at the top is
    merely a roofless one enclosing the chief temple
]


Long before the end of the journey the traveler is reminded that Shansi
is one of the world’s greatest deposits of coal, perhaps of iron. From
the train could be seen coal-mines, mere surface diggings, but producing
splendid anthracite in big chunks large as a strong man could lift. One
of these broken in two made a donkey-load, two gave a mule his quota,
and long trains of these animals picked their ways down the treeless
defiles. Here and there a string of coolies, each with a lump of coal on
his back, trailed over the steeper hills. A European who made a diligent
investigation of the question reported that the province of Shansi alone
has coal enough to supply the world for a thousand years. Thus far it
has scarcely begun to be exploited, in the real sense of the word, like
so many of the great natural resources, other than agricultural, of
China. For one thing, some of the old superstitions that made delving in
the earth so unpopular still prevail. Evil spirits guarding these hidden
treasures will wreak vengeance on the men who dare to disturb them—and,
what is worse, on the entire community. Dragons are still known to spit
death-dealing fire upon those who dig too deeply for coal; in other
words, there have been cases of fire-damp explosions. According to
popular Chinese fancy, dragons, snakes, and tortoises produce pearls,
and many of the miners themselves still think that coal will grow again
in an empty shaft within thirty years, and iron and gold in longer
periods.

We came out in mid-afternoon upon the broad plain of Shansi, “West of
the Mountains,” two or three thousand feet above sea-level and thickly
dotted everywhere with toiling peasants. Here the windlassing of water
for irrigation again seemed to be the chief occupation, and this time
there were often four men at as many handles over a single well-drum.
Yütze swarmed with travelers, for there nearly all the traffic for the
south of the province leaves the train, or enters it to return to the
capital, toward which the railroad turns as much north as westward. Less
than an hour later the twin pagodas of Taiyüanfu rose close at hand on
the ridged landscape, and we were set down well outside the walls of the
Shansi capital.

The police stopped every traveler at the city gate to ask his name, his
errand, and other pertinent questions. But there was a courteous
atmosphere about the interrogatory which made it seem the precaution of
a careful ruler rather than the espionage of a tyrant. Inside, the
streets were on the whole in better condition, modern improvements in
general more numerous, than in most provincial capitals. Yet somehow
this was not yet the model city much hearing about it had caused the
imagination to picture. The pace of life, too, was noticeably slow,
surprisingly so for the capital of one of China’s most important
provinces, almost the cradle of the Chinese race and for centuries the
home of its great bankers. What was perhaps most exasperating of all to
the passing traveler was to find the rickshaw-men the poorest in China,
so slow and so untrained for their tasks that it was almost faster and
certainly more comfortable to walk. Possibly the altitude of nearly
three thousand feet was the explanation, though not the excuse, of their
snail-like habits, and their awkwardness could be largely due to the
fact that many of them are peasants from the surrounding villages who
make rickshaw-pulling a slack-time avocation instead of a profession.
But the impression survived that they were merely outstanding examples
of the provincial leisureliness of life back here behind the mountains.
Residents did not seem to realize that their rickshaw-runners resemble
lame turtles, any more than they were aware of the incessant unnecessary
racket they create. Custom or some local ordinance has fitted the right
shaft of all Taiyüan rickshaws with a kind of automobile horn, and not
merely do the runners blow these beyond all reason when in action but
amuse themselves like the adult children they are by constant honking
while waiting or wandering for fares, so that night and day are an
unbroken charivari.

Taiyüan—its name means “great plain,” and the “fu” so often tacked on to
the names of second-grade Chinese cities is as out-of-date now as the
word “yamen,” though both survive in popular speech—and the province it
governs still retain some of the traits and customs of olden times, long
ago abandoned, if not forgotten, in other provinces. Though there is a
good modern police force, night-watchmen of the old régime go their
rounds every two hours beating a gong to warn thieves of their coming.
Surely the origin of this aged custom, whatever tradition may allege, is
rooted in the inherent timidity, not to call it cowardice, of the
Chinese. Pushed beyond a certain point they can die more easily than
Westerners; but the fear of a mere slap, the sight of a stick that would
not frighten a normal American boy, is terrifying to the great mass of
them. Naturally the night-watchman would rather warn the thieves to move
on, or to lay aside their activities until he has passed, than to come
to blows with them. A thousand Chinese staring fixedly with their little
monkey-like eyes were likely to surround the foreigner who does, or has
about him, anything suggestive of the unusual, though foreign residents
are neither rare nor new. No one has ever succeeded in sounding the
depths of Chinese curiosity. When I called inopportunely on the
fellow-countryman who was destined to become my host in Taiyüan, he left
a class of Y. M. C. A. students of university age, long used to
foreigners and their ways, in charge of one of their number while he
stepped out to have a word with me; and seven of the fifteen young men
left the class and followed him down-stairs to see what he was doing.

The foreign atmosphere of Taiyüan is almost entirely British. Such
American missionaries as work in this province are not stationed in the
capital, and England assigned the indemnity exacted for the killing of a
large group of her nationals here in Boxer days to education in the
province, as we did for the whole country. For ten years Shansi youths
were distributed among English universities and technical schools, and
now that the preparatory school in which they were groomed for the
journey has reverted to the Chinese and become the University of
Taiyüan, there are many returned students among the faculty and in
important official positions, some of them with English wives. The good
and the trivial points of British university life came back with them.
They seem to have lost, for instance, the Chinese virtue of early
rising. Taiyüan labors under the handicap of three kinds of
time,—“railway,” “gun,” and “university” time. The last is considerably
slower than either the station clock or the governor’s noon-gun, and
rumor has it that it gradually became so because the curriculum included
a number of eight-o’clock classes which certain of the most influential
faculty members could never quite reach.


Yen Hsi-shan, both military and civil governor of Shansi, is known in
China as the “model governor.” The mere fact that he has held his
position ever since the revolution, while the rest of the country has
been like a seething mass, a boiling kettle, of officials of all grades,
in which the scum has all too often come to the top, is enough to have
given him that title. But he has done more than that to warrant it.
Under his rule a number of motor roads have radiated from the capital,
and now carry a considerable motor-bus traffic. It is true that these
roads are largely due to American famine relief funds under missionary
management, and that the principal highway runs about two hundred _li_
northward exactly to the governor’s native village. But they are
unusually well kept roads for China, with guards enough to keep the
sharp-wheeled carts off them, and a species of _peon caminero_ at
regular distances whose permanent task it is to keep them in repair.
Besides, a branch of that north road goes on, as a kind of afterthought,
to a gate of the inner Great Wall, which crosses northern Shansi.
Governor Yen has done much toward the establishment of village schools,
with the accent wisely on primary and general instead of higher and
class education; he has made a certain amount of schooling compulsory
for both sexes, though even he would scarcely assert that such an
innovation is already effective throughout the province, for after all
Shansi is still China. He has actually and visibly taken the beggars off
the streets of Taiyüan; and has established a school of trades for them.
He has improved outdoor recreation facilities for the people, and has
had erected in conspicuous places about town, and in the province, long
boards bearing the thousand characters which he thinks every one should
learn to read and, if possible, to write. Bandits have been unknown in
Shansi for years; the opium which it used to grow more widely than any
other province has almost if not completely disappeared. Both these
curses of China have been chased over the provincial boundaries. Taiyüan
boasts a beginning of an opium-consumers’ refuge, with free keep and
treatment for the indigent. Just beyond it, to be sure, there is what
the Japanese call a _yoshiwara_, an officially protected restricted
district two by four blocks large, with five hundred women; but every
one of the identical courtyards within is in a condition to suggest
unusually good sanitary conditions, and a high wall surrounds the entire
district, so that no one can be in doubt as to what he is entering. The
governor, by the way, was a student in Japan for four years, and both he
and his policies bear various reminders of that fact.

[Illustration:

  Behind Tung Ling the great forest reserve which once “protected” the
    tombs from the evil spirits that always come from the north was
    recently opened to settlers, and frontier conditions long since
    forgotten in the rest of China prevail
]

[Illustration:

  Much of the plowing in the newly opened tract is done in this
    primitive fashion
]

[Illustration:

  The face of the mammoth Buddha of Jehol, forty-three feet high and
    with forty-two hands. It fills a four-story building, and is the
    largest in China proper, being identical, according to the lamas,
    with those of Urga and Lhasa
]

[Illustration:

  A Chinese inn, with its heated _k’ang_, may not be the last word in
    comfort, but it is many degrees in advance of the earth floors of
    Indian huts along the Andes
]

The governor received me one Sunday morning, with his civil secretary,
the British-educated dean of the engineering department of the
university, as interpreter. It seemed almost strange to walk so
peacefully into his yamen through the same now rather tumble-down
entrance at which more than twoscore foreigners were massacred by
Boxer-influenced mobs in 1900. The governor prides himself on being a
plain man and does not believe in surrounding himself with magnificence
or formality. With the single exception of the “Christian General,” Feng
Yü-hsiang, he has retained, at least in his audiences with foreigners,
fewer of the useless, time-squandering forms of old-fashioned Chinese
etiquette than any of the high officials I have met in China. Yet the
essential Chinese courtesies were still there; there was no suggestion
of a general surrender to Western bruskness. A solid-looking man, in
physical as well as the other sense, with a somewhat genial face
sunburned with evidence of his personal attention to his outdoor
activities, met us with no appreciable delay in a semi-private part of
the yamen that was tasteful in the Chinese sense, yet which made no
efforts at magnificence in the hope of increasing the impression of the
occupant’s importance. Rather a man of plain common sense and
perseverance than of brilliancy, a brief acquaintance with the governor
suggested; and Heaven knows China needs this type just now much more
than the other. His garments were of cotton, not silk, and the
simplicity of life this symbolizes has its effect upon his subordinates,
at least in his presence. Officials having an audience with him usually
also put on cotton clothing for the occasion, lest the governor say, as
he has more than once: “Ah, I see you are making lots of money out of
your post. Now, there is a famine down in the southwest corner of the
province, and ...” He talked freely, yet certainly not boastfully, of
his various policies, plain, common-sense policies, like the man
himself, but which do not suggest themselves to the Chinese as readily
as one might expect. Later I had opportunity to compare actual results
with verbal intentions.

His laws against opium and bound feet would be better enforced, Yen
Hsi-shan’s friendly critics agree, if the officials under him were
really in favor of such reforms. One man alone cannot cure a whole
province, larger than most of our States, of the bad habits of
generations. At first the governor was very assiduous on these points.
Traffickers in, as well as growers of, the drug were fined and
imprisoned, and life made as miserable as possible for those who
persisted in consuming it. Inspectors examined the feet of women and
assessed a fine of five dollars a year against those who had not unbound
them, or who bound those of their daughters. Not a severe penalty from
the Western point of view; but this is much money to the average Chinese
countryman, and bound feet are most persistent in the rural districts.
But the governor’s _lee high_ (severity) is dying out, the people say,
and little girls with bound feet may be seen near and even in Taiyüan.
The stoutest reformer would be likely to lose heart before the unrivaled
passive resistance of the Chinese against even their own best welfare;
it needs unbroken generations of radicals to get permanent results. At
least the pigtail has virtually disappeared from Shansi!

The “model governor” comes fairly near being a practical man in the
Occidental sense. The forty automobiles in the government garages
include huge streetcar-like buses that make good use of his new roads,
and trucks that are run mainly by steam. Gasolene is expensive in
Shansi, and coal is cheap. Much of the city is taken up by what
resembles immense barracks, and the public is chased many blocks
roundabout by the long mud walls enclosing them. But if this gives the
appearance of a ruler who considers the capital his private property, it
makes possible a great normal school for all the province, where
handcrafts are given proper attention, up-to-date soldiers’ workshops,
in which everything needed by the army is made, a model prison, and
other spacious institutions on quite modern lines. Besides, there was
evidently ample room inside the city. The old wall of Taiyüan is in a
ruinous state, and any one can climb it, almost anywhere inside and with
no great difficulty from without, as if the governor realized that such
picturesque defenses are useless against modern attacks, and feels able
to cope in the open with the bandits against which city walls still
offer a certain amount of protection in many parts of China. There are
lakes and broad sheep pastures, and many acres of cultivated fields,
within the walls, and only one suburb of any size outside them, without
a single smoking chimney except those of the big extramural arsenal
standing forth against the distant low hills that half surround Taiyüan.
In fact, one whole corner of the city is used as a rifle-range, with the
ruined wall as a back-stop, and the soldiers still find plenty of room
to throw their dummy hand-grenades and practise their modified
goose-step. All this hardly means a prosperous city, were it not for the
practical activities of a good governor. His soldiers, by the way, get
six “Mex” dollars a month, which is the rate throughout most of China,
and his “snappy” model police nine; but unlike so many of his colleagues
Governor Yen actually pays his troops, which is one of the great secrets
of his success. Unpaid soldiers not only do not drive brigands over the
frontier, but they are prone to sell them ammunition and even to join
them.

It was evident that the governor’s progressive administration includes
one particular pet scheme, which he is working out as rapidly as
possible, quite ready to admit that it takes time to make changes in
China. He is gradually introducing a village military system, a kind of
National Guard on a provincial scale. Instead of having military
parasites from other provinces come to exploit the people or turn
bandits among them, he is organizing militia companies for local
protection. The chief advantages he expects are that it will thus be
easier to maintain peace and repel outside invaders, as village soldiers
will naturally do their best to protect their own homes; it should
eliminate the danger of becoming an offensive force against neighboring
provinces, since these soldiers are not riffraff and loafers recruited
wherever they can be had but ordinary citizens with proper occupations,
who will not care to sacrifice their peaceful living for the sake of a
few ambitious militarists; and it does not take them away from their
fields or their usual tasks, except for brief periods of training each
year. It is not exactly an original plan, at least to the world at
large, but self-evident things are not always so to the Chinese, and
Governor Yen may be on the track of the very thing to wipe out rapacious
militarism and its twin sister, banditry.

The mass of the people of Shansi are convinced that the governor loves
them like a father, which is a very essential thing in China even for a
virtual dictator, if he wishes to hold out. Yet Yen is a rich man, one
of the richest men in China, some say, and he was not born that way.
Only the uninformed masses think that he sacrifices everything to their
welfare. Any land with China’s pressure of population, family system,
and centuries-old, almost universal political corruption from top to
bottom would need at least a demigod of which to make a ruler who
actually thought of nothing but the public good. Yen Hsi-shan, it is
said almost openly, has kept his position so long largely by preserving
a strict neutrality even in the payment of “squeeze” toward those high
up who might have taken his job away from him. It is almost publicly
known that he gave one million two hundred thousand dollars each to
Chang Tso-lin and Tsao Kun in the “Anfu” days as “military assistance.”
But at least he has made the province he has ruled for twelve unbroken
years a better place to live in; his worst enemies do not hesitate to
admit that. Perhaps he is, as many Chinese who use their minds assert, a
great governor only as a small hill is a mountain on a flat plain; the
fact remains that he has some ideas and the will to carry them out,
ideas which, if introduced into the other provinces would put the people
of China in a much better position to solve some of those pressing
problems that seem to be driving them to national destruction. With a
score of Governors Yen the dismantled old Celestial Empire might still
be no paradise, but the anxious visitor can sweep the country almost in
vain for a glimpse of any other force that promises prompt and effectual
resistance to the misfortunes that threaten to overwhelm her entirely.

All up and down the province the happy results of good rule are
apparent. Village girls, like the boys who come to the various
barrack-institutions in the capital, are taught what they are really
likely to need in the life that in all probability lies before them, not
the often useless stuff of an ideal but imaginary life, to which even
American mission schools are somewhat prone. There are still such
adversities as famine in Shansi Province, and numbers of its men migrate
northward to Mongolia and Manchuria in search of the livelihood their
ancestral homes deny them. But even a civil and military governor
combined cannot make rain fall. More than one Tuchun of other provinces
still thinks he can, and leads his people in processions to the temples
of the god of rain, or helps them to plant that delinquent deity, in a
brand-new coat of paint as a counter-inducement, out in the blazing
sunshine, in the hope that he will think better of the cruel neglect of
his duties. One suspects, however, that Governor Yen’s more up-to-date
methods are likelier in the end to bring real results. But, alas! safety
and modern improvements are not what most beguile the random wanderer
with a strong penchant for the picturesque, and a longer stay in the
“model province” promised little to make up for the exciting things that
might still be in store for me in other parts of the country.




                               CHAPTER XV
                  RAMBLES IN THE PROVINCE OF CONFUCIUS


The chief impression of the long all-day journey from Peking to Tzinan
in early spring is of graves. All sizes of them, from mere haycocks to
veritable haystacks, take up almost more of the fields than they leave
to cultivation, so that the deadly flat landscape, drearily dry brown at
this season, looks as if it were broken out with smallpox. In Chihli
Province there had been no real snow all winter; but from about the time
we entered Shantung onward the shrinking remnants of a recent modest
fall of it varied slightly the bare yellowish monotony spread out under
a cloudless sky.

The old walled city of Teh-chow was the first place of importance over
the boundary, and there was nothing visibly different about that from a
hundred other walled cities of China. At one end of the long graveled
station platform sat an old coffin, and lying on top of it was the stone
that had marked its first grave and was needed now for the new one
somewhere else. The Chinese are coming to be more easily persuaded by
the clink of silver that their ancestors will endure removal, when a
railway or a growing mission station or an industrial plant finds it
imperative to have more room. A policeman quite as up to date as those
of Peking was driving up and down the platform two men who seemed to
have known some prosperity before this misfortune overtook them. Ropes
tied to their outside arms furnished the driver his reins, and about
their necks hung by cords big wooden placards detailing their crimes.
The officer saw to it that they forced their way into every group, so
that there could be no excuse for any one, in or outside the long
crowded train, not to recognize them as rascals, before he drove them
back to wherever they waited until the next train called them forth
again. It was an anachronism, this ancient mode of punishment amid such
modern surroundings; but what would be the effect if our own absconding
bankers and sneak-thieves were similarly paraded from suburbs to
railroad station, pausing for any one who cared to read? It would at
least make their faces more familiar to those who might benefit in
future by such knowledge. But on second thought our press serves us the
same purpose, without physical exertion to criminals or policemen.

At Teh-chow the ancient and the modern means of transportation between
the Yang Tse and Peking part company. All the way from Tientsin, the
railroad which, about a decade back, brought Shanghai within thirty-six
hours of the capital is within rifle-shot of the Grand Canal that Kublai
Khan merely _re_constructed six hundred and fifty years ago. Before we
realized that maps and modern conditions are not counterparts in the
China of to-day, we had a pleasant dream of houseboating from Peking to
the Yang Tse, when it came time for us to move southward. Intuition
should have sufficed, but we only learned from inquiry that, since the
tribute grain which once came yearly to Peking by hundreds of junks
could now come by other means, if any one still gave Peking tribute, the
Grand Canal has silted up for long distances, to say nothing of the
bandit nests through which it runs in these days of the self-styled
republic. Once the railroad meets and crosses it again, at the southern
boundary of the province; otherwise the two routes are never in
agreement below Teh-chow.

The capital of Shantung Province announces itself by its smokestacks
about the time the rumbling of the long German-built bridge across the
Yellow River awakens the traveler to the fact that the day’s ordeal is
over. Flour-mills account for most of these spirals of smoke where ten
or fifteen years ago little more than graves grew. Tzinan is an
exception to the general rule of Chinese treaty-ports, in that it was
opened to foreign trade in 1906 by desire from within rather than
pressure from without. The Germans, and after them the Japanese, have
built up a fore-city of broad, almost-paved streets, lined by modern
buildings that here and there approach the imposing, on the space turned
over to the growth of foreign enterprise by the Chinese themselves.
Japanese hospitals and schools, buildings that carry the thoughts back
to the bridge-heads on the Rhine, here and there a contribution by some
other nationality, give quite a manly air to this modern section of
Shang-Pu, with its railway stations. But if one’s mind has that queer
and no doubt reprehensible quirk which makes the picturesque more
interesting than standardized efficiency, the wheelbarrows are strong
competitors for the attention. In Peking and the north these are less
used, and not at all for passengers. In Tzinan they carry a much larger
proportion of the population than do the rickshaws. For while the latter
are numerous also, their capacity is limited, and there seems to be no
exact high-water mark to the number of persons a barrow-man can crowd
upon the two cushions flanking his high wooden wheel, with its guards
doing duty as seat-backs. Especially when the factory workers are going
to or from their mud huts, eight or ten, and even twelve, pairs of
little misshapen feet hang over the sides of these patient vehicles,
still barely bending the sturdy back of the human packhorse in the
shafts. Men ride in them, too, sometimes a pair or a group of coolies
whom it would be impossible to distinguish from the man whom they are,
one must assume, paying to do their walking for them. A wheelbarrow trip
costs but a half or two thirds as much as the same journey by rickshaw;
the mere matter of greater speed or comfort is not, of course, of any
importance to the rank-and-file Chinese; and the invariable ungreased
squeaking of the conveyance, which announces its coming as far off as
could a trolley-bell, may easily be soothing music to a people who enter
Chinese theaters without compulsion.

The main stream of squeaks ambles its way into the old native city,
doubly surrounded by two rambling walls. There the recent snow had left
what passes for streets ankle-deep in mud, except perhaps for a few
short stretches paved centuries ago with huge slabs of stone so rounded
off now that a rickshaw can scarcely make wheelbarrow speed over them,
and which at best are only somewhat less thickly covered with paste-like
slime. Foreigners who have lived there half a century say they can see
improvements in the native life of old Tzinan, but the new-comer will
have to take most of this on faith, and is not likely to carry off many
impressions essentially different from those he has had or will have
inside the walls of any well populated Chinese city. Merchants in black
lounge in skullcaps in constantly repeated little booth-shops on either
hand, outwardly indifferent to custom as they sip their tea from
handleless cups, smoke their tiny pipes with the often yard-long stems,
play chess, checkers, cards, or dice, all of an Oriental kind. Immediate
attention comes, however, when a possible client pauses in what would be
the doorway if there were a front wall, quadrupled, quintupled if the
pauser is astonishingly a foreigner. Here and there several people stand
before a counter, and two or three times as many behind it. Street
venders paddle through the mud, stridently announcing themselves.
Roofless shops on the corners, and everywhere else that there is a bit
of space to crowd in, sell steaming balls of dough, bowls of watery
chopped-up meat, China’s kind of macaroni, served with worn chop-sticks
and accompanied, perhaps, by a constant refrain designed to draw, rather
than to drive off, more customers. Beggars in costumes which could not
have possibly reached such a state without deliberate aid splash along
beside the stranger’s rickshaw at a speed to prove health and strength,
crying incessantly, “_Ta Lao Yea! Ta Lao Yea!_” “Great Old Excellency!”
in the vain hope that the Chinese compliment of granting old age where
it is still not physically due will bring perhaps even silver from the
outside barbarian who is in reality still disgustingly youthful.
Glimpses at irregular intervals down side streets that are merely poorer
examples of the same thing, with more makeshift booths and fewer large
shops, more strident venders and fewer hopeful beggars. Once or twice
the big weather-beaten gateway to a yamen, with coolies made into
soldiers by the superimposing of a faded uniform padded with cotton
leaning on their rifles and eying the passing throng with the air of bad
boys who are far too seldom spanked. Less shopkeeping and more miserable
dwelling farther out, women and girls standing or hobbling about in the
mud on their little deformed feet, everywhere a plethora of boys,
nowhere a person who could be called clean, almost everything and every
one dirty as a pigsty. Then the street shifts a block before it passes
out the farther gate—for evil spirits would make short shrift of a city
with a straight passage clear through it—and the stranger finds himself
in the outskirts, between the great and the outer wall, with a
picturesque glimpse along the former of women washing clothes in the
tree-lined moat, and ragged boys are pushing his rickshaw from behind
over a bridging hump in the stone and mud-slough road in the hope of
being tossed a copper.

[Illustration:

  The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone stairway which
    ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,” here seen in the upper
    right-hand corner
]

[Illustration:

  One of the countless beggar women who squat in the center of the
    stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every pilgrim to drop at least a
    “cash” into each basket
]

[Illustration:

  Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan, capital of
    Shantung
]

[Illustration:

  A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most sacred of the
    five holy peaks of China
]

With the example of decent dwellings and habits in plain sight about
them in as well as outside the walls, this plodding through filthy
streets between dismal mud dens seems to remain wholly satisfactory even
to those visibly able to improve their conditions if they chose. Rows of
modern two-story stone houses of the missionaries stand on two sides of
the city, and with all the efforts of these enigmatical men and women
from across the Pacific to jounce China out of her old ruts, it would
have been curious to find how slight effect such patent examples have on
the daily living of those in constant contact with them, even to the
extent of a little increased effort for cleanliness and convenience—if
one had not already seen China elsewhere. Just around the corner from
the well equipped hospital manned by Americans and English, the Chinese
medicine-shops continue to sell powdered fossils for curing diseased
eyes, dried frog’s liver for kidney troubles, deer horns ground up into
remedies for other ailments, and to send inquirers to native
medicine-men who know the hundred and some spots on the human body where
sickness can be let out by puncturing with a needle. The mission
university with its big campus backed by a splendid landscape and
reached by a hole cut specially for it in the main city wall continues
to look utterly incongruous in its setting of ignorance and filth. The
turnstile of a mission museum filled with graphic illustrations of
China’s errors and the simple cures for them records hundreds of
thousands of visitors from all the surrounding region and beyond during
the pilgrim season alone, yet the callers seem to carry nothing home
with them except the honor of having climbed the sacred mountain and
worshiped at the shrine of the famous sage a little farther southward.
Graphic proofs that deforestation has brought in its train devastating
floods, that it contributes to the aridity of the soil on which even the
snow, for lack of shade, evaporates before it sinks in, that it is
mainly responsible for the locusts which birds might make way with if
there were trees for birds to live in, has barely caused the planting of
a few shrubs here and there on the mountains that roll up at the edge of
the plain on which Tzinan is built—and these will be hacked down and
carried off for fuel at the first good opportunity. The people of
Shantung’s capital seem to regard as their chief civic asset the big
spring that boils up in three mounds of water in the heart of the city
and forms a great lake within the walls, through the reedy channels of
which they are poled on pleasure-barges, set with tables for their
favorite sport of eating, out to island temples where gaudy gods still
gaze down upon worshipers unable to recognize the sardonic smirks on
their color-daubed wooden faces.


South of Tzinan there are low mountains or high hills, bare except for
temples and patches of snow that glistened in the moonlight. These
culminate in fame, if not in height, in Tai-shan, most sacred of the
holy peaks of China, two hours below the provincial capital. I had
purposely timed my journey to Shantung so that I could climb Tai-shan
with the pilgrims who flock to it during the fortnight following the
Chinese New Year. Though he might have been extremely nasty at that
season, the weather god evidently approved my plans, for it would be
impossible to picture more perfect conditions for making this far-famed
excursion than that brilliant first day of March according to our
Western calendar.

Even in Peking those who should have been better informed had led me to
expect strenuous opposition to my refusal of chair-bearers. There was
nothing of the kind, though I seemed to feel an atmosphere of mingled
surprise and prophecy that I should deeply regret it before the day was
done, when I asked merely for a coolie to carry my odds and ends. The
ability of almost any foreigner in China to afford servants for all his
menial tasks gives the great mass of the Chinese the impression that he
has no physical endurance of his own, but only untold riches. The coolie
who set off with me at sunrise was well chosen, for not only was he all
that a coolie and a guide and “boy” combined should be, but he was so
quick-witted and so free from the worst crudities of the Shantung
dialect that we conversed almost freely on almost any subject in spite
of the scantiness of my Mandarin vocabulary.

The way lay first across a stony plain sloping gently upward, with the
compact mass of rocky mountains so close in the cloudless atmosphere
that one might easily have been deceived about the exertions that lay
ahead, had not common fame more than corrected any such error. Pilgrims
were already converging from both directions upon the partly stone-paved
route leading out of the north gate of Taianfu, surrounded by its
time-blackened walls, and within an hour we were all passing in a single
stream through the first great archway. _I-T’ien-Men_—“First Heaven
Gate”—the Chinese call it, and over it hangs an inscription announcing
in the brevity of Chinese characters that Confucius took this path when
he climbed Tai-shan—enough to make it the accepted one even if there
were other feasible ascents. Stone steps soon begin to hint at the
obstacle race ahead, though this early they are merely in isolated
half-dozens scattered up the gradually more sloping road floored with
big irregular stones worn smooth by uncounted millions of feet. Already
the beggars who decorate the entire ascent were raising their insistent
clamor, and shops and temples and tea-houses and itinerant venders
formed an almost unbroken wall on either side. Higher up there were
increasingly open stretches looking off across the steep tumbled gorge
we were climbing, to the swift rocky mountain-sides that shut us in.
Here and there a cluster of rugged, misshapen pines gave as dainty a
retreat as if we had been in Japan, but the general lack of cleanliness
alone distinctly informed us that we were not. These clumps were rare,
too, even on China’s most sacred mountain, otherwise almost entirely of
stone, with hardly a patch of earth big enough for the planting of a
flower-bed.

This did not make it infertile for its inhabitants, however; rather the
contrary. My coolie companion, to whom the ascent was an old, old story,
put the number of beggars that lined it at one thousand; but that
certainly was over-modest. Surely there were several times that number
from bottom to top, and just as many from top to bottom. They sat in the
center of the great stairs, so that chair-bearers passed one on either
side of them, and those who were carried up passed directly over their
heads. The top of each little cluster of stairs seemed to be the
exclusive territory of one mendicant, or, in the great majority of
cases, of one whole family of them, and not one did I see poaching even
for an instant on his fellows’ preserves. Just as often as the
half-dozen steps were surmounted a beggar was certain to be found
squatting in the middle of the topmost, his woven-reed scoop lying
invitingly beside him. Where the merely sloping stretches between these
steps were more than ten or twelve feet long other beggars were
regularly spaced along them; and higher up, where the ascent was all
stairs, there was one, or a family group, about every sixth step.

Sleeker, fatter, more contented-looking beggars I cannot recall having
seen anywhere on earth. Red-cheeked children, boys seeming to
predominate, were the chief stock in trade, though there were a few
adults who were visibly in sad states of health. During the pilgrim
season, I was told, hundreds of peasants leave their little farms in
charge of one member of the family and the rest establish themselves
somewhere along the ascent to Tai-shan, until the spring grows so warm
that their other occupation requires their presence at home again. On
one side or the other of the climb, seldom more than a few feet from
their squatting-place, each group had a makeshift dwelling,—a hut of
rocks and grass-mats, sometimes a natural grotto covered over with
whatever was available, generally only high enough for the adults on all
fours, but carpeted with mountain hay and better than the average homes
along Peking _hutungs_. Mountain water, magnificent air, a far-reaching
view across the plain below, if that means anything to them, made the
dismal mud dwellings of most Chinese, within the reeking gloom of city,
town, or compound walls, nothing to be compared with this life of
perfect leisure in such a vantage-place.

There might have been one serious drawback to all this,—like the
“horrible example” of the temperance lecturer, the exhibits could not be
kept in proper condition to make the best appeal. The whole mendicant
army on Tai-shan, except the small minority that was really ailing,
looked so well fed and well slept that only an unusually charitable or
exceedingly unobserving Westerner would have yielded to their pleas. He
might have been inclined instead to thump the well padded ribs of the
woman who here and there, at his approach, stripped suddenly naked the
plump youngster she held in her lap, hastily trying to hide its thick
warm _i-shang_ behind her—for there was still a distinct bite in the air
even on this southern slope of the mountain with a brilliant sun beating
down upon it. But the visible prosperity of the mendicants seemed to
matter little, for the Chinese pilgrims who made up the now almost
constant stream of humanity toiling skyward had evidently some
superstition that their pilgrimage would not be effective if they did
not succor all who needed it along the way, and most of them were taking
no chances on passing by a deserving case merely because it looked
better nourished and housed than they did themselves. Those who gave
confined their gifts almost exclusively to brass “cash”; but there were
many scoops an inch or two deep in these cheap coins, occasionally with
a real copper standing conspicuously out among them, though the
recipients sneaked off to their lairs now and then to hide their
gleanings. A whole scoopful of “cash” would not resemble riches to an
American “panhandler”; to Chinese of the lower class, however, the
pickings of most of the mendicants on Tai-shan, if that day was an
average, would seem almost an income of luxury.


About nine o’clock the descending peasants and coolies had also grown to
a constant stream, so that rules of the road—or, more exactly by this
time, of the stairway—had to be more or less strictly obeyed if progress
was to be made either up or down. There were no pilgrim costumes, such
as the Japanese climbing Koya-san, for instance, so commonly wear,
though frequent groups of coolies carried triangular flags bearing a few
characters, touches of color that livened somewhat the almost invariable
blue of the every-day garments of the masses. Unfailingly good-natured,
the coolie pilgrims had neither a suggestion of the rowdiness of our
popular excursions nor of the rather belligerent self-complacency of
their island neighbors to the east. Except for two little Japanese
professors from Manchuria, who conversed with me in English and German
respectively and with the Chinese by characters scrawled on scraps of
paper, I was the only foreigner making the ascent that day. The sight of
me on foot did not arouse more than the usual gaping to which any
Westerner outside the restricted orbits of his kind is subject anywhere
in China—until my coolie made one of his often repeated answers to the
question as to what had become of my chair. Even the little Japanese
climbed on foot for an hour or more, their chairs trailing behind them,
and only a few of the haughtiest and fattest Chinese declined to get out
and stretch their legs at all. But that a man not only ostensibly of the
wealthy class, but a weak “outside barbarian” into the bargain, should
be so foolish as to risk getting himself stranded by undertaking a
journey which naturally he could not finish unassisted, changed the mere
gaping to excitement. It was all very well, I gathered from such of
their remarks and gestures as I could understand, for even a foreigner
to win whatever merit was given such beings by making as much of the
journey as he could on foot, but he most certainly should have brought
along a chair to rescue him when he could no longer climb.

[Illustration:

  A priest of the Temple of Confucius
]

[Illustration:

  The grave of Confucius is noted for its simplicity
]

[Illustration:

  The sanctum of the Temple of Confucius, with the statue and
    spirit-tablet of the sage, before which millions of Chinese burn
    joss-sticks annually
]

The chairs, by the way, were really not worthy of that name. Instead of
the sentry-box-like sedan used in many parts of China to this day, with
a carrier or two, or even three, in front and as many behind, these were
merely a kind of pole-and-rope hammock, mildly resembling a crude, low
rustic arm-chair, in which the carried sat facing forward with his feet
hanging over before him, grazing the heads of the incessant beggars in
the middle of the ascent, while his rarely more than two carriers walked
on either side of him, bearing the contrivance sidewise. Every little
distance, when the straps over their outside shoulders became painful,
they shifted simultaneously by swinging themselves and the chair around
with a swift, almost automatic motion, and continued to toil upward.
This was as near as the facts corresponded to the tales so often told of
the breath-taking dangers of chairing it up Tai-shan, where, according
to the most imaginative tellers, the carriers “just toss you off into
space” whenever they change positions. Ever since I first heard this
yarn I had pictured thousands of feet of sheer abyss directly beneath
the trembling chair-rider, whereas I doubt if he would at any time have
dropped more than six or eight feet, exclusive of what he might have
rolled, in the unheard-of event of the bearers’ spilling him.

A little spill would have served the riders right anyway, for most of
them were larger and better nourished than the coolies who bore them,
needed in fact just such reducing exercises as walking up Tai-shan; and
any really two-legged mortal can make the ascent considerably sooner on
foot than by chair. On this day at least the carried were decidedly the
aristocratic minority, for there was by no means one of them to each
hundred of the foot-travelers who shuttled past in two often long
unbroken lines. To win full merit for the pilgrimage, evidently, it
should be made under the pilgrim’s own steam, though there seems to be
no harm in getting a little assistance by the way. Thus most of the
women who were painfully toiling upward on their bound feet had each a
coolie walking beside her to sustain her faltering steps and give her a
boost every now and then by the hand in one of her armpits.

One by one we came to “Flying Clouds Hall,” to the “Ten Thousand Genii
Hall,” where the Emperor Kao-Tsu paused to receive homage during his
ascent in 595 A.D., to the “Horse Stopping Place,” and finally to
_Hui-Ma-Ling_, the “Horse Turning Back Peak,” where even an emperor was
forced to dismount and resort to some other means of locomotion. All
these “halls” were Chinese temples, quite commonplace except for their
location, filled with dusty, gaudy wooden gods before whom pilgrims
burned joss-sticks by the bundle, heaping the big iron urns with ashes,
and with the clamor of begging priests, beating gongs, shrieking their
demands, calling upon all passers-by to try their fortune-telling or
invest in their tissue-paper prayers. In the courtyards of many of them,
too, and on the landing outside all, were venders of tea and dough-balls
and other delicacies of the Chinese cuisine, some having permanent
establishments with home-made tables and sawhorse benches, most of them
men who carried their stock in trade on a pole over their shoulders. The
general stoniness of the mountain broke out here and there in mighty
boulders and rock-faced cliffs, on which inscriptions had been carved
centuries ago in characters sometimes the height of a man. There were
fixed resting-places at which not only chair-coolies but my own
companion insisted on stopping, though his load was next to nothing. It
had only been a lunch-basket and some extra clothing to begin with, and
at the bottom of the first cluster of stairs he had hired a boy to carry
most of that. At _Ch’ung T’ien Men_, for instance, approximately
half-way up, as its name suggests, there were two or three temples and
as many tea-houses, a terrace from which one could gloat over the ascent
that already lay below, and a view of the flat plain stretching away
interminably from the foot of the mountain; and my failure to stop there
for refreshments caused as great astonishment among the custom-shackled
throng as did my strange Western garb.

At this point the road descends rather sharply for a furlong or more
through a ravine, across which the rest of the climb stands in plainest
sight, like a stairway to the sky, a ladder rather, for it seems almost
perpendicular, and disappearing high above through the archway of a big
red structure famed throughout China as the _Nan-T’ien-Men_—the “South
Gate of Heaven.” This furlong is a relief, not only from incessant
climbing but from beggars, none of whom are so needy as to choose a
station on this damp and shaded slope. They soon began again, however,
interminable and insistent as before, at the bottom of the remaining
ascent. Some one with more taste for statistics than for scenery has
computed that there are six thousand steps on this final stairway to
Tai-shan, and no one who has made this upper half of the journey by his
own exertions will accuse him of exaggeration. But it is not, as common
repute would have it, impossible on foot, either because of the
steepness of the stairs, the precarious steps, or the danger that
beggars or carriers will push one off into space for not contributing
the orthodox amount—all of which one may hear from the lips of educated
Chinese as well as foreigners even in Peking. The stone steps are
uneven, from six inches to a foot wide, the average perhaps eight
inches, and some of them are worn to a distinct slope. When they are wet
with melting snow, as many things were that day on the upper part of the
mountain, only the foolish would set their feet down carelessly upon
them, but that could not constitute a worthy reason for intrusting one’s
health to a pair of panting coolies who would double the time of the
ascent. The beggars, I had gravely been told by a Chinese lady who had
lived abroad in several embassies, would simply not allow me to pass if
I did not contribute, and as a last resort they would take my offerings
by force, so commanding do they become on the mountain at New Year’s
time. They were certainly numerous and sturdy enough to have named their
own contributions, and there was no visible force that might have curbed
them. But they were Chinese—in other words, timid, passive, submissive,
in spite of their blustering manner. In regular succession as often as
half a dozen steps were surmounted they raised their voices in what
might have been mistaken for demands that could not be refused; but just
as often their seeming ferocity oozed quickly away into a meek and
helpless, and withal a cheerful, resignation as soon as I passed without
contributing. One or two, who were women, snatched at my coat-tail or
legs, but the hint of a menacing gesture quickly freed me from their
noisome attentions, and most of them seemed to be too well fed and
contented to rise and run beside me, wailing the “Great Old Excellency!”
so familiar in Peking and most other cities of the North. From the plain
to the Gate of Heaven the adult mendicants at least seemed to think it
exertion enough to squat beside the little fire almost every group had
built in the center of its step, and depend on voice and manner—and of
course, most valuable of all, ancient custom—for their gleanings.
Indeed, one wise old fellow had resorted to absent treatment, remaining
in his kennel across the rocky ravine nearly a hundred yards from his
scoop on the stairway, beating a gong and shouting to attract attention,
and no doubt strolling over now and then to carry home the wealth that
rained upon him, which his colleagues made no attempt to appropriate.

The “Clouds Stepping Bridge” was the last break in the sheer ascent,
which thereafter marched straight up to the southern Gate of Heaven,
dense blue from top to bottom with cautious coolies picking their way up
or down. Sometimes there was a very old man, half carried by his sons;
now and then a limp, white-faced fellow whose exertions had been too
much for him came down in the chair he had scorned to take, or could not
afford, when he set out. Even on this upper stretch of the journey the
stairway was broken by landings, and on these even the sturdiest paused
for breath more and more frequently as the red archway slowly descended
to meet us. Youths loitered about the steepest places and lent a hand to
those who looked likely to reward their efforts, unless one drove them
off with scornful gestures. Near the top a great iron chain was set in
the rock as a kind of hand-rail but was hardly needed by any whose legs
had not deserted them. When at last, a trifle more than four hours after
setting out from the railway station, I marched in through the archway,
it occurred to me that, beggars, pilgrims, and stairs aside, the climb
had been very similar to that up the steeper side of Mount Washington,
in New Hampshire, both in the amount of exertion required and the
rockiness of the landscape.


A cold wind swept across the summit, in disconcerting contrast to the
burning sunshine below the gateway, calling instantly for all the
garments my two carriers had brought for me. The climbing was not yet
done; in fact it is a good half-mile from the _Nan-T’ien-Men_ to the
Taoist temple which crowns the mountain. But this is by a winding,
leisurely road passing through several temples in which pilgrims were
performing the feats for which they had come. The courtyards of these,
neglected by the sun, were littered with heaps of dirty snow, with the
ashes of myriad sticks of incense, with the débris of firecrackers and
tissue-paper prayers, and as temples they were nothing out of the
ordinary, duplicated by hundreds all over China, but famous for their
location and the special potencies their gods derive from it. Coolies
and peasants made up at least three fourths of the throng kowtowing
here, faces touching the ground, burning incense there, lighting big
bunches of firecrackers for the edification of some sleepy-eyed god over
yonder, rubbing a glass-smooth stone monument from which some form of
blessing seems to be extracted by friction; but there were many men of
the well-to-do and the ostensibly educated classes among them. The
scarcity of women and children made each temple compound seem a congress
of adult males, and the mixture of Fourth of July boyishness and
fishwife credulity with which these men solemnly carried out their
superstitious antics would have seemed even more out of place but for
their girlish cues and their generally simple, almost childlike manners.

Out on the rock knoll before the highest temple, marked with a stone
shaft here and there and swept now by wintry winds out of keeping with
the unbroken brilliancy of the day, a few stone-cut characters announce
that “Confucius stood here and felt the smallness of the world below.” A
wide expanse unfolds on every side, with only the heavens above. One can
make out Tzinan, and faintly the Hoang Ho, then a lake of considerable
size, and the railway stretching like a hair on the glass into infinity
in either direction—a brown world rolling away in a myriad of peaks and
knobs and salients of what looks like a boiling landscape suddenly
struck solid. I have nowhere been able to find why Tai-shan is a sacred
mountain, but it was already so twenty-five hundred years before the
Christian era began; perhaps its great sanctity had its start among the
largely plain-dwelling Chinese simply because of the comprehensive view
of the world below from its summit when there is nowhere the hint of a
rag of cloud and only the haziness of great distances limits the power
of the eye.

There was a surprising change in the human element of the scene when I
descended early in the afternoon. Where there had been crowd after crowd
two hours before, in every temple courtyard, in every refreshment-shop,
where the great stairway had seemed carpeted from top to bottom with
shimmering dark-blue, there were now only scattered individuals, and
most of these were lolling or squatting inside the buildings. What had
become of the vast throng so suddenly was a mystery; as nearly as I
could make out from my guide’s answer they had gone home again. Taoist
priests in their black bonnet-caps were enjoying siestas along the stone
verandas on the sunny side of their courtyards; worshipers, in so far as
they remained at all, were sipping tea and wielding chop-sticks, or
doing nothing whatever, in the den-like places where their patronage had
been so vociferously solicited in the morning. The completest change of
all had come over the beggars. Their shallow baskets, barely sprinkled
now with “cash,” lay in constant succession in the center of the
stairway as before, but in the whole descent I doubt whether as many as
a dozen mendicants were there in person to make a vocal appeal. Perhaps
the rules of their union forbade labor at this hour—which reminds me
that the medical mission school in Tzinan can rarely get the bodies of
beggars for dissection, numerous as they are in life, because the
beggars’ gild insists on giving them honorable burial—and the corpses of
criminals, readily furnished by the Government, are useless in the study
of the brain, because the modern substitute for the headsman’s sword in
China is an officer who steps up and blows the back of the culprit’s
head off with a revolver. The general desertion of their stations
looked, however, more like the contented retirement of craftsmen whose
wants were amply satisfied by a part-day’s exertion. They sat off the
trail against sunny rocks or beneath an occasional evergreen, or about
the mouths of their huts and caves, gossiping, quarreling, scratching,
and otherwise heartily enjoying themselves, especially sleeping in their
grass-floored nests, scorning to exert themselves even to the extent of
a pleading word or glance at likely passers-by. Their untended baskets
were plea enough, if charity was still abroad—and evidently honor is no
less among beggars than among thieves, for no one seemed in the least
concerned lest some one else appropriate the coins meant for him.

We passed now and then a few descending pedestrians, and two or three
going down in chairs. Those who have tried it say that there is the
exhilaration of dancing in the descent of Tai-shan in these misnamed
contrivances, especially down this upper half of it. For though the
stairway is continuous here, it is frequently and regularly broken by
landings, and the technique of the chair-bearers, handed down perhaps
from remote antiquity, is to trot down each cluster of stairs, then
saunter slowly across the landing, perhaps shifting shoulders upon it,
before jogging suddenly down the next flight. So the descent is like a
rhythmic dropping through space, something suggestive of waltzing by
airplane, soothing or terrifying, according to the nerve adjustment of
the rider. A few belated pilgrims, mainly women on their pitiful feet,
were still laboring upward; but the way was almost clear, and two hours
below the summit found us strolling away down the last gentle slope
between old cypresses. Once, before we entered the square-walled town of
Taian, my companion dragged me aside into a temple to “see something
good see,” and one of those mixtures of rowdy and beggar which so many
Chinese priests become unlocked a kind of chapel containing an ugly
gilded statue that pretended to have human arms and legs, the latter
crossed in Buddhist repose. The story has it that a monk sat on this
table until he starved himself to death as a short cut to Nirvana, but
the thing was a mere dressed-up mummified corpse arranged to mulct
credulous coolies of their precious coppers. It was an outbreak of
barbarism worthy the Catholicism of Latin America and many times more
surprising in a land which, whatever else it has to be ashamed of, is
not particularly given to this form of savagery.

Inside the walled city, too, I came upon the first deliberate
obscenities I had so far seen in the Middle Kingdom. A great fair was in
full swing in the grounds of a temple, and among the large colored
photographs which several story-tellers inserted in the double-panel
screens they had set up to illustrate their chanted tales, were quite a
number depicting such things as women nude to the waist. A slight breach
indeed in many another land; but in China, where the subject of sex so
rarely receives public recognition, it meant almost an open parading of
immorality. But New Year’s season seems to bring a relaxation even of
morals, and especially does gambling, quite publicly and without
distinction as to age or sex, rage throughout China during that
fortnight, as it did not at scores of places within these temple
grounds. They were vast, and shaded by magnificent old trees, with a
wall as mighty as that of the city itself surrounding them, and still
with room to spare, though all the hawkers, traders, and money-changers
for many _li_ roundabout seemed to be gathered there. At one end stood a
mighty hall, famed for its four colossal wooden statues, which still did
not reach the lofty beams of the roof nor seem cramped within the walls
on which ancient frescos were still moderately well preserved. Here, as
everywhere that a wooden god is housed in this holy land of China, stood
begging priests and a receptacle heaped with “cash” and coppers flung at
it by passing pilgrims. The latter are no doubt the principal source of
income of Taianfu, yet prosperity seemed more at home there than in the
great majority of China’s smaller cities. Time was when the people knew
prosperity would depart at the building of the American Methodist
Mission just outside the walls, but both the mission and the prosperity
seem to increase rather than to languish.


When the Germans, something more than a decade ago, built that portion
of the Tientsin-Pukow Railway which runs through Shantung, they
naturally planned to have it touch Chufou, sacred to Confucius. But
their surveyors insisted that the line must cut across the long cypress
avenue between his temple and his grave, and rather than permit such a
desecration Chufou did without the railroad. Perhaps it is fitting,
anyway, that those who come to honor the great sage should bump by
“Peking cart” the twenty _li_ between the station, a short two hours
south of Tai-shan, and the town; for did not Confucius himself suffer in
some such contraption while vainly hawking his wisdom to and fro through
the land we now know as China? At least, sinologues assure us that the
cart antedates Confucius, and certainly there has been no notable
improvement in it since its first appearance, for that would be
un-Chinese. Tucked away inside by a solicitous seeker after gratuities
who had furnished several pillows by the simple method of stripping a
few hotel beds, one expects a “Peking cart” to ride rather well—until
the first jolt disabuses him. There may be roads smooth enough to make
such traveling comfortable, but they do not grow in China. How many
times one side or the other of the vehicle deliberately reached over and
severely thumped me here, there, or elsewhere during that six miles
across a fertile sea-flat plain which should have been as easy-riding as
the labyrinthian road should have been direct I have no means of
computing. I do recall, however, wishing a thousand times that the mule
who tossed with me would be a little less deliberate and have it over
with, only to thank fortune a second later when something, anything
brought him to a momentary halt.

If Confucius could return to the old town he would certainly be
disappointed—or am I imbuing him with a modern point of view to which he
could not attain even by reincarnation? Judging by the effect several
hundred centuries of his philosophy have had on his countrymen, I doubt
on second thought whether he would lose any sleep over the insignificant
fact that before he could reach his own compound he would have to wade
at least calf-deep in oozy black mud for a mile or so, between mud
hovels at which our pigs would curl their tails in wrath, stared upon by
a redundancy of people to whom his native soil seems preferred as
covering to cotton or wool. At worst he would probably quickly forget
it, once inside his own private domain, especially if the thought of the
streets and of “Peking carts” were not embittered by the necessity of
returning to the station. The wall of Chufou has a circuit of four
miles, and a third of the area within is taken up by the temple of
Confucius and the residence of his lineal descendant. One steps directly
from an unspeakable street into the vast enclosure, broken up by wall
behind wall and building behind building in the style common to Chinese
construction. First comes a forest of tile roofs, each covering a single
turtle-supported stone shaft set up by this or that Chinese emperor.
There are several rows of these, with perhaps a dozen in a row, larger
and many times better built than the home of the average living Chinese.
Above them, as through all the subdivisions of the great enclosure, rise
old cypress-trees affording the sylvan pleasures of shade, the singing
of birds, and the murmur of swaying branches. In the principal courtyard
the stump of a pagoda-tree reputed to have been planted by the sage
himself is preserved under a little glass-sided temple, a miniature of
those in the outer yard. This is popularly believed to take on new life
through another sprout as often as one dies, thus bridging all the
centuries between the planter and present-day China, and certainly a
large old tree of the same variety now leans forth from what seems to be
the same root. Beyond is an open temple of kiosk shape where Confucius
sat under a plum-tree and taught—even in winter no doubt, for he was
probably as impervious to cold and discomfort as are the Chinese of
to-day in their cotton-padded garments.

The great main temple about which all else centers has often been
described in detail, so that all who read of such things should know
that it is a hundred and thirty-five by eighty-four feet in area and
seventy-eight high, with a portico upheld by nine far-famed stone
pillars intricately carved with dragons. What seems to be less widely
known is the impressive simplicity of that great structure, especially
of the interior, dimly yet amply lighted through paper windows, and as
strikingly free from the cluttering of painted idols which crowd most
Chinese temples as is the whole enclosure from beggars and sycophant
priests. A seated statue of the sage, ten feet high, occupies an alcove
in the center of the room, facing the great doors. He wears the ancient
scholar costume, culminating in a head-dress from which our mortarboard
cap might have been derived, being a flat thing some two feet long, with
ropes strung with beads, hanging well down over his face, which greatly
resemble the warnings that our railroads hang on either side of low
bridges as a caution to their brakemen to duck their heads. Above the
alcove a slab of wood bearing four characters boldly announces Confucius
the “Master Exemplar of All Ages”; before it stands the spirit tablet,
the table on which sacrificial food is offered, and a great iron urn
filled with the ashes of countless joss-sticks. On the right and left
are the images of the “twelve disciples” of Confucius, a number which
seems to have been purposely reached, by including the “boob” among his
pupils and the commentator on his Classics who lived during the Sung
dynasty—something like adorning the tombstone of Shakspere with the name
of some professor who had edited a school edition of his works. Yet
spaciousness on either hand, and upward to the old painted beams
supporting the tile roof, is the impression likely to stay longest with
the visitor from the West.

The original temple was built on this spot in 478 B.C., and to realize
how slightly Chinese worship of the illustrious dead has changed during
all the centuries since, one has only to drop into the former home of Li
Hung-chang in Tientsin and note how similar in all its details is the
temple in which his spirit tablet is enthroned. With each renovation
there came an increase in size, until the shrine of Confucius became the
vast cypress-shaded enclosure it is to-day. Many priests are attached to
it, but they spend their time in learning the elaborate ritual and
intricate forms of ceremony used during the spring and autumn festivals,
so that regular and frequent worship, as we who live in Christian lands
understand it, is scarcely practised. At stated periods the lineal
descendant of Confucius comes to burn incense and offer food before the
statue, as every Chinese son is expected to do before the graves of his
ancestors. Pilgrims, too, come in great numbers, especially at certain
seasons; but there is nothing similar to the daily mass or the weekly
service of our churches.

Behind this main temple—which means on the cold north side of it, since
every properly constructed Chinese temple faces south—is a smaller, much
more severely simple hall containing the spirit tablet of Mrs.
Confucius, though just which one is not specified. A spirit tablet, by
the way, is a varnished or painted piece of wood a foot or two high,
narrow and thin, bearing in three carved and usually gilded characters
the posthumous name under which the deceased is honored, and set upright
in the place sacred to him. At one side are two other temples, of the
parents of Confucius, identically arranged. That is, the father is
represented by a statue, in scholar’s costume, and the mother by a mere
tablet, in a building following as meekly after that of her lord and
master as does the Chinese wife in the flesh to this day. Why not
statues of the wife and mother also, I asked the first man of learning
willing to strain his understanding to catch my mispronounced meaning,
though almost certain what the answer would be. It would be improper, he
explained, politely, as to one with the ignorance of a new-born child,
indecent, to speak plainly, to have a female statue, particularly in a
sacred place. Given the ramshackle, filthy condition of a very large
number of Chinese temples, the care with which all these were kept up
was striking. But even these were not fleckless, especially those of the
wife and the mother, where everything was covered with dust and the bare
resounding chambers had a lonely air, as if very few ever took the
trouble to come and burn incense to mere females.

I might, with a little effort or foresight, have come to Chufou properly
introduced to meet the present head of the Kung family, which is the one
we know by the name Confucius. But he is a mere boy—the prince who long
held that position having recently died—and was certain to be in no
manner different from a million other Chinese youths of the well-to-do
class. Besides, though he passes as the seventy-fourth descendant in
direct male line from the sage, he is in plain fact nothing of the sort.
For the Confucius family, like many others in China, illustrious or
commonplace, has now and then been forced to adopt a son to keep the
line unbroken; even if a generation is not entirely sterile mere
daughters are wasted effort in preserving a Chinese lineage. T’ai Tsung,
nearly fifteen centuries after the death of the sage, bestowed
posthumous honors upon the descendants of Confucius for the past
forty-four generations, and exempted those to come from taxation, a
privilege they still enjoy.

It is some two miles from the town itself to the grave of Confucius, by
a worn-out avenue of ancient and bedraggled cypresses. “Those with
letters of introduction, or persons of distinction,” explains the
nearest approach to a guide-book of this region that is to be had, “are
the only ones admitted; but others may be by tipping the guardian.” As
if any one could possibly have gotten this far afield in China without
knowing as much! The custodian was an unsoaped, one-eyed coolie who lay
in wait just inside the first ornamental gateway, before which a pair of
stone tigers, two _lin_ (sacred animals unknown to natural history), and
stone statues of two gigantic gentlemen known as Weng and Chung, stood
on guard. A tablet over this, or one of the other several entrances we
passed on the half-mile walk that remained to the grave itself,
announced it the “Tomb of the All-Accomplished and Most Saintly Prince
Wen Hsüan,” a posthumous title by which the sage would scarcely
recognize himself. There were fields to be crossed, sometimes along ways
lined by trees, a landscape covered far and wide with ordinary graves, a
small stream, finally a locked and bolted gateway through a temple-like
building, before our walk ended. But when it did it was at a last
resting-place that even the Western world would have approved, perhaps
have envied. Venerable old trees whispering with last year’s dead leaves
rose above the secluded spot, yet not so thickly as to cut off the arch
of the blue heavens or to more than filter the brilliant sunshine. Birds
flitted here and there. It was such a spot as could scarcely be found in
any Occidental cemetery, for not even the formality of granite
tombstones or graveled walks between the graves was there to mar the
sylvan charm. Stones there were, a single plain slab before each of the
three mounds, but with only three characters in the old rounded script
on each of them, and the softening hand of time, perhaps of centuries,
to bring them into harmony with the scene, they seemed as naturally in
place as did the old trees stretching their arms above them.
Cone-shaped, as is the custom in China, but many times larger than the
graves strewn by millions throughout the land, the mounds were simple
hillocks, covered now with winter-brown grass. The slightly larger one,
the characters on its stone in gold instead of red, was of the sage
himself; that on the east covered the remains of his only son, while
before the main mound rose a third that caused dispute among the several
hangers-on who had accompanied me, so that I have no certain means of
knowing whether it is that of the sage’s brother, his father, or his
grandson.

Kung Fu-tze, as he is known in his native land, was born some twelve
miles eastward from Chufou, in the village of Ni-San, now under the rule
of bandits, and has been dead only a little more than twenty-four
hundred years. In those days the small states that eventually coagulated
into what we know as China were separate principalities, of which modern
Shantung alone contained four, Confucius being a native of the one
called Lu. He was already teaching at twenty-two, and studied much
history. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that there was not much of
anything more exciting to do for a young man wading the streets of
Chufou twenty-five centuries ago; hence undue credit should not be given
this particular youth for frequenting libraries rather than pool-rooms.
A few decades of his life seem to have passed without anything
particularly worth recording; but what are a few decades in China?
Whatever else he passed this time at, there is no question that the
studious young man was doing everything in his power, short of
overstepping the easy marital laws of Lu, to beget him a son, in which
he eventually succeeded. At length he emerges again from obscurity “at
the early age of fifty-five,” as a chief city magistrate. The elections
seem to have run his way, for we behold him soon afterward the _acting_
minister of state—that unsatisfactory prefix probably being due to the
fact, if one may judge by the politics of present-day China, that his
appointment was not confirmed by Parliament. As such he “put an end to
all crime,” evidently a simple little matter in those days, perhaps
because “squeeze” was not included. But the old prince of Lu died and
the new one abandoned himself to sensual pleasures, and at length
Confucius quit the job and went on the road. Once it broke out, he seems
to have had as serious a case of wanderlust as any ordinary mortal, for
he rambled for thirteen years, looking in vain—so at least he told the
story to sympathetic listeners—for a prince who would follow his advice
and set up a model administration. The briefest reflection will remind
the most thoughtless how times have changed in this matter of reformers
since then.

If it were not improper to be critical toward so venerable an old
gentleman, one might voice the suspicion that Confucius did not suffer
severely from lack of self-confidence, for he repeatedly stated that he
would produce a faultless administration and do away with all crime
within three years in the domain of any prince who would hire him. Alas,
if only he were back, be it only in the principality of Lu! No present
member of the human race, unless perhaps a “practical politician,” will
have the cynicism to suppose that the offer of this wandering Luluite
was not eagerly competed for from the eight points of the Chinese
compass. Yet the truth is far worse than that: he found no takers
whatever! What was left for him, then, but to come back home and write a
book? In fact, during those last three years of his life in Chufou he
wrote five books, bringing himself unquestionably into the class with
almost any of our modern novelists, though he succeeded in gathering
about him only three thousand disciples. Population was scarcer in China
twenty-five hundred years ago, of course, and publicity hardly a science
at all. However, whatever he lacked in numbers he made up in quality,
for no fewer than seventy-two of this handful became “proficient in the
six departments of learning.” From these he chose ten as “master
disciples,” granting them whatever passed for sheepskins in those days
“for attainment in Virtue, Literature, Eloquence, and—and Politics!”

It is chiefly through these chosen followers, who wrote his “Discourses
and Dialogues,” that Confucius became famous—and, like Christ, greatly
misconstrued—and laid the foundation of China’s ethical and political
life. But he could scarcely have had more than an inkling of the fame
that was to accrue to him in later centuries, for his honors have been
mainly posthumous, and it was not until twelve hundred and seventeen
years after his death that he was made the “Prince of Literary
Enlightenment!” Why, then, this hectic eagerness of modern man to attain
to fame even before the sod has closed over him? I wonder, too, if the
great sage would swell with pride at his achievements if he could come
back and wander again through the grave-strewn, soiled and hungry,
wickedly overpopulated, politically chaotic China of to-day. Surely he
could not plead innocence of helping to bring about her present woes,
for one of the most famous of his dictums, which have had so much
influence on Chinese life for many centuries, runs “He who is not in
office has no concerns with plans for the administration of its duties.”
Where can be found, in so few words, the explanation of what is mainly
wrong with the ancient empire which so erroneously now calls itself a
republic?

Personally I should have preferred to Chufou the birthplace of Mencius,
some thirty miles still farther southward, for there hills rise above
the plain, growing larger beyond. Tsowhsien is a more enterprising town,
too, with an electric light plant that had just been installed by an
American company, and less of the air of making an easy living out of
pilgrims than either Taianfu or the home of Confucius. Perhaps it has to
thank the lesser fame of Mencius for this more manly attitude, for
though he is reckoned second, or at worst third, among China’s sages,
not one person in ten, even in his native province of Shantung, seemed
to know where he lived and died. Pilgrims do come to Tsowhsien, for it
is on the direct line of places of pilgrimage through this holy land of
China; but Mencius has only dozens or scores of visitors where Confucius
has thousands.

The green roof of his chief temple rises among the trees within easy
sight from the railway. If the rest of the land somewhat neglects him,
his native town bears him constantly in mind, and any street urchin can
point out the monument marking the spot where he traded his shoes for a
book, or where other typical escapades are immortalized in stone slabs,
in spite of the fact that centuries of a swarming population have left
them sad, slum-like spots. Chinese celebrities have, of course, an
advantage over those of the Occident in being kept before the attention
of posterity. Public monuments and dwelling-house museums are all very
well, but how much more certain of constant attention Shakspere or
Washington would be had they direct male descendants, overlooking an
adoption now and then, whose main business in life it would be,
generation after generation, to worship at the shrine of these
illustrious ancestors and see to it that the things sacred to their
memories grow and prosper.

The present head of the Meng family—for the name of the chief successor
of Confucius was really Meng Tse—is a man in middle life, who dwells
inside a big high-walled compound across the street from that enclosing
the temples; and he evidently bears a striking resemblance to less
fame-pursued Chinese of his class, for information reached us that he
was just then busily engaged in feasting some friends. Except that it is
considerably smaller and less imposing, the temple grounds of Mencius
are quite similar to those of his more famous forerunner. Aged cypresses
and the marks of time give it dignity and a certain charm; the statue of
the sage wears the same bead-veiled scholar’s head-dress, and a costume
as exactly similar as if it had been copied by a Chinese tailor; behind
him is the meeker temple of his consort, containing only her spirit
tablet; at one side are the smaller but almost identical shrines of his
parents. If there is anything unique about the place it must be the
birds nesting in the tall trees in the unoccupied back of the compound,
beautifully graceful white birds that resemble both cranes and herons,
yet do not seem to be exactly either. The information that they are
found nowhere else in China was disputed by some of those who heard it.




                              CHAPTER XVI
                       “ITINERATING” IN SHANTUNG


The day was delightful, fleckless and summery as if it had been three
months later, and we should willingly have lingered longer among the
cypress-sighing shades of Mencius, had it not been beyond the power of
man to shake off the influx of childish soldiers, street urchins of all
ages, and every inquisitive male of Tsowhsien who caught sight of us in
time, that had burst through the opened gate and swirled about us like
molten scoriæ wherever we moved. My companion, I have neglected to
mention, was a robust American missionary with headquarters away down in
the southern corner of Shantung, who was kind enough to initiate me into
the devout sport of “itinerating.” From the home of Mencius we were to
strike out across country by wheelbarrow. To the man who, before the
present century began, had already grown to recognize that as his chief
means of locomotion, there was far less thrill in the thought of
wheelbarrowing than there would have been in the unusual experience of
taking a street-car; but to me it was something entirely new in the
field of travel. The passenger wheelbarrows of Shantung are of two
kinds,—small and large, city and country, short or long distance,
according to the individual choice of dividing line. In town they are
merely two cushioned, straight-backed benches on either side of the high
wooden wheel, on which six or eight crippled women may ride comfortably,
sitting sidewise. But for cross-country work a larger, sturdier breed is
used, with room for several hundredweight of baggage and a pair of the
owners thereof stretched out upon it, feet forward, like a sultan on his
divan. In town one man usually bears the whole burden; out in the
country there must be at least another tugging at a rope ahead—unless
one be wealthy enough to replace him with a donkey or an ox—besides the
fellow gasping between the back handles, with the woven strap between
them over his shoulders. For a very long trip, say twenty to thirty
miles in a day, it is considered more humane, or at least more certain,
to have a third man between the front shafts or handles which the
country variety possesses.

[Illustration:

  Making two Chinese elders of a Shantung village over into
    Presbyterians
]

[Illustration:

  Messrs. Kung and Meng, two of the many descendants of Confucius in
    Shantung flanking one of those of Mencius
]

[Illustration:

  Some of the worst cases still out of bed in the American leper-home of
    Tenghsien, Shantung, were still full of laughter
]

[Illustration:

  Off on an “itinerating” trip with an American missionary in Shantung,
    by a conveyance long in vogue there. Behind, one of the towers by
    which messages were sent, by smoke or fire, to all corners of the
    old Celestial Empire
]

In the good old days, only a few years ago, in fact, the usual wages for
a barrow-man in rural Shantung were five cents a day—and he saved money
on that. Now things have reached a pretty pass, for each man may expect
as much as thirty cents, though actually to demand that would almost
rank him among the profiteers, the radicals, the undesirable element of
the working-classes, and to pitch one’s demands too high in China is
likely apt to result in losing one’s job to the three hundred and
sixty-five other men who are eagerly waiting to snatch it. To be sure,
these wages are not so dreadful as they seem, for they are in “Mex,” and
nowadays the use of the wheelbarrow is included.

Perhaps it was because we generously paid this highest price that our
two men bowled along as rapidly as a “Peking cart,” and many times more
smoothly, so evenly in spite of the broken foot-path along the pretense
of a road we followed that one could read as easily as on any train. But
their best possible speed seems to be a characteristic of most of the
barrow-men of Shantung, as does a constant cheerfulness that is always
breaking out in broad smiles or laughter at the slightest provocation,
as if their joy at having another chance to exercise their magnificent
calling could not be contained. Unless the passenger is so inexperienced
and squeamish that the gasping of his human draft-animal just behind him
prickles his conscience, the wheelbarrow of the country variety comes
close to being China’s most comfortable form of land travel. It has
little of the cruel bumping and vicious jolting of a two-wheeled cart;
there is far less labor involved in reclining on an improvised divan
than in bestriding an animal; even a rubber-tired rickshaw is given to
sudden protests at the inequalities of the surface of China. Besides,
two rickshaws can rarely travel side by side, whereas the men stretched
out on either flank of a barrow-wheel may discuss religion, philosophy,
and the natural equality of man without once straining the ears or
losing a word. One might go further and praise the exclusiveness, the
sense of Cleopatran luxury, the freedom of route which makes the barrow
so much preferable to a train packed with undisciplined soldiers and as
many of the common, ticket-buying variety of unbathed Celestials as can
crowd into the space these putative defenders of the country graciously
leave unoccupied. The train makes more speed, perhaps; but what is so
out of keeping with the spirit of China as haste? The minor circumstance
that there must be mutual agreement between the two passengers on a
wheelbarrow as to when to ride and when to walk might conceivably be a
disadvantage, but there is no reason it should be if the one more given
to walking will bear in mind the plumpness of his companion and its
proper preservation. From the distance of the Western world the
impression may arise that the barrow-men must consider these fellows,
whom they wheel about like the latest pair of twins, rather weak and
sorry members of the human family. But this is merely another way of
saying that the Occidental can quickly lose his way in the labyrinth of
the Chinese mind. The reaction of the sweating coolies seemed to be,
not, “I wish this overfed pair of loafers would get off and walk a
while,” but a kind of pride at being associated with men of such wealth
and standing, mingled with the feeling, built up through many
generations, that naturally persons of finer clay should not bemean
themselves by tramping like a coolie, and topped off with the impression
that if the gentlemen call a halt and take to their feet it is because
the wheeling is not entirely satisfactory, which quickly brings in its
train the dread that one of those three hundred and sixty-five other men
eagerly waiting for such a job will get it next time.

We passed two of the “telegraph” towers of old-time China that
afternoon, square-cut stone and mud structures large as a two-story
house, from the now crumbling and grass-grown tops of which news and
orders were sent from end to end of the Middle Kingdom. Fires were the
signals by night and a dense black column of smoke from burning wolf’s
dung by day. Particularly were they used when more troops were needed at
the capital, and the story runs that one emperor who flashed forth the
call for a general mobilization just because his favorite concubine
wished to see the discomfiture on the faces of the exasperated soldiers
shortly afterward found his rôle in the hands of one of the eager
understudies. Cues are still no abnormality in China as a whole, but one
is struck by their almost universal retention in Shantung. The Manchus,
it is said, ordered cues to be worn not so much because they had worn
them for centuries themselves as in order to be able to tell a man from
a woman, if some of their rather effeminate new subjects chose to
disguise themselves, for both sexes had long hair up to that time. It
seems that when orders were given, after the overthrow of the Ch’ing
dynasty, that this badge of Manchu servitude be removed, the execution
depended largely upon the provincial and local authorities. In some
places men were given the choice between losing their pigtails or their
heads, and they had less difficulty in deciding upon the relative value
of these two adornments than might have been the case had the question
been left to an impartial committee. But the military ruler of Shantung
during the first years of the republic was a monarchist who had no use
for this new republican stuff, and who did what he could to return the
emperor to the throne; therefore the people under him dared in few cases
to remove what amounted to a badge of loyalty. Now that a decade has
passed and the making of hair-nets has become one of the principal
industries of the province, when even the boy “emperor” in Peking has
adopted the Western hair-cut, one would think that the masculine braid
would disappear. But personal beauty is a matter of taste, and the
Chinese mind is famous for the number of cogs in that section of it
devoted to the preserving of established customs—as China goes, the
wearing of a cue can scarcely be called an old one—and on the subject of
barbering the country seems at present to be about at a status quo.

It was the sixteenth day of the first moon, our March 3, the last big
holiday of the Chinese New Year’s season. Thus, though we had seen
endless streams of people, the men as nearly spotless as they would ever
be during this Year of the Pig, the women in their gayest garments,
which in most cases meant blue or red silk jackets above bright red
trousers tapering down to tiny white baby-shoes, ears and glossy oiled
hair adorned with their most precious trinkets, the children dolled up
like the principal actors in a Chinese drama—though, I say, we had seen
many thousand of these pouring into Tenghsien for one of the chief
celebrations of the year, there were no people whatever working in the
fields, which this far south were quite ready for the first spring
tilling. Besides, much of the land in this region is given over to
winter wheat, planted in October and now just beginning to tinge with
green the vast yellowish brown of the typical North China landscape.
When at length we had been wheeled, like a load of bricks, to the
gateway of Chung-Hsin-Tien, we paused and dismounted, for it is a gross
breach of Chinese etiquette to ride into or through a town where you
have friends—or to speak from a vehicle or the back of an animal to a
friend on foot. A remnant of this point of view, members of the A.E.F.
will recall, survives in American army regulations.


“Middle-Heart-Inn” was for centuries a place of great importance, being
the half-way stopping-place of all travel on the old Peking-to-Shanghai
route. Then the railroad came, a decade ago, passing it by without even
naming a station in its honor, and it sank to the large miserable
village within a long, rambling, broken mud wall which we found it.
Moreover, it had been struck by hail the autumn before and the crops
just outside its wall had suffered more severely than anywhere else in
the devastated area. One was in luck, I gathered, not to have been
caught out in that storm without an umbrella. The country people of all
that region solemnly assert that the hailstones were as large as
tea-pots, and American missionaries bravely run the risk of being
charged with perjury by asserting that they saw with their own eyes some
as big as grape-fruit. One of the stork-heron birds from the compound of
Mencius was struck dead, and several severe injuries to people were
reported.

My companion still had left a few hundred dollars from what had been
given him for distribution among famine sufferers, and our first act
after installing ourselves in the mud hut that served as a mission
station and partaking of the heavy repast which a few of the faithful
had insisted on providing—and on clashing chop-sticks with us over—was
to set out on a visiting tour among those pointed out by the chief local
Christians as in urgent need of assistance. I was struck with the
thoroughness with which my companion prepared for the coming
distribution. He refused to give any aid whatever to cases which he
could not personally inspect, and he had lived in China long enough to
know most of the tricks of the unworthy. Anywhere in the United States,
not even excluding the “poor white” and negro communities of the South,
the entire population of Chung-Hsin-Tien would have seemed at a glance
to need the assistance of charity. But in China one must be ragged and
dirty and possessionless and hungry-looking indeed to stand out visibly
from the millions always more or less in the same predicament. Hut after
hut we entered to find not a Mexican dollar’s worth of anything within
it. A bit of crumpled straw or a few rags of what had once been
cotton-padded garments served in most cases as bed, sometimes on a small
_k’ang_ that could be heated—had there been anything to heat it
with—more often on the earth floor itself. Then there might be from two
to half a dozen mud-ware jars and shallow baskets in which the family
habitually kept its possessions, and possibly one or two peasant’s
tools. That was all, in sight at least; and the people had had no
warning that a benefactor was coming. It seemed to be taken for granted
that my companion would consider every one a deceptive rascal until he
had personally proved himself to the contrary, and not only were there
no protests against our entering every hovel, but invitations to do so,
in spite of the breach in Chinese domestic customs involved.

We felt into every jar and basket, prodded into every corner and nest of
rags, to make sure that the family did not have more than the handful of
grain they admitted. In no case, I believe, was any deception
discovered, but my conscientious companion not only continued until
darkness fell that Saturday evening, but violated his religious scruples
by spending much of the Sabbath afternoon at the same task. Sometimes it
was an old man living alone, with literally nothing but a few handfuls
of chaff and the hulls of beans to feed upon. More often there was a
wife and several children to share such splendid provisions. Not a few
lived in _yin-tse_ instead of huts,—holes cut in the ground and roofed
over with sticks, straw, and mud, with a crude ladder or notched pole by
which we descended through a small opening to the dark interior. The
missionary was particularly scrupulous in entering all of these, for
they often serve as the rendezvous of gamblers, and he trusted to his
experienced eyes to make fairly sure that a cave was not this, but
actually a poor man’s dwelling. There was a similar hole in the ground,
though uncovered and with earth steps leading down to it, in the yard of
the local “mission,” for in the winter it is more comfortable to hold
school or gossip in such a place, out of reach of the wind, yet in the
sunshine, than in the dreary, unheated mud huts.

Sometimes only the woman and the children were at home, and the only
decent way to inquire of her about her husband, according to Chinese
etiquette, was to refer to him indirectly as her _wai-tou_ or _nan-ren_,
her “outside” or her “male person.” Perhaps he had gone to Manchuria,
with the millions of coolies who set out for there soon after the
Chinese New Year, their belongings in a soiled quilt roll. Compared with
densely populated Shantung, where ten villages within five square miles
is nothing unusual, the “Eastern Three Provinces” are sparsely peopled
and wages are correspondingly high. From Chefoo to Dairen the poorest
steamers cross in a day, and the railroads offer reduced rates to
migrating coolies—furnishing them open freight-cars for their journeys.
But there is more snow than work in Manchuria during the winter;
moreover, any Chinese with a proper respect for his ancestors will
return to his home among their graves at least for the beginning of the
new year, so that much time and some wages are lost in traveling to and
fro. Sometimes the “outside” was working in another part of the
province. There is, of course, no slavery in China; so long-civilized a
land would not tolerate such an institution. But many of the “gentry”
and landowners of Shantung, and of other provinces, no doubt, profit by
the excess of population by paying a man five “Mex” dollars a year and
his food for his labor, and making no provision whatever for his family.

But there was no real famine in Chung-Hsin-Tien, my companion concluded.
No one was actually starving—though how some of them kept from doing so
on their visible means of support was beyond me. Under-nourishment was
common; the only plentiful thing in town was children, especially boys,
perhaps because of the custom of even the poorest of keeping the girls
out of sight. For nature seems to take revenge on the Chinese for their
ardent desire for male offspring. How often the traveler who has the
audacity to pursue his questions far enough—for Chinese friends do not
greet one another with inquiries as to the health of their respective
families—will finally unearth the shamefaced answer, “All girls.” Some
had sold their land—a _mou_, or about the sixth of an acre, at fourteen
dollars “Mex” perhaps—to carry them over the winter, some their last
household goods that would bring a copper; one man who was so far above
the lower level as to have no hope of outside assistance answered my
joking query as to the price of the most likable of his small sons with
a quick, “Take him along!” But none had been reduced to the final
necessity of tearing down their miserable houses in order to sell the
few sticks of wood in them; hence there were deserving, but not urgent,
cases.

The native helper had filled a huge sheet of red paper with the names
and particulars of each family visited, to the dictation of my
companion, who divided them into first-, second-, and third-class cases.
The first were the most needy—the utterly possessionless, they would
have seemed to Americans at home—who would be given “full assistance,”
that is, a “Mex” dollar or two a month per person until the next harvest
began to come in. Second class were those who still had something left—a
few pounds of corn meal, a chair that might be sold, a job at a few
coppers a day—and they would be helped accordingly. To be inscribed
third was proof of comparative affluence; it meant that the family had a
goat or a pig, perhaps even a donkey; that one of their jars was still
half full of corn or millet or _kaoliang_, or that they had been caught
in the act of smoking tobacco or of having a little handful of the weed
in the house, prima facie evidence that they were really not suffering
from hunger. To these, small distributions would be made if there was
anything left over from the more needy cases. The two impressions, aside
from the definition of the word “poverty” in China, which this
canvassing left with me were, first, the unfailing cheerfulness, the
hair-trigger smile and ready laughter, of even the most miserably
destitute, and their tenacious clinging to custom in spite of
misfortunes. It seemed never to have suggested itself to the poorest
family in town that it might be well to limit the number of children it
brought into the world to share its perpetual nothing; and mothers who
did not have a pot or a whole garment to their names still somehow found
cloths with which to bind their daughters’ feet. From their point of
view of course this last effort was genuine parental sacrifice; for to
leave the girl with whole feet would mean almost certain starvation
without a husband instead of only partial starvation with one.


Itinerating missionaries in China can scarcely avoid living up to the
biblical injunction to “suffer little children to come unto” them. For
their first appearance at the edge of town is the signal for a flocking
from all directions, not merely of all the boys and as many of the girls
as are not restrained, but of a generous collection of men of all ages,
and even some of the boldest women. Chinese and Western courtesy are
diametrically opposed in some of their characteristics, and perhaps
there is no wider gulf between them than the conception of proper
behavior toward strangers. We consider it rude to stare; the Chinese
consider it almost an insult not to stare. Like the young ladies of
Spanish America, who would take it as much more than a slight on their
beauty not to be ogled so brazenly that it becomes almost indecency by
the young men lined up on either side of their promenade, so the Chinese
high official or man of wealth would be seriously hurt by a failure of
the populace to flock about him wherever he appears in public. Simple
villagers cannot of course be expected to know that Westerners do not
consider this attention so essential, and to that is added the most
inquisitive temperament among the races of mankind, a curiosity which,
though it is no exaggeration to dub it monkey-like, is probably proof of
a higher grade of intelligence than that of more stolid and indifferent
peoples. But it is a form of intelligence with which most travelers from
the West, I believe, would very willingly dispense, for to be stared at
unbrokenly hour after hour by a motionless throng becomes at times the
most exasperating of experiences.

It is not of course to the advantage of a missionary to drive off the
crowds that gather about him, for he has come to China mainly for the
purpose of addressing crowds, and every tendency toward exclusiveness is
so much set-back in his chosen work. Naturally, too, it is not fitting
in the guest of an itinerating missionary to throw cups of tea or mud
bricks in the faces of the compact mob through which may be scattered
some of his host’s converts, however strong the temptation may become.
During all our stay in Chung-Hsin-Tien, therefore, we were like kings at
a levée—if we are to believe that kings were ever so thickly attended
during the exchanging of their nighties for their breeches. There was a
gate to the mission yard, and a padlock that fitted it; but the picking
of that even from the outside seemed to be the easiest thing the town
did. Besides, the yard was invaded so closely on our heels that nothing
would have been gained by locking the gate. The door of the mud house
that usually served as church, as well as for the sleeping-room of the
local pastor and ourselves, was no barrier to the advance. Long before
the preliminary tea was poured for us there was a compact wall of
humanity drawn so tightly about us that we could barely move our elbows,
and the sea of fixedly staring faces stretched away to infinity out
through the yard. Now and then an undercurrent of discontent at
inequality of proximity surged through the multitude, to break against
our ribs or toss smaller urchins in between our legs and over our knees.
When at length it came time to open our cots and sleeping-bags, there
was still a large audience to such disrobing as we cared to do under
such conditions, and it was an hour or two afterward before the most
privileged characters had been convinced that they, too, should retire.
Nor were we by any means out of bed next morning when there appeared the
vanguard of the throng that was to wall us in all that day. It was hard
somehow to understand just why a town which often saw foreigners still
came to stand by the hour watching with the fixed eyes of a statue our
every slightest movement, be it only the tying of a shoe-lace or the
buttoning of a coat.

A large number of those about us bore famous names. Many a Chinese
village is made up almost exclusively of persons having the same surname
and the same ancestors, and Chung-Hsin-Tien, being no great distance
from the birthplace of either, contains many descendants of both
Confucius and Mencius. There was Meng the shopkeeper and Kung the cook,
both Christians, right within the mission compound, and it was easy to
find in any small crowd others bearing those illustrious names. Once I
came upon a Mencius squatting in the dirt at the corner nearest the
gate, shoveling away with worn chop-sticks a cracked bowlful of some
uninviting food, and so ignorant that he fled in dismay when I suggested
a photograph, refusing to have his soul thus taken from him. A little
farther up the street a Confucius sold peanuts in little heaps at a
copper each. Missionaries in this region say that those bearing the two
famous names are so numerous that the difficulty of making converts is
increased, because they are so proud of their ancestry that they will
seldom risk the stigma attached to changing to a “foreign” faith. Yet
there was a Confucius from this very town who was now a Presbyterian
preacher, and the two names appear rather frequently on the church
registers of southern Shantung.

Of late years at least it is not unduly easy to become an accepted
Christian there. My companion spent half that Sunday morning in putting
a dozen candidates through a long catechism, and permitted only two of
them to join the church at once, baptizing them—from a tea-cup—at the
morning service. It was fully as easy, too, to get out of the church as
to get into it; one of the hardest and most important tasks of the
missionaries is to see that backsliders are dropped from membership.
Almost before we had entered the hole in the mud wall that passed for a
city gate a rather addle-pated old man had appeared, hugging his
well-worn Bible under his arm; and as long as we remained he hovered
close about us, grinning at us upon the slightest provocation, as if to
say, “We are brethren, far above this common herd.” He was about the
first convert in the region—and one of the chief thorns in the flesh of
the itinerator. For the latter had been forced to drop him from the
church rolls years before because he had taken a concubine, and there
was still no prospect of his being granted forgiveness, even though he
had advanced the ingenious argument that he had been compelled to the
act by his mother, lest the family graveyards be left without
attendants. Yet he continued his church-going as religiously as if he
were one of the principal deacons. Perhaps it was just retribution that
he still had no son, in spite of his lapse from the tight missionary
way. I confess that I did not quite follow the reasoning which made it
quite all right to admit the concubine herself to church membership, but
I have always been dense on theological niceties.

The day was delightful, and services were held out in the yard. Perhaps
twoscore men and half as many women, not to mention a veritable flock of
children, crowded together on the narrow little benches taken from the
mud-hut church, or stood behind them. I could not but admire the
endurance of the missionary, and silently congratulate him on the
sturdiness inherited from his “Pennsylvania Dutch” ancestors. For it can
scarcely be a mere mental relaxation to talk incessantly, earnestly, and
energetically for an hour in a tongue as foreign as the southern
Shantung dialect, while Chinese urchins by the dozen, from
seatless-trousered infancy to devilish early youth, seemed to be doing
their utmost to make life about them unbearable; and when even the
adults frequently displayed habits that are not usual in our own church
gatherings. Or, if this is not enough to try any man’s strength and
patience, there was the frequent torture of listening to the horrible
imitation of our hymns perpetrated, with missionary connivance, by the
congregation. Evidently no Chinese can “hold” a tune, but he can do
almost anything else to it which a vivid imagination can picture. Why
their own “music” cannot be adapted to religious purposes to better
advantage is one of those innumerable questions which flock about the
traveler in China like mosquitos in a swamp.


Evening services of almost as strenuous a nature, and many personal
conferences on religious or financial matters, plumply filled out the
day, and early next morning, when the last clinging convert had been
shaken off without the suggestion of violence that would have planted a
little nucleus of discontent in the community, we were away again by
wheelbarrow. I am in no position to testify as to how strictly the few
Christians of Chung-Hsin-Tien lived up to their faith in every-day life,
but they, and no small number of their as unwashed and ragged
fellow-townsmen, missed mighty little of the vaudeville performance
which the appearance of a foreigner or two in almost any Chinese town
seems to be considered by the inhabitants. This time we had three
barrow-men, one of them a first-class candidate for famine relief funds,
whose insistent smile at this unexpected windfall of a job was less
surprising than the mulish endurance he somehow got out of a chaff and
bean-hull diet. Less brute strength is required, however, in the
handling of a Chinese wheelbarrow than appearances suggest. During the
afternoon I changed places for a bit with the coolie between the front
handles, and while I would not care to adopt barrowing as a profession
while some less confining source of livelihood remains to me, the thing
ran, on the level at least, more like a perambulator than the most
optimistic could have imagined. The Chinese are adepts in the art of
balancing, and the wheelbarrow, like the rickshaw and the “Peking cart,”
is so adjusted as to call for less exertion than the sight of it
suggests. Ups and downs, sand or soft earth, sheer edges of “road,” and
the passing of many similar vehicles where there is no room to pass,
however, make an all-day journey no mere excursion even to a team of
three barrow-men.

Women and children were scratching about here and there in the fields;
the men were bringing manure in two big baskets fixed on a barrow, such
as carry the night-soil of Peking out through the city gates, and were
piling it in little mounds differing from the myriad graves only in
size. The New Year season was visibly over, and the incessant
working-days had come again. Somehow the name “Shantung” had always
called up the picture of a half-wild region, in spite of the protests of
reason; I found it instead very thoroughly tamed, as befits one of the
most populous regions on the globe—tamed at least in the agricultural
sense. When it came to such afflictions as bandits, officials, and the
Yellow River there is still much taming to be done in the province of
Confucius.

We passed almost incessantly through villages. High on the tops of the
smooth, bare hills that grew up as we advanced were rings of what seemed
to be stone, refuges built at the time of the Taiping Rebellion, which
came to a standstill in this very region. They were only walls, with
perhaps still a well inside, though the suspicion was growing that
bandits were finding a new use for them. Once we passed close on the
left an isolated stony peak that is as sacred as Tai-Shan, though much
less famous. Thousands of country people climb it, especially in the New
Year season, either as their only penance excursion, or as a part of
their pilgrimage through all the holy land of China. It is a rough and
uninviting climb, but nowhere is filial devotion more generously
rewarded, if we are to believe the faithful. Therefore one may on almost
any day see the son of an ailing father, dressed only in his Chinese
trousers, holding his hands with palms together in front of him, a stick
of burning incense between them, marching to the top of the mountain
without once taking his eyes off the rising thread of smoke before him.
A crowd follows close behind, and one of these carries the clothing of
the devotee, whose father is certain to recover under this
treatment—unless one of several hundred little incidents occur to make
the penance useless.

That night, in the mission-owned mud hut of another unlaundered town, my
companion preached a long sermon full of energy to a congregation of
five, one of whom was part-witted, two often asleep, and another merely
one of our barrow-men. Only the village “doctor,” whose training
consisted of a year as coolie in a mission hospital, kept his attention
strictly on the business in hand, as should be expected of the chief,
even though somewhat fragile, pillar of Christendom in the region. There
had been an audience of goodly size for such a locality in the early
part of the evening. Not only was the hut crowded with the score it
would hold, but at least twice as many more blocked the open door or
flattened their noses against the single dirty window. But a few
rifle-shots had suddenly sounded somewhere off toward the hills. Bandits
had raided, looted, and kidnapped in this town several times during the
year just over; and though there was no sudden exodus—for the Chinese
must “save face” under all circumstances—the audience melted steadily
away until only the five remained. The itinerating missionary, however,
must never let outside influences affect even the tone of the message he
is ever seeking to deliver. Whatever his benefits to the field he is
cultivating—and a wide experience is needed to acquire any certain
knowledge on this subject—he at least still has some of the hardships of
early missionary days, which his thousands of well housed colleagues,
even in China, only know by hearsay.


Tenghsien seemed to be far enough south to be tinged with the problems
and customs of southern China. Its dialect was audibly at variance with
that of Peking, even to an ear of slight Chinese training. On the wall
of the vault-like passage through the southern city gate hung several
time-blackened wooden crates containing the shoes of former magistrates.
It is one of the politenesses of the region to stop a departing
magistrate at the gate and remove his footwear, as a way of saying, “We
hate so badly to see you leave that we will do everything within our
power to prevent your going.” How careful such an official may be to
make sure that the ceremony is not omitted in his case, even though he
has to detail the shoe-pilferers, or whether or not he slips on the
oldest footwear in his possession that morning, are of course
unauthorized peeps behind the scenery such as tend to take all the
poetry out of life. We dropped in at the local pawnshop, with which my
host was on good terms rather out of policy than necessity, but it was
nothing now but a huge compound of empty buildings, crowded together in
almost labyrinthian turmoil. The pawnshop is one of the most important
institutions in any Chinese community, with many curious little
idiosyncrasies unknown to our own displayers of the golden balls, but it
can scarcely be expected to continue to function where, between grasping
officials and bandits frequently sweeping in from the hills, neither the
ticketed articles nor the cash on hand can be kept from disappearing.

The throwing out of sick babies seemed to be a fixed habit in Tenghsien,
though one seldom hears of such cases farther north. Millions of Chinese
parents believe that if a child dies before the age of six or seven it
is because it was really no child at all, but only an evil spirit
masquerading as one; and unless it is gotten rid of in time, woe betide
the other children of the family, already born or to come. It is
preferable apparently that it be eaten by dogs, but above all it must
not die in the house. The missionaries of Tenghsien have grown to take
this custom as a matter of course. If in their movements about town they
came upon a discarded baby still alive, they did what they could to
relieve its sufferings, but they did not “register” surprise. The
Chinese merely passed by on the farther side of the street. To touch an
abandoned child would be to invite the evil spirit to your own house,
unless it proved, by getting well, to be merely a sick child, and no
Chinese is brave enough to run any such risk as that. Not long before my
arrival, the mission “Bible woman” had found a girl of two thrown out on
a pile of filth, and even she had dared do nothing more than sit and fan
the flies off it, until it died. The missionaries, however, have come to
be looked upon as immune from these evil spirits. More than one
garbage-heap baby graces the mission kindergarten, and a man of some
standing now in the town carries on his face the teeth-marks of the dog
to which he was abandoned. It is not all mere superstition either, the
missionaries assert, but dread of responsibility, hatred of initiative,
often mere selfishness, masquerading as such. Many Chinese may actually
fear that the river spirit will get them if they save a drowning person,
but many others are merely afraid of wetting their clothes.

The Western and the Chinese mind may be similar in construction, but
they certainly do not work alike. Let the missionaries take a girl for a
year’s training, for instance, or for the temporary relief of her
parents, and they are sure to be informed when the period is over that
it is their duty to care for her the rest of her life. As it is contrary
to the Chinese idea of politeness to mind one’s own business, so their
gratitude seems to be of a different brand from ours. Something akin to
that feeling is no doubt now and then felt, in otherwise unoccupied
moments, for the men and women from overseas who spend their lives
trying to instil into Chinese youth such wisdom and right living as they
themselves possess; yet rarely does the passing visitor get a hint of
anything more than superficial politeness toward the benefactors, and
the assumption that they are somehow making a fine thing, financially or
materially, out of their labors—otherwise why would they continue them?

Sometimes Tenghsien buries its children, like those of its paupers who
do not belong to the beggars’ gild, in such shallow, careless graves
that the dogs habitually dig them up again. These surly brutes sat
licking their chops here and there on the outskirts of town, among
discolored rags of what had once been cotton-padded clothing scattered
about little mussed-up holes in the ground. Lepers were treated with a
similar policy of abandonment, or “let the foreigners do something about
it if they must.” The same American woman who had the highest record for
rescuing babies from the garbage-heap had built the only leper-home in
Shantung, if not in northwest China, a mile or two outside Tenghsien. As
far as the Chinese are concerned lepers run about the country as freely
as any one else. They may not be exactly popular—for the people know the
horrors of the disease and easily recognize its symptoms—but they can
scarcely be avoided. The thirty or more men and boys, who had been
gathered together in a two-story brick building many times more splendid
than the homes any of them had known before, had that same cheerful,
seldom complaining, easily smiling demeanor of the Chinese coolie under
any misfortune. Only a few were bedridden, for the greater resistance to
disease for which the Chinese are famous seems to spare them some of the
more horrible ravages of leprosy. But on one point they were losing
their cheery patience. For months they had submitted weekly to
injections of chaulmugra oil without any visible signs of improvement.
The treatment is painful; they all admitted it, and one fat-faced boy of
fourteen was pointed out as “tearing the walls apart with his screams”
when it was administered to him. But his quick retort to the charge
seemed to be the consensus of opinion: “Oh, please let us live without
the needle and go to heaven in peace when our time comes!” Such efforts
were being made to build a similar refuge for women—who of course always
come second in China—that even the men sufferers were asked to
contribute the few coppers they could live without—and when it is
finally built, through missionary effort, it will pay taxes to the local
authorities, like many other mission institutions.


Under more auspicious circumstances I should have struck off into that
labyrinth of mountains occupying the southeastern part of Shantung. But
it might have meant a very much longer stay than I cared to make. For
years now the mountainous parts of the province have been overrun more
or less continuously by what we call bandits. The Chinese call them
“_hung-hu-tze_” (“red beards,” a term evidently originating in
Manchuria, where bearded men from the north seem to have been the first
raiders, and to have suggested a clever disguise for native rascals) or
“_tu-fei_” (which means something like “local badness coming out of the
ground”). But under any name they are a thorn in the side of their
fellow-men. In Peking, where the so-called Central Government still
decorates foreign passports with separate visés for each province, five
at a time, even though the provincial authorities rarely look at them,
conditions were admitted with a frankness which other Governments might
copy to advantage. I had been given permission to travel freely in
Shantung—“_except_ in the areas of Tungchowfu, Linchengchow, Tsaochowfu,
Yenchowfu, and the regions controlled by the Kiao Taoyin.” In other
words, one could go anywhere, so long as one kept within sprinting
distance of the two railway lines. As a matter of fact, much of the
information of the Central Government was out of date; places it
excepted were now peaceful, and others it did not mention were infested
with brigands. Yenchowfu, for instance, showed no more ominous signs
when I passed through it than any other sleepy old walled town; and the
world at large knows how safe the railways themselves were just about
this season. Had there been any good reason to run the risk, the chances
are that I could have gone anywhere in Shantung without anything serious
happening to me; on the other hand, I might have been carried off before
I got well into the foot-hills.

The mountainous sections in which the brigands were operating most
freely are merely poorer, less populous parts of the crowded province,
where there is little to be seen except smaller editions of what may be
found within easier reach elsewhere. Now and then they had entered
Tenghsien, the station of my “itinerating” companion; only recently they
had posted a warning on the mission gate in Yihsien, reached by a
branch-line a little farther south, that unless some large sum of cash
was forthcoming within a hundred days the place would be burned. The
women and children had been sent to safer stations, and outposts of
agricultural and evangelistic work had been temporarily abandoned. It
was near Lincheng, the very junction of the Yihsien line, and the next
large town south of Tenghsien, that a score of foreign passengers were
to be taken from the most important express in China a few weeks later
and carried off into these same hills. The brigands, in fact, hard
pressed for a way out of their difficulties, debated the wisdom of
taking the missionaries of Tenghsien and neighboring stations as the
lever they needed against the authorities. It is more in keeping with
justice that they finally decided to hold up the express instead and be
sure of hostages with wealth and influence enough to assure the world’s
taking notice of them, for the missionaries have lived for years in
constant danger of such a raid, while most of the passengers were well
fed individuals who had left home mainly in quest of experience.

When Tenghsien came to be altogether too closely pressed by bandits, the
authorities fell back upon a scheme to drive them away without
bloodshed. The Boxers, it will be recalled, had their origin in southern
Shantung, and the method by which they fancied they made themselves
immune to injury by their foes is still widely believed there. The
authorities therefore, or private individuals with the initiative
needed, called in some countrymen with stout faith in the efficacy of
this form of protection and paid magicians two dollars each to make them
“immune.” This is accomplished by various forms of hocus-pocus, in which
the swallowing of bits of paper with certain characters written on them,
and the wearing of similar charms, are the chief features. Not only did
the countrymen believe that this made them proof against bullets,
swords, and bayonets, but, what made the investment really useful, the
brigands also believe it. When care had been taken to have word of the
ceremonies reach the bandit camps, the “immune” persons were placed in
front of the government troops, who moved slowly but steadily out into
the hills. The outlaws knew the futility of wasting precious ammunition
on men whom it would be impossible to injure; hence they gracefully
retreated as far from town as the authorities chose to drive them. There
was, of course, the slight danger that some skeptic among the bandits
would doubt the efficacy of the charm. But the Chinese are much more
given to swallowing their popular beliefs whole than to investigating
their worth, and in the case of an unforeseen accident the evidence
would be plain, not that the hocus-pocus is ineffectual, but that it was
badly performed.


Not far below Tenghsien the railway crosses the old bed of the Yellow
River, that greatest of Chinese vagrants. As far back as history is
recorded this has changed its mind every few centuries and decided to go
somewhere else. It is not a believer in the old adage that as you make
your bed so you should lie in it, for the Hoang Ho has the custom, not
usual even among rivers, of piling up its course until it flows some
twenty feet above the surrounding country, puny mankind meanwhile
striving feverishly to confine it by dikes which cannot in the end keep
pace with the growth of silt between them. No Chinese can be expected to
be comfortable on so elevated a bed, much less a river, and when things
become altogether too unbearable the Hoang Ho suddenly abandons its
course and makes a new one overnight. The last great change of this kind
was in the middle of the past century, when, swinging on a pivot near
Kaifeng, one of China’s many old-time capitals, it struck northeastward
across Shantung to the gulf of Chihli, though it had formerly emptied
into the Yellow Sea hundreds of miles farther south, barely touching
Shantung at all. Shantung did not want it, but it had no choice in the
matter. The provinces which had been so suddenly relieved of so violent
an enemy, and at the same time presented with a large strip of land
where land is so badly needed, certainly were not going to help, nor
even permit, if it could be avoided, restoration to the old bed.
Besides, there are both historical and visible evidences that Shantung
had harbored the unwelcome visitor more than once before, that the two
mountainous parts of the province were probably once islands, and that
the Yellow River, washing back and forth between them, has built up the
level and more fertile parts of the country. Similar things happened in
many parts of the world, but in most cases the job was finished before
man appeared, whereas in China it is still going on. The result is that
man finds himself very much in the way during the process.

[Illustration:

  On the way home I changed places with one of our three wheelbarrow
    coolies, and found that the contrivance did not run so hard as I
    might otherwise have believed
]

[Illustration:

  The men who use the roads of China make no protest at their being dug
    up every spring and turned into fields
]

[Illustration:

  Sons are a great asset to the wheelbarrowing coolies of Shantung
]

Chinese history is full of accounts of the struggle to keep the Hoang Ho
within limits. Some emperors are famous chiefly for their struggles
against it. For centuries the “squeeze” connected with the building of
dikes, or even their maintenance, has been one of the richest
perquisites of certain official positions. Perhaps this is why the
latest task of wrestling with the Yellow River has been given to an
American firm established in China. Two years ago the river broke
through its dikes again, though this time within a hundred miles of its
mouth, and inundated what to crowded Shantung is an immense area,
destroying many villages and withdrawing the land about them from
cultivation. Several walled cities, too, were in great peril,
particularly Litsing, situated in a bend of the river, and _below_ it;
for here as in its former course to the south the stream has gradually
silted itself higher and higher, until one crossing it anywhere along
its lower reaches must climb thirty or forty feet to the top of the dike
from the land side, to descend only ten or twelve to the river. In flood
season the waters washed at the walls of Litsing, which in time they
must have undermined and broken, drowning out the city. Famine relief
funds improved the lot of those who had been driven from their homes,
some of whom built new shelters on the broad tops of the dikes, while
others scattered, particularly to Manchuria. The dead and the living
between them so crowd the land in Shantung that if one patch is taken
away there is no other room for those who live upon it. Bids were asked
for the task of retaming the river, to be paid for jointly from relief
funds and by the province; the American firm offered to do the work at
just one fourth the price asked by Chinese contractors, and having
secured itself against the common misfortune of those working for
Chinese Governments by insisting on monthly prepayments, tackled a job
that was old when Confucius was a boy.

Clumsy native boats, bringing down rock for the work, as well as coolies
and supplies, will carry one from Tzinan to the scene of operations in a
day or two; but the more hasty American way is by automobile from
Choutsun, two hours east of the capital on the Shantung railway. What is
known in China as a motor-road, that is, a raised causeway made entirely
of soft yellowish earth, which cuts up into ever deeper ruts, growing
impassable with much rain, its steep sides gradually crumbling away
until the barely two-car width is reduced to the point when passing is
impossible for much of the distance, runs northward to the river, where
cars take to the top of the dike. The workmen, strange as it may seem,
are not so numerous as the company would like, and recruiting has to be
carried on at considerable distances. The proverbial Chinese distrust of
the “outside barbarian” has something to do with this; perhaps fear of
bringing down upon their heads the wrath of the river gods for
interfering with him may deter others; naturally in this season of the
lunar New Year many had gone back to their ancestral graves. To put into
American dollars and cents the wages paid would be to give a false
impression of penuriousness on the part of the company; suffice it to
say, therefore, that they are much higher than the average of wages in
Shantung, that millet and rice and other essentials are furnished at
cost to the employees, thereby saving them from heartless exploitation
by their fellow-countrymen of the merchant class, and that reeds and
other materials are supplied for covering their lodging-places. These
are neither more nor less than holes dug in the earth; but mud
dwellings, whether above or below the ground, have been the lot of
Chinese coolies for many centuries, at least since the forests were
turned into fuel and coffins, and these have the advantage that they can
be moved in a few hours with a shovel as the work advances.

Here several thousand coolies already, with two or three times as many
to come, it is expected, are engaged in straightening out a great crook
in the river. The methods are of course those of the Orient, where many
men with shovels and baskets, swarming like trains of leaf-cutting ants
over the scene of activities, are more economical than snorting
steam-shovels and endless strings of rattling freight-cars. In the early
spring, when mountains of broken ice from up the river joined that which
had covered the flooded region during the short winter, the sight was
one worth coming many _li_ to see. But that was gone now, even in the
middle of March, and the task of taking a kink out of “China’s Sorrow”
is on the high road to completion. The plan is to teach the river the
way it should go, and then let it scour out its own channel. Western
initiative and ingenuity, however, probably can no more cure permanently
the vagrancy of the Hoang Ho than did the ancient emperors, and
corrective measures will have to be applied to the incorrigible vagabond
among rivers at least for centuries to come.




                              CHAPTER XVII
                          EASTWARD TO TSINGTAO


A splendid task for some scholar of unlimited patience and a
mathematical turn of mind would be to count the graves in China and
compute how many sadly needed acres they withdraw from cultivation. He
might offer a thesis on the subject, in exchange for the right to wear
the letters “Ph.D.” Unfortunately he could not complete the task in a
mere lifetime, or just a century or two, but the undertaking might be
handed down, Chinese fashion, from father to son, until data were
forthcoming that might in time make an impression even on the Celestial
mind. This worshiping of ancestors is all very well, if only the living
could also be given a fair deal. The constant sight of undernourished
multitudes grubbing out a scant escape from starvation in the
interstices between the sacred mounds of earth littering almost every
Chinese landscape recalls the story of Bridget tearfully refusing Pat a
taste before he died of the roasting pork that smelled so good to him,
because it was all needed for the wake.

Reflections of this simple nature were inclined to crowd out all other
impressions during another of my cross-country jaunts in Shantung, this
time northward to an ancient city still popularly called Loa-An. For the
way led through Lin-tze, also walled, aged, and dreaming of the past,
which in the days of Confucius was in the heart of the kingdom of Chi,
as the home of the sage was in that of the neighboring one of Lu. For
miles about it, therefore, the princes of Chi lie buried, not under the
mere cones of earth of ordinary ancestors, but beneath hillocks and
hills, and what sometimes seem across the floor-flat country to be
almost mountains. Some are still so respected that the groves of mainly
evergreen trees about them, beautifying the usual bare nudity of Chinese
graves, have survived to this day, and one or two are guarded at a
respectful distance by a standing stone giant who recalls those of Egypt
or of the southern shores of Lake Titicaca. Then there are many lesser
lights, such as always cluster about a court, and innumerable areas are
sacred to other ancient families, the mounds graduated in size and state
of repair from the principal one of the collection at the back to the
small ones so far out in front that the peasants dare to cultivate close
about them. Remnants of tissue-paper “money” donated to the dead all
over China at the New Year still fluttered from the peak of many a
mound, some of which dated so far back, perhaps, that live servants and
domestic animals were buried in them, instead of the flimsy paper
substitutes for these that are burned at modern funerals, along with
papier-mâché automobiles containing a pair of painted chauffeurs and a
concubine or two; but more than anything else, even of the sense of
antiquity, one was impressed by the endlessness, the uncountability of
the grave-mounds of all sizes.

Draft-animals, if only a cow or a donkey, or the two hitched together,
were drawing crude but effective plows and what American farmers call a
“drag,” on which the driver stands, raising clouds of dust behind him.
But the dodging of graves seemed to be the most serious task of all, far
as we rode northward, and one could fancy the undernourished peasants,
suddenly struck with Western seeing in place of blind custom, deciding
that it is high time these aged mounds are leveled off, or at least
planted over. Possibly that miracle will some day come to pass, and
China will by a turn of her hand increase her productive land by several
provinces, without extending her boundaries or robbing her neighbors of
an acre.

This time I used still another of Shantung’s many modes of locomotion,—a
bicycle. It has its advantages in a flat country where the roads are
often narrow paths, and where a vehicle that cannot be lifted about by
hand now and then is limited in its range. But when it chances that a
raging head wind blows both going and coming, and the contrivance
between one’s aching legs emanates from a Chicago mail-order house,
there are certain things to envy the traveler by wheelbarrow. In a way
the season was poorly chosen, too, for though the day was cloudless and
warm, plowing was on, and while the Chinese peasant leaves unmolested
the graves that dot his little field, he often plows up the road. Thus a
route which at best was an alternating between the bottom of a ditch
deep in dust and a precariously narrow and by no means continuous path
often on the sheer edge of it, frequently became a trackless field,
plowed by draft-animals or chopped up with the clumsy, sledge-heavy
adz-hoe still used in China. Rye and barley, and above all peanuts, were
to be the principal crops wherever winter wheat was not already showing
its tender green. One does not at first thought closely associate the
two, but peanuts and missionaries are likely to lie side by side on the
floor of the Chinese coolie’s mental granary. The Chinese had a peanut
before the missionaries came, and still cultivate it to a certain
extent. But it is so tiny and dry that it looks more like the end of a
pea-pod, with a pea or two left in it, that has survived several winters
in a very dry place—and the taste does not dispel this illusion.
American missionaries brought the much more profitable variety from
Georgia in an effort to improve the conditions of Shantung, and to-day
the American peanuts grown in China probably run into millions of
bushels, dotting every market-place and producing oil enough to supply
the world with peanut-butter.

Loa-An is no longer officially known by that name, and thereby hangs a
typically Chinese tale. Soon after the establishment of what passes in
the outside world for a republic, it was decreed that deeds of
land-holdings must be registered again, though this had been done quite
recently under the Manchus. The registry fee was to be a dollar and
twenty cents, of which 70 per cent was to go to the Government and the
rest to the local magistrate. Now, a dollar and twenty cents, even in
“Mex,” is a lot of money to a Shantung peasant, with the tiny parcel of
land which the custom of dividing among the sons of each generation has
left him, and a decade ago it was still more so. Moreover, the
magistrate should have known that in China government decrees are not
necessarily meant to be carried out, at least beyond the point of
individual discretion. But he was of the aggressive type of official,
sadly needed perhaps but not always successful in China, and his
insistence on having the order obeyed to the letter reached the point
where he helped to carry it out in person. The wrath of the country-side
increased. One day when the magistrate was some forty _li_ out of town
in the interest of thorough collections and an honest return of them
from his constables, a band of peasants fell upon him and chopped him to
death with their hoe-hooks.

Soldiers were hurried to Loa-An, where they oppressed the population for
months in the time-honored Chinese way, and finally lopped off eight
heads. None of these had been the leading spirits in the assassination,
nor perhaps had any real part in it at all, but they had been the
easiest to catch; and, their duty ended, according to Chinese lights,
the soldiers withdrew. But the Government saw fit to inflict a heinous
punishment on the city of Loa-An itself, for the crime of permitting
such a crime within its district. Loa-An means “Rejoicing and Peace,” as
nearly as it can be translated; it was ordered henceforth to call itself
Gwang-Rao. Does this mean “Bunch of Rascals,” or something of the sort,
as we of the West might suppose? It does not; it means FarReaching
Forgiveness, for, as I have already had occasion to remark, the Chinese
mind may have been originally built on the same specifications as our
own, but its manner of functioning has grown quite different during the
many centuries that separate us. For one thing, it refuses to jar itself
by sudden readjustments, and Gwang-Rao is still spoken of as Lao-An in
ninety cases out of a hundred.

As is so often the case throughout China, much of the population and the
business of Lao-An have gathered outside the city walls, where there are
certain advantages which the American suburbanite will understand.
Inside, there is that atmosphere of an old ladies’ home which one feels
in an aged New England village off the trail of modern progress—though
certainly in outward appearance there are no two things more dissimilar
than a New England village and a Chinese walled town. An immense pond or
lake takes up a whole corner of the enclosure, licking away at the inner
base of the crumbling wall. In its prime this was almost majestic,
higher than anything within it, broad enough for a “Peking cart” to
drive comfortably upon it, the crenelated parapets armed with small
cannon of curious casting which now lie rusting away wherever chance has
rolled them. There are other open spaces within the walls, some
cultivated, some merely idle, but the town itself is compact enough,
with one long trough of dust or mud as a main street, lined by
baked-earth houses of one form or another, enlivened only by an
occasional hawker marking his leisurely progress by some Chinese species
of noise, or a long unlaundered family group enjoying the brilliant
sunshine of early spring.

Outside it is different,—movement, crowding, an uproar of wide-open
shops and transient venders, all noisily contending for patronage,
dwellings that are almost imposing in their milieu, and, in the
outskirts, a large Presbyterian school and mission under an unusually
trusted Chinese pastor. His board beds may not have been the last word
in comfort, but they were many times nearer that than a passing guest
could have found in all the rest of the district. The auditing,
counseling, and moral sustenance for which the white-haired missionary I
had accompanied made his annual visit to Lao-An, with a brief service by
the honored visitor and a few moments in the unheated school-rooms,
where full outdoor garb was in order, left us time to go to prison
before we faced the head wind again. It was typical probably of most
local limbos in Shantung, unless the weekly services which the pastor
had been allowed to give there for a year now had remodeled the moral
outlook of the prisoners as completely as he believed: cells that were
larger than the average inmate had at home, and not overcrowded, by
Chinese standards, tolerable food and plenty of sunshine, a certain
semi-freedom at times in the yards, and in contrast iron fetters about
the neck, waist, and ankles in most cases, with clanking chains
connecting them. The prisoners got five coppers a day to feed
themselves—more than a whole American cent! Yet they lived well,
according to the pastor, and could save money. Three coppers paid for a
catty (a pound and a third) of millet, and the grain hong saw to it that
they got good measure. What average Shantung countryman is sure of a
catty of millet a day? Besides, they were paid for their work. The young
and spry could earn as much as ten coppers daily making hair-nets, and
the older ones, with their more clumsy fingers, half as much weaving
_dee-tze_—girdles, I suppose we would call them, though the Chinese use
twice as many of them about their ankles as around their waists. Then
Loa-An gets great quantities of a rush the size of a lead-pencil from
nearer the mouth of the Yellow River, and from these are fashioned
baskets and scoops, and shallow basins for the feeding of animals,
buckets for use at wells, winnowing pans, and, strangest of all, a thick
winter shoe that looks like an infant Roman galley.


All the romance of hair-nets is not limited to the tresses they confine.
Shantung, and to a lesser degree some neighboring provinces, has known
some of it. Until Europe went mad, hair-nets were made mainly in France.
America, callous upstart, continued to demand them even though the guns
were thundering. Some of the materials had always come from China,
though the French were much given to the use of horsehair; now it
occurred to some genius that the Chinese might be taught to make them on
the spot. A small town in Shantung became the center of the new
industry; later it gravitated naturally to Chefoo. Every one took to
turning discarded cues and combings into nets; children learned to tie
them; coolies forced their clumsy fingers to it when nothing else
offered; in mission churches women pinned the things to one another’s
backs and went on tying the little knots while they listened to the
sermon. The making of hair-nets kept many from starvation in famine
days, even though the wholesalers took advantage of the situation and
paid the hungry toilers as little as possible. Even in the best of times
the workers make no fortune. They are paid by the gross of nets; women
and children working at odd times can earn from five to ten coppers a
day; those who are skilled and put in all their time at it make from
thirty-five to fifty coppers—ten to thirteen cents gold—when the nets
are selling at their highest, five to seven dollars “Mex” a gross. Just
now they were down to half that, and with a great oversupply of nets on
the market and fashion turning toward the double-strand net, the makers
were getting hardly three American cents a dozen.

Many wholesalers, on the other hand, have quickly gotten rich out of
hair-nets. There is a barber, for instance, who is known to have laid up
ten thousand dollars in three or four years, a great fortune in China
even to men far above the lowly barber caste. But the newly rich are not
so kindly treated where class lines are still rather sharply drawn and
precedent especially tenacious. His envious neighbors overwhelmed their
former hair-cutter with lawsuits, the most common and effective form of
Chinese community persecution; though he turned his money into land he
can neither live on nor rent it, so virulent is the prejudice against
him. With the coming of hair-nets the bicycle trade boomed. This was the
only quick way of getting about the country, and the buyers could carry
thousands of nets back with them. The Germans of Tsingtao had good
_Fahrräder_ to offer at reasonable prices, and made the most of their
opportunity. Then came a slump in the trade, hints of the reasons for
which in time reached the wholesalers, if not the makers. American girls
had taken to bobbing their hair! But this fad had begun to die out
again, and already the people of overcrowded Shantung were feeling the
effect of this in fuller bowls of rice.

In wandering about Shantung I was constantly coming across coolies who
had been to France. One could generally tell them at a glance, from some
remnant of uniform, or their way of wearing what they had chosen when
that wore out, perhaps by a certain air of something that was not
exactly what we popularly dub “freshness,” yet which was more or less
distantly related to it. Besides, they seldom waited long on the chance
of recognition, but greeted the foreigner with the self-confidence of
familiarity and proceeded to impress their fellow-countrymen who had
been denied their advantages, and who never failed to gather about in as
great a circle as the community afforded.

The British and, to some extent, the French, took large numbers of
coolies overseas for work behind the lines, mainly from Shantung and
southern China. Some three hundred thousand went from this northern
province, at first slowly and with misgivings, then more eagerly, as
propaganda and the reports of those who had gone ahead filtered out
through the villages. The French made some arrangement whereby their
recruits seem to have been much lower paid, yet to have come home more
contented, than those with the British. The latter offered them ten
Chinese dollars a month in France and an equal amount to their families
at home, with of course transportation, food, and clothing. This was so
high that at first the coolies would not believe it; these wily
foreigners must have something else up their sleeves, they told one
another, putting them out in front of the soldiers perhaps, for it was a
rare coolie who had ever earned half the amount so glibly offered. But
the incredible turned out to be true. Several towns were designated as
district headquarters; foreign residents, usually missionaries, were
asked to take charge in them, and once a month the nearest of kin of the
absent workmen came in and got their ten dollars, in coin. At Weihsien
ninety thousand were paid monthly for several years, for the coolies of
the labor battalions were not returned until 1920, after the carrying of
troops had been completed. Up to that time the Chinese with the British
had been quite satisfied. But when they came to draw what they had saved
during their years abroad there was an uproar. In the contract made with
them “Mex” dollars were specified; there was no mention of francs. But
in France they were of course paid in the money of the country, and the
amounts they chose to lay aside were credited to them in francs. By the
time they came to draw their savings the franc had crashed. Being from
China they should have been wiser on the vagaries of exchange than the
American “doughboy”; but they insisted that the British had promised to
pay them in the dollars of their home-land, and raised such a hullabaloo
that the matter reached the honor of being discussed in Parliament,
though that was its loftiest attainment. The resentment at what was
considered a raw deal by tricky foreigners has somewhat died out in
Shantung now, and many a man would willingly go abroad for the British
again; but the few wise or lucky coolies who turned their francs back
into dollars as they saved them, and then meddled with the exchange in
those glorious days when the gold dollar went down to about eighty cents
“Mex,” are still the envy of their comrades. In an almost entirely
illiterate throng, thousands of miles from home and all its
exchange-shops and customs, and filled from childhood with suspicion of
their fellow-men, it is easy to guess about how many took advantage of
this opportunity.

One suspects that it was from the highest point of honor attained by
this painful subject that there originated an attempt to soften the
resentment that only resulted in increasing it. Legislative bodies the
world over have a reputation for bone-headedness. One day word was sent
out over Shantung and beyond that if coolies who had been to France for
the British would report back to the centers where they had been
discharged and paid they would learn something to their advantage. Aha,
_ting hao!_ they are going to give us all the money they promised after
all, said the coolies, and began to flock in from all directions, often
from considerable distances. Some came overland all the way from
Tientsin, not being able to afford the railroad. When they arrived they
were each given a nice brass medal to hang about their necks, with a
likeness of their grateful ex-employer, King Georgie, on one side and
words of similar sentiment on the other. Any one with thirty cents’
worth of understanding of the psychology of the Chinese coolie could
have told the thoughtful originators of this idea that an extra
_cumshaw_ of a dollar or two would have won his everlasting gratitude
far more than a medal graced with the vapid faces of all the kings of
Christendom—and probably have cost less money. But textbooks on
psychology, particularly of far-off “heathen” lands, are not required in
a politician’s education. At first some of the coolies thought the
things were gold, and raced to the exchange-shops accordingly. When
these reported that the gaudy gifts were not even coin at all, men
drifted out to mission compounds to inquire what they were good for....
“Is it worth anything?” “Well, I’ll give it to you for fifteen coppers.”

Coppers, by the way, are the general medium of exchange in Shantung.
Silver dollars pass, though silver fractions of them do not, and
bank-notes even of the province have only a limited acceptance. Except
in large towns or transactions, every one pays in coppers, the division
being the _diao_. In olden days this meant a thousand “cash” on a
string. Now it means forty-nine coppers in most regions. How this
decided change came about is only another of the queer stories with
which monetary matters bristle in China. One day the Manchu dynasty
decided it could get plenty of money to pay its grumbling troops merely
by decreeing that thenceforth a _diao_ would be five hundred, not a
thousand, “cash.” Every one would be compelled to accept the new rating,
on penalty of severe punishment, and the surplus five hundred “cash”
would accrue to the Government. As late as the beginning of the present
century the brass “cash” was the only money used in the interior of
Shantung; in those days my missionary friends had taken an extra
wheelbarrow with them to carry their change. Then in 1902 the copper
began to be minted. Ten “cash” make a copper; fifty coppers therefore
should make a modern _diao_; but in most places one of them goes to some
one, identity unknown but strongly suspected, as the inevitable
“squeeze” of all Chinese transactions.

Probably a majority of the third-class tickets sold on the
Tientsin-Pukow line in Shantung are paid for from clothfuls of coppers
handed in at the window, the cloth and any excess coins being returned
with the ticket. The foreigner who produces a silver dollar when only a
few cents are needed will be deluged with a shower of huge coppers
sufficient to fill an overcoat pocket. The general run of prices and
wages in Shantung is suggested by some of those paid by my missionary
companion. Master masons were receiving fifty-four coppers a day, their
helpers thirty-six—a copper being approximately half a farthing or the
fourth of an American cent. In the good old days of a decade or more
back they were satisfied with fifteen and ten respectively, though the
copper was then worth 50 per cent more than at present. Country pastors
are paid twenty Chinese dollars a month, those in towns all the way from
that to forty, “Bible women” eight dollars, “evangelists” (unordained
preachers who also work on their farms) receive eleven, teachers from
eighteen to forty, and native doctors fifty.


At Weihsien “Peking carts” are the almost exclusive means of
transportation, though forty miles west a similar town has only
wheelbarrows. This important half-way station between Tzinan and
Tsingtao lies in the heart of what was thirty centuries ago the kingdom
of Wei, and the landscape on either side of it is littered with
monuments and graves. Shantung is much given to elaborately carved stone
_p’ai-lous_, or _p’ai-fangs_, as they are more often called in that
province, and these imposing memorial arches to virtuous widows or
officials more or less willingly honored naturally outlast the mainly
wooden ones in Peking and vicinity. Stone horses completely saddled and
bridled, stirrups hanging ready for instant use, stood with other less
familiar animals before some of the graves, awaiting their riders these
many centuries; and groves of evergreens, some of them overtopped by the
four reddish upright poles bearing a kind of ship’s crow’s-nest which
means that the principal deceased of the group some time in the bygone
ages passed the examinations for the highest rank of Chinese scholar,
were a little more frequent about them than is general in northern
China, though there were still far too many of the one and too few of
the other.

Weihsien is really two distinct cities, each surrounded by a massive
stone wall, with a sandy-bedded river between them. But the farther one
was not walled until the days of the Taiping Rebellion, and it is still
regarded as a suburb of the other. Thanks to spring rain and
water-carriers, the streets of both were rivers of mud in which a
mule-cart was almost indispensable even for the shortest distance, and
an ordeal into the bargain. Weihsien had indeed recently imported her
first rickshaws, but all three of them were without rubber tires or
experienced runners, which made the first jaunts in them by a few of the
town dandies an experience to be remembered rather than to be repeated
or recommended, and the fear was expressed that these evidences of
modern progress would be withdrawn for lack of appreciation. However,
the new autobus line to Chefoo starts from Weihsien, and motor-cars have
become almost familiar sights to those who have come out to see them at
the edge of the suburb, beyond which they cannot penetrate. There should
long since have been a branch railway to Chefoo. Ocean communication
with that important silk and hair-net center is irregular and
uncertain—except from Dairen over in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. But
so long as they held the Shantung Railway the Japanese would not permit
this extension, lest Chefoo become a serious rival to their beloved
Dairen. So the usual raised dirt highway has been built, with frequent
guarded barriers to keep others off it, and along this the few still
movable contrivances of all sizes and makes which were bought
second-hand from the Japanese before they evacuated Shantung stagger in
a daily service scheduled to make the journey in a day and a half, with
the brick bed of a Chinese inn to break it. The line is under railway
management, but one glimpse of the once gasolene-driven wrecks that
litter the yard at Weihsien should convince the most foolhardy that to
ride behind a Chinese chauffeur is more risky than behind the worst
locomotive driver in the Orient. Chefoo, by the way, is unknown to the
Chinese; they call it Yentai. Just what misunderstanding on the part of
early sailors led to the name by which it is known to all foreigners,
including the Japanese, seems never to have been fully cleared up.

When Tzinan was voluntarily opened to trade in 1906, Weihsien, as well
as Choutsun farther west, was also designated as a “port”; but though
the Chinese laid out “foreign settlements” in them no one came to
settle. A stray German or two is all that the city has to offer in this
line, except the missionaries. The Catholics have an imposing church
building just outside the walls, and there is an important mission
school established by one of the pioneers among American Presbyterians
in China, far outside the town, where the bitter hostility of those
earlier days drove him. When the school was first founded, pupils had to
be paid to attend; to-day there are waiting lists at fifty-eight dollars
a year—a great deal of money, let it be kept in mind, in Shantung—of
which twenty-five dollars pays a year’s board. Millet or _kaoliang_ in a
kind of gruel seemed to be the chief diet. Then there was the pickled
tuber resembling a turnip that is constantly munched all over Shantung,
and which does away with any desire to salt the other food. There were
flocks of timid high-school girls in their neat trousers, though
missionary influence tends to introduce the skirt, which is surely
mistaken zeal for mere change. The trousers are more convenient, more
becoming, and certainly many times more modest than the unstable garb of
our modern maidens of the West. Formerly many Shantung women of the
better class, influenced perhaps by the Manchus, who once had walled
towns of bannermen in all this region, wore a skirt over their trousers
when they appeared in public, and older missionary ladies can still
remember the polite greeting when they reached the home of a Chinese
hostess: “Well, take off your skirt and stay a while.”

The large church of the Weihsien mission was well filled at Thursday
evening prayer-meeting and packed at the principal Sunday service.
Chinese pastors officiated on both occasions. Though the weather was
still distinctly cold, no provision for heating the building was made,
and one could only guess what it must be in midwinter. Gradually the
stone floor congealed the feet and removed them completely from the
realms of sensation, but the Chinese, in their full outdoor garb, caps
and all, seemed to be as comfortable as they ever have any need to be.
Uncovering the head had become so nearly a dead letter that even the two
or three American missionaries in their overcoats usually kept their
hats on, even when they rose to pray in fluent Chinese. The feminine
portion of the congregation occupied the back part of the church, the
boys the front and center, graduating back to youths and men behind and
on either side; when prayers were offered all rose to their feet instead
of kneeling, and the less said of the bold and stentorian “singing” of
hymns the better.


A few weeks before my visit the Shantung Railway had been turned over to
the Chinese, in accordance with the agreement reached at the Washington
Conference. But to go back to the beginning: you will recall that two
German missionaries were killed in Shantung in 1897 and that Germany
quickly made this a pretext for demanding the lease of Kiaochow Bay, and
the concession for a railroad from there to the capital of the province.
Though it was a generation since the Chinese Government had been able to
still popular uproar against such diabolic contrivances only by buying
out the first railway in China, running a few miles out of Shanghai, and
shipping it over to Formosa, there was bitter opposition to this one,
ostensibly from the superstitious masses, though it is known now that
officials and some of the gentry urged the people on. In fact, the
building of the Shantung Railway was very largely responsible for the
“Boxer” uprising, which had its beginning, as I have said before, in
mountainous southern Shantung. The exasperation was partly due to pure
superstition, partly to real grievances which the Germans unwittingly
perpetrated. They cut through the hill south of Weihsien which had
brought the town all its good luck for centuries, and thereby destroyed
its beneficence. This matter of _feng-shui_, of placating the spirits of
wind and water, is of the highest importance, and there seems to be no
fixed rule in dealing with them. For instance, there is another peak,
west of Weihsien, through the top of which a slot quite like a railway
cutting was gashed centuries ago at great labor, in order to neutralize
the _bad_ luck it brought the town. When they first came the Germans had
to depend upon interpreters, and these of course were true Chinese. They
would stroll out when they were off duty, or when no one was watching,
and drive a survey stake in the top of a grave, perhaps miles from the
projected route of the railroad; and a day or two later they would offer
to get the stake removed and leave the grave unmolested if the
descendants could raise money enough to “bribe the Germans.” When a
railroad is surveyed its proposed turns are marked as sharp angles first
and the curve is traced inside this later. The interpreters collected
handsomely also from farmers for getting the Germans to remove stakes on
the points of these angles—where the railroad had never thought of
trespassing. In spite of both passive and active opposition the Germans
pushed the line rapidly inland; many Chinese Christians free from the
popular superstitions or sustained by the missionaries took contracts to
prepare the way by sections, and early in the present century
locomotives snorted into Tzinanfu.

The line still bears many marks of its original nationality. It is a
direct descendant of the railways of Germany—excellently built, with
stone ballast in exact military alignment along flanking paths of
exactly such a width, iron ties of the reversed trough shape, light
rails and fourteen-ton bridges—European rolling stock is not heavy by
our standards—well-built stations, service buildings, and grade-markers,
still here and there bearing a German name, in spite of eight years of
Japanese occupancy, the whole railway still lined for much of its length
by the quick-growing acacia-trees which the Germans expected to furnish
supports for their mines. Now that the Chinese have returned, one
frequently runs across a station-master who speaks German but no
English.

It is said that there was more graft under the Germans than under their
successors. German inspectors were conspicuous; Japanese ones blended
more or less into the general racial landscape. In German days
unrecorded telegrams sped along from station to station, “Inspector
coming to-day,” and certain customs were temporarily suspended. On other
days passengers often got on without tickets, crossed the hand of the
Chinese guard with silver, and the latter gave the high sign to the
gateman at the disembarking station, dividing the spoils with him at the
first convenient opportunity. Whatever their other faults, the Japanese
know how to run a railroad, and under them this sort of thing is reputed
to have disappeared. Their influence was still distinctly in evidence.
The people are said to have liked the Germans better than their
successors because, among other things, they were not so strict—which
speaks loudly indeed for Japanese sternness. Part of this strictness was
the insistence on order instead of the free-for-all methods so loved by
the Chinese. The Germans allowed huckstering at the trains; the Japanese
licensed and curbed it. They introduced the innovation of standing in
line for tickets, instead of the riot in vogue on all purely Chinese
railways. It is said that it took the butt of many a rifle and the flat
of many a sword to convince the coolies that they should drop back to
the end of a cue when there was plenty of room at the front, but as they
became more familiar with the language the Japanese, like the Germans
before them, got their results with less violence. Foreigners,
especially their somewhat kindred island neighbors, can discipline the
Chinese as they never could themselves. The weakest thing in China is
discipline, and there is not moral fiber enough in the country—or there
is too much gentleness in the Chinese temperament, whichever way you
choose to put it—to cure such things from within.

[Illustration:

  A private carriage, Shantung style
]

[Illustration:

  Shackled prisoners of Lao-an making hair nets for the American market
]

[Illustration:

  School-girls in the American mission school at Weihsien, Shantung
]

[Illustration:

  The governor’s mansion at Tsingtao, among hills carefully reforested
    by the Germans, followed by the Japanese, has now been returned to
    the Chinese after a quarter of a century of foreign rule
]

Foreign residents, including some missionaries, were already complaining
of a deterioration of the Shantung Railway under Chinese management. To
one who had just come from the other railways of China this seemed
rather exaggerated cynicism, for it certainly was superior to those
others in many ways, though possibly these were relics of German and
Japanese times, which were gradually dying out under the new régime. The
almost praiseworthy cleanliness of at least the higher class cars may
have been merely a memento of earlier days; also perhaps the brief,
businesslike stops at stations. There were “red-caps” instead of the
tidal wave of ragged ruffians who fight pitched battles for one’s
baggage elsewhere; and the platforms were free from loafers, stragglers,
beggars, and false passengers among whom the actual traveler is so
completely swallowed up at the average Chinese station that he often
despairs of getting on board at all. But with more than half the new
personnel in the higher grades graduates of American colleges, some of
them with real railroad experience, it hardly seems that the line can go
entirely to rack and ruin, nor that it is being made the complete pawn
of hungry politicians utterly devoid of ability which some rumors have
it.

Until the line is paid for, five to fifteen years hence, there will be a
Japanese traffic manager and chief accountant. But there has been sent
down to Tsingtao from the Ministry of Communications in Peking an
English-speaking superintendent who is notably fitted for the post, and
one is struck by the above-the-average of the personnel all along the
line. All its telegrams, by the way, are sent in English, which is a
hardship on station-masters who spent years learning German. But for
telegraphic purposes Chinese characters have to be reduced to numbers
which often run into four, if not five, figures, and it is much simpler
to wire “Hold six at Fangtze” than to beat out on the keys “5674 8762
9085 4356,” and run the added risk of the code-book being misplaced at
either end. It can scarcely be expected that the change from Japanese to
Chinese management will be made without a hitch; for one thing, men had
to be brought from all the five government railways of China, on all of
which, having been first built and operated under different
nationalities, rules and practices vary. We would scarcely expect the
theoretical “All-American” football team to display perfect team-work if
suddenly brought together for a game. Then there is the usual percentage
of bone-headedness to be reckoned. On the eve of the Chinese New Year an
engineer eager to spend that day at home, but having no orders which
gave him a right of way, coupled his locomotive in front of another
drawing a freight-train and double-headed westward. Now the folly of
running thirty-five-ton American locomotives across fourteen-ton bridges
is bad enough; when two of them dash madly out upon one it is not
strange if something serious happens. What was left of the two fine big
engines still lay on either side of the central pier when we crept
across a temporary bridge nearly a month later; but that particular
driver will probably prove of much more use to the line as an example to
his fellows than he ever was at a throttle.

Foreigners in general, as is widely known, have long been called by
Chinese in ugly moods “_yang gwei_,” which we have more or less
correctly translated as “foreign devil.” This particular “_yang_” really
means ocean, and a “_gwei_” is a spirit of the dead, quite possibly,
though not necessarily, a devil in the Western sense. Thus small Chinese
are not so far amiss as they sound to the uninformed when they run after
foreigners shouting, “Yang Gwei! Yang Gwei! Give me money!” For the
spirit of the dead is sometimes benevolent, and even small urchins would
scarcely expect charity in return for knowingly uncomplimentary titles.
But there is no doubt what the people of Shantung mean by their popular
expression for the Japanese, “_hsiao gwei_,” or “little devil.” Nor need
one inquire often or listen hard to get hints of why there is much
actual hatred of the efficient islanders, quite aside from the
theoretical dislike built up by rumor and propaganda. When the Japanese
held it one could not buy tickets on the Shantung Railway with Chinese
money; there were exchange-shops on the road to all stations of
importance, where it took a “Mex” dollar, and sometimes some coppers in
addition, to buy a yen, though the honest exchange was always
considerably in favor of the dollar. Shippers may not have had to bribe
the station-master to get a car for which they had already paid the
official fees, as often happens on Chinese railroads, but they might be
perfectly sure that Japanese shippers would always get cars first. It is
against Chinese law to melt up current money; the Japanese bought and
melted all the brass “cash” in Shantung. There has been much outcry from
them in recent years about race equality, yet the Japanese look down
upon the Chinese far more than any Californian does upon the sons of
Nippon, more than any American does upon our negroes; and apparently the
more military and brutal part of the occupation in Shantung was always
on the lookout for opportunities to show this supposed superiority
forcibly. It may be that the better class, or the non-militaristic
party, or the Japanese people in general, thoroughly agreed with the
terms of the Washington agreement and were glad to prove the national
good will by evacuating Shantung; but if so they should have made
greater efforts to curb the spirit of bad boys driven out of the
playground which prevailed on the spot. Before they left, the
disgruntled among the Japanese occupants slashed up the velvet
seat-cushions of first-class coaches, just as the Germans did in the
cars they were forced to turn over to the Allies; they carried off
indispensable fittings; they left cars and locomotives as far as
possible from where they were most needed; during the last months they
avoided making even imperative repairs. They deliberately flooded the
mines at Fangtze; they turned on the faucets in buildings belonging to
the railroad, so that they were swimming-pools by the time the Chinese
occupants appeared; they carried away, ruined, or wantonly destroyed
furnishings, walls, windows; out at the agricultural experiment station
on the flanks of Lao-shan they carefully mixed into one useless mess the
several kinds of cotton-seed that were to be planted in the spring. An
American-trained expert who drifted into my compartment as we neared
Tsingtao asserted that more than a dozen bridges had already been found
with serious cracks in them filled with putty and painted over. In
Japanese days, even those unfriendly to them admit, trains were so
exactly on time that clocks could be set by them. The new superintendent
explained the growing tendency to be late as due to these wanton
hamperings and the necessity of crawling across bridges in bad
condition, or too light for the present rolling-stock, and he was
preparing a slower schedule to be used until the line had been
strengthened throughout. This English-speaking, straightforward official
would probably strike any fair-minded observer as an unusually
trustworthy Chinese, but he did not mention also the difficulties of
making his people believe in the importance of keeping to any exact
schedule.

Gradually, as it approaches Kiaochow Bay, the train picks up more and
more Japanese, the women and children, and a few of the men, in their
chilly national dress, with scraping wooden _getas_ and blue noses. The
country continues flat and fertile, given over mainly to graves, as far
as the old walled town of Kiaochow, forty-five miles by rail from
Tsingtao just across the bay. Though this ancient city was well within
the hundred _li_ periphery beyond high tide that was leased to the
Germans, it remained under Chinese rule, much like the cities of Colon
and Panama within the Canal Zone. Then hills grow up on the horizon, and
soon rise to a labyrinth of low mountains, the most striking of them
across the bay, distant ones to the southeast capped with snow. Wild
geese and bustards within easy reach tempt the sportsman. The train more
than half encircles the big bay, close on the left, visibly a
magnificent harbor, even though larger ships must wait at the entrance
for high tide. Bit by bit the many little things which mark a Chinese
landscape die out; factories, warehouses, big modern buildings, many of
them still flying the rising sun, grow more continuous on either hand,
and by the time one’s journey is ended, whether he descend at the Harbor
Station or at the terminal, there is little left to remind him that he
is still in China.

In the days of the Germans Tsingtao was generally admitted to be the
model city of the Far East. The Japanese have greatly extended and in
certain ways improved it. There could scarcely be a greater contrast
within one country than that between this modern European city, with
broad macadamized streets and ample sidewalks, block after block of two-
and three-story buildings of brick and stone, rolling away over a series
of small hills which subside at last along waterfronts that would not be
out of place on the Mediterranean, and the flat, low, heavily walled,
dismal collections of baked-mud hovels, broken by narrow, reeking lanes,
which are typical of China. For even the Japanese have built in their
conception of the European model, rather than in the frail style of
their home-land, so that one may wander through street after street and
get few hints of the Orient except the people who pass to and fro in
them. Least Chinese of all, perhaps, are the splendid motor-roads
darting off into the country in all directions, and the wide-spread
growth of trees upon the hills as far as the eye can see.

It is said that Germans are gradually returning now to Tsingtao, but the
little cloven-footed people from the east are much more in evidence. The
largely Japanese shops are a trifle mean and small in comparison with
the general scheme of things, and boldly demand Japanese money still, as
though there had been no change in the status of Tsingtao merely because
their troops and officials have sailed away. On the other hand, one
might travel far to see another institution as splendid as the Japanese
Middle School out among the hills below the governor’s residence, and
many another of their establishments is equally as near what it should
be. By the terms of the treaty the Japanese are permitted to retain
their educational, mission, and similar institutions, and naturally
their nationals retain full rights of residence and commerce. Other
residents charge them with a certain underhandedness in stretching these
rights, and point to block after block of big new residences that have
never been occupied, asserting they were built merely that the Japanese
might hold that much more land.

The coming of the Japanese in 1914 seems to have brought much the same
advantages and misfortunes which they carried to Korea and Manchuria.
Under the Germans life had been comfortable, a trifle strict perhaps,
sharply divided by caste lines that made it impossible for the wife of
an officer to meet the wife of a merchant; but the fact is that the
German penetration into Shantung was more of a commercial than of a
military nature. Though there are still mighty guns pointing seaward
above the concrete underground forts which they dug in the surrounding
hills, and which show vivid evidences of the Japanese bombardment,
Tsingtao was never a Port Arthur or a Gibraltar. The Germans strove
rather for the good will of the Chinese, that they might above all sell
them more goods. Yet their national efficiency never failed them, and
reforms which they felt essential were carried through with as nice a
balance as could be preserved between complacency and insistence. There
was the matter of squeaking wheelbarrows, for instance. No barrow-man of
Shantung would feel that his apparatus was functioning properly unless
it emitted a constant screech that can be heard at least a furlong away;
to have it cease would give him much the same sensation as the motorist
has when he hears a knocking under the hood of his engine. But the
incessant screaking got on the nerves of the Germans in general and on
those of the governor’s wife in particular. Sein Excellenz, her husband,
gave orders that, beginning on the morning of September 16, wheelbarrows
should no longer squeak within German leased territory. Old residents,
American missionaries among them, held their sides; who ever heard of
changing a time-honored custom of the Chinese, especially by a mere
proclamation? But the Germans did more than command; they sent out
inconspicuous propaganda, giving reasons, appealing to common sense and
good will. On the morning of the sixteenth a missionary group was
sitting at breakfast, vaguely conscious that something had happened,
that things were not exactly what they hitherto always had been. One of
them finally stepped to the window, then raised her hands to her ears.
The others quickly followed suit. Had they all suddenly gone deaf? The
same endless line of wheelbarrows was trundling along the street
outside, but not the smallest infant of a squeak was sounding; they
passed as silently as a company of wheelbarrowing ghosts; and to this
day Shantung’s principal means of transportation is mute within the
territory just returned to China after a quarter of a century of alien
adoption.

The methods of the Japanese were quite as coercive, without the
softening propaganda. The military party was in full control, and not
even Western missionaries were permitted for a moment to forget it. The
Japanese closed the American Presbyterian mission school on the charge
of “spreading propaganda”; and they continued to collect taxes on it
during all the years they used it as a police station. They built
several blocks of semi-official brothels under the very eaves of the
native church established by this same mission, and by the terms of the
treaty of evacuation these are allowed to remain, for Japanese
“enterprises” in Tsingtao must not be molested. If it were an isolated
case, one might believe that the site was chosen merely for its
convenient situation; but the _yoshiwaras_ of Korea and Manchuria also
show a strong tendency to elbow mission property and American residences
with what looks much like the cynicism of the military clique. Japanese
gendarmes and soldiers pursued mission “Bible women” until in many cases
they had to give up their labors; they made it unsafe for Chinese
school-girls to remain in the mission dormitories; they showed the same
barbarian disrespect for privacy which one so often heard charged
against them in Korea. Let the wife of a missionary neglect to lock the
kitchen door, even at noon, and she would probably find a pair of
Japanese gendarmes standing in her bedroom when she looked up. They
never gave any reasons for their intrusions; they merely implied by
their attitude that they were the rulers of Tsingtao and that it was no
one’s business where they went, or when. The Japanese—or the Germans
either, for that matter—would not allow American physicians to practise
within the territory, not even to attend fellow-Americans who were of
the same mission or might be in the same house with them. The
missionaries, and even their wives, were summoned to court on every
possible pretext, and allowed to stand two or three hours among beggars
and prostitutes before they were called upon to stand at attention
before the haughty judge and testify. The American consul never
officially admitted the right of the Japanese to bring Americans before
their courts, contending that they enjoyed extraterritoriality in
Tsingtao quite as well as in the rest of China; but for some reason he
personally advised his countrymen to obey Japanese summonses. Multiply
these few and restricted cases of petty persecution by some very large
number and it will be clearer why the residents of the Kiaochow
territory, except the Japanese themselves, were so pleased to see the
rising sun replaced one morning in December by the five-color banner of
China, even though they are ready to admit that many excellent things
came from Japan.


From the distance of Peking we had heard that Tsingtao was virtually in
the hands of bandits; on the ground, there proved to be no truth in this
rumor. Things had been really much worse in that respect under Japanese
occupation, though they need not have been. There seems to be little
doubt that the Japanese tolerated bandits in Shantung, perhaps helped to
recruit them and sold them arms. Scores of little hints to this effect
reached the ears of even the least suspicious residents of the occupied
zone. They appear to be able to cite indefinitely cases similar to that
of the mission cook, trustworthy beyond all question, who was approached
by a Japanese with the promise of an easy life and a large income if he
would turn bandit. Guns could be rented, I was assured, from Japanese
gendarmes at two dollars a night by any one who wished to create a
little disorder; the bandits were often allowed to wear red hat-bands
(the distinguishing mark of Japanese soldiers and gendarmes everywhere)
and to take refuge in railway or other Japanese property where Chinese
soldiers could not pursue them. Whether or not they were actually in the
pay of the nation to whom disorder in China is always an advantage,
there is little room for doubt that they were unofficially aided and
abetted.

The military part of the occupation left Shantung in an angry mood; the
Japanese hoped to the last that complications would arise that would
give them an excuse to remain, and they were not beyond doing their bit
to create them. It is the old story of the two opposing factors in the
political life of Japan, which her apologists make the most of when they
have to explain actions strangely at variance with professions. The
ministers of war and the navy are responsible directly to the mikado,
not to the premier, as in other lands; hence the Foreign Office may be
openly flouted by the military clique. Moreover, these ministers must be
a general and an admiral respectively; in other words, there is not the
soothing effect of civilian control over the war-dogs which is quite
general elsewhere. A bulldog is an excellent defense, but it is an
unwise home which allows the bulldog to take command of things.

Conditions became fantastic during the last few weeks of Japanese
occupation. The bandits had their headquarters only twenty miles from
Tsingtao, by excellent motor-road, up in the foot-hills of the beautiful
Lao-Shan range. They raided the neighborhood at will, and went to town
to see the movies whenever the spirit moved them. All they had to do was
to stroll down to the Japanese police-box at the edge of the leased
territory and telephone a garage in Tsingtao to send them a car. They
rode or strutted through the streets like the proverbial walking
arsenal; what was worse, they wore uniforms which made them
indistinguishable from Chinese soldiers. Once they invited the Chamber
of Commerce to ask them to dinner, the Japanese knowing so well about it
in advance that they had their secret police among the first arrivals,
and instructed that body that the payment of one hundred thousand
dollars, the appointment of their chief as garrison commander and of one
thousand of their number as a police force, were essential to the
immunity of Tsingtao from their devastations. Then they picked up the
local deputy of the provincial Tuchun and the president of the Chamber
of Commerce as hostages and motored back to their headquarters with
them.

In the end, apparently, they were given a certain sum of money and more
or less official standing, as is the custom in China, the land of
compromise. But by the time I reached Tsingtao they had been moved to
Fangtze, far outside the former leasehold, and the city was well policed
by the men in black uniforms and white leggings with which Peking is so
familiar. Hand-picked and trained by a European, these constitute one of
the best bodies in China, and they had been scattered along the entire
line of the Shantung Railway, poorly equipped at first, but armed now,
one and all, with brand-new rifles from China’s government arsenals. The
ordinary cotton-clad, ill disciplined Chinese soldier was very little in
evidence. Now and then a group of them try to board the trains without
tickets to the great detriment of this line also; but station-masters
have a way of appealing to their good nature, if not to their
patriotism, with the strong argument that unless the line pays for
itself within five years the Japanese will come back, and then....

Bismarck Strasse became Ryojun Machi and in its turn will no doubt be
this or that Ta Chieh, perhaps without even the concession of naming it
in Roman letters which the Japanese granted to the West. The contrast
between the blue sea and the clean red roofs may grow more and more dim
under slack Chinese rule, and Tsingtao may sink back into the slough
from which Germany rescued it. But it is not likely, for the Chinese are
on their metal. True, there is already the curse of useless politicians
and military pressure in the highest offices, but a Yale graduate in
forestry is in charge of continuing the good work of the Germans and the
Japanese in spreading the gospel of reforestation, and other branches of
the new Government are in equally competent and progressive hands. There
is great need in China for officials to take up economics as a part of
government, especially to establish some continuity of plan which will
carry on in spite of the disruptions of political changes; and
ready-made Tsingtao is an excellent place for them to begin to practise.
The people may reassert their centuries of training and pilfer all the
trees, as some were already beginning to carry off the brushwood
contrary to rules, as they cut even the trees about their graves when
hard pressed, for only their Confucianism stands guard over the few
groves that are left in the land. Or they may, as some of the
enthusiastic young officials of the former leased territory announce,
make Tsingtao more important than either Tientsin or Shanghai, by
pushing new railways back into the interior beyond Tzinan and draining
even the Yang Tze of its natural carrying-power. More likely the future
will be somewhere between these two extremes, with a certain Chinese
indifference to small comforts and strict cleanliness somewhat marring
in the eyes of the West a port which in the main will retain much that
it has learned during its quarter of a century of sterner foreign
tutelage.




                             CHAPTER XVIII
                         IN BANDIT-RIDDEN HONAN


One of our military attachés at Peking purposed to see China’s Far West
before the cycle of duties called him home to a regiment, and he
consented to have company. At least if it chanced to please the bandits
who were just then using that means to coerce the incoherent Government
to add us to their growing collection of foreign hostages, there would
be some advantage in companionship.

The major had business in Honan before I could leave Peking, and took
the newly captured cook with him, leaving the “boy,” Chang, who
maltreated considerable English and was to be our most important link
with the outside world, to wait with me for the next biweekly express.
Below the junction for Shansi, where daylight overtook us, the landscape
was still as flat as about Peking; but there were more trees, bushy as
the mango, though thinner of foliage, many trees, indeed, for China.
Though it was already late October, the leaves had hardly begun to turn,
and that brilliant sunshine and utter cloudlessness which is one of the
greatest charms of dry, denuded North China so many days each year made
it seem still almost midsummer. The broad, fenceless fields swarmed with
people, mainly engaged, as far as a passing glimpse could tell, in
picking cotton and threshing peanuts. The cotton was in some places so
thin that even the frugal Chinese apparently did not find it worth
gathering, while the best of it, on plants scarcely knee-high, was
nothing to exhibit at a fair. Women gone cotton-picking had the
advantage of trousers, but this was more than offset by the bound feet
on which they hobbled from bush to bush. In contrast to those long
two-bushel bags the negroes drag behind them through the fertile
cotton-fields of our South, a kind of newsboy’s sack at the waist, or a
pocketed apron, seemed to be quite large enough here.

It was hard to distinguish the many heaps of peanuts from the still more
numerous graves. With enough of this baseball and circus delicacy within
one sweep of the eye to satisfy a ravenous city on the Fourth of July,
there came back to mind the touching story of the fond American mother
who sent her dear son in China a box of peanuts for Christmas, so that
he might for a little while be reminded of home. Even small children
were helping to pull them, and to pile the nuts in grave-like mounds of
careless cone shape. Of the graves themselves there was literally no
end, until the landscape for long stretches seemed to grow nothing else.
Yet the land was a veritable market-garden, so great is the individual
care of Chinese fields in all their processes. Here and there, in place
of the far more common tilling by hand, was a plow, drawn by two or
three mules; but naturally you cannot plow to advantage if you must
dodge grandfather’s grave every trip across a short field, after that
great-grandfather’s, and then that of the father before him, back to
more than remote generations. If only the old gentlemen would consent to
lie in a row, or even in a companionable cluster, or to be laid away in
a real graveyard where the little cones of earth might perhaps be kept
green even in China, instead of being rare, rain-gashed heaps of dried
mud as hallowed as a pile of peanuts!

Yet sometimes there is a hint of reverence, rather than of mere
superstition, about a collection of half a dozen of these untended
mounds drifting through the centuries with no other evidence of care
than the slender shade of a single tree bent over them, like some
faithful old servant still respectfully waiting to do their bidding. A
suggestion of this comes now and then even to the disapproving
foreigner, aghast at the wicked wastefulness of China’s burial methods;
and certainly the peasant himself, the only one after all whom it
greatly concerns, develops no spirit of criticism, no thought of revolt.
A plow being in most cases inconvenient among his ancestral mounds, he
digs away about them by hand year after year, generation after
generation, as those same ancestors did century after century. Naked to
the waist even in these late autumn days, his body burned to the hue of
old polished mahogany, he never disturbs them, and rarely if ever mends
them.

There were still reminders of the summer’s crops,—sweet potatoes,
onions, lettuce, cabbages, carrots; but there was little if any evidence
of the house-high _kaoliang_ that stretches for unbroken miles across
more northern China, all the north, indeed, of this province of Chihli.
Country-women hobbling slowly and painfully about on their crippled feet
were everywhere, even the most ugly, weather-beaten, and work-worn of
them boasting this fancied form of beauty. Blindfolded donkeys and mules
marched patiently round and round hither and yon across the landscape,
some about ancient well-curbs, lifting by great wooden wheels water for
the irrigation ditches that are so widely needed in this deforested,
rain-stingy land, others rotating big stone rollers for the hulling or
grinding of wheat. Brick-kilns, which the Chinese seal up for long
periods with their contents, stood forth like rudely chiseled monuments
or artificial hillocks. The earth was worn away around everything,
walls, trees, roadsides, monuments, those great slabs of stone,
top-heavy with carved dragons, that may be seen anywhere; for great
portions of China are half-desert, dry as dust, of a moistureless brown
soil ready to wash or blow away at the least provocation, and slavishly
dependent upon irrigation. Chinese farming methods, too, increase this
erosion. Everywhere men were cutting off the top layer of soil and
screening the earth into many little mounds that stretched in long rows
across the sunken fields. Later they “spread this between the wheat,” if
I understood Chang’s laborious explanation; that is, they use it as a
kind of fertilizer, sometimes mixed with the droppings of animals
gleaned along the roads, as well as for the building of the many little
low field-dikes.


Barely over the boundary of Honan, where it thrusts itself in a point
that recalls the “gerrymandering” of the West into the two provinces
bounding it on the north, is Changte, burial-place of Yuan Shih-kai. A
tomb evidently rivaling those of the most powerful emperors, certainly
larger and more sumptuous than that of Mencius not far east of here in
Shantung, rises among great trees within easy sight from the train. But
it is not covered in imperial yellow, for the new dynasty that the
occupant hoped to found, and which, if numerous examples in Chinese
history still mean anything, would have been the more natural
development, failed to materialize, less because of wide-spread
republican sentiment, one suspects, than for lack of tact, among the
virtues of political sagacity, in the make-up of what might have been
the founder.

Yuan Shih-kai is the father, so to speak, of the curse of swarming
soldiers that now overrun China. For it was he who first saw in Korea,
when he was a mere officer of the Manchus, the first Western-style
soldiers, and who coaxed the Government to start what has become the
present military misfortune of China. There were “soldiers” everywhere
now—in China one must use the word with a grain of salt, for to put a
simple country youth or a mere coolie into a faded gray cotton uniform
and hand him something resembling a weapon does not make a real warrior,
as the sight of rows of men standing at “present arms” and at the same
time staring back over their shoulders at a strolling foreigner
suggested. These artless, slouch-shouldered fellows lounged with fixed
bayonets along the graveled platform of every station; they packed the
trains to overflowing; they were drilling in companies and battalions,
once or twice, it seemed, in whole regiments, on bare, dusty fields
along the way. Had the half of them been genuine soldiers there should
not have been a bandit within a month’s march in any direction.

At Chengchow next morning the head of a man, his long hair carefully
wrapped about it, as if that were much more precious than what had been
his neck, lay a yard from his trunk, hands and feet rudely tied with
ropes, out on the bare space before the station. Perhaps he had really
deserved this frequent, casual Chinese fate, and was not the simple
coolie substituted for influential or unattainable criminals which his
appearance somehow suggested. The curious strolled over to see him, but
the eating-stalls just in front lost none of their custom or their
cheerfulness; by noon the body was gone, and dogs had licked up the
great patch of blood that had spread between head and trunk.

The major had already gone westward, and it was not until months later
that I visited Kaifeng, capital of Honan, long after the “Christian
General” had been transferred from there to Peking. Fu Hsi lived there a
little matter of 4775 years ago and not only ruled the Chinese but, if
we are to believe all we hear, taught them to fish with nets—the Yellow
River being but a supernatural stone’s throw away—to rear domestic
animals, to use the lute and lyre, in a way, one suspects, that has not
changed since, and spent the leisure time left him in instituting laws
of marriage and inventing a system of writing by using pictures as
symbols. No doubt he played some antediluvian species of golf and
lectured on the necessity of large families also, but early history is
often careless in preserving “human interest” details. What we do know
is that Kaifeng was the capital of China under the Sung dynasty, from
960 A.D. until the court was captured by the Kins nearly two centuries
later, a brother of the emperor escaping to Nanking and setting himself
up in his place, and remained a kind of capital of the Kins until they
were finally overthrown by their fellow-Tartars, the Mongols. Since then
the city has apparently been content with its provincial status.

Its wall encloses a mammoth space, much greater than that of Taiyüan,
for instance, but with great open spaces within it. Lakes before the
“dragon throne” in the center of the enclosure, though in the West they
would more probably be called ponds, give the site mildly a suggestion
of Peking. In a far corner the _tieh-tah_, or “iron pagoda,” is worth
coming to see, though the only iron visible about it is the Buddhas in
relief peering out of each opening up its thirteen stories. Of a
beautiful glazed color of reddish brown with imperial yellow specking
it, one might also call it the world’s largest porcelain. The keeper
insisted that it was two thousand years old, but I fear tradition
uncorrected by the printed page had deceived him as to the date of the
Buddhist invasion of China, to which her pagodas are due.

There was a busy, almost a pleasant atmosphere about Kaifeng, with its
moderately wide streets, and rickshaw-men almost as fast as those of
Peking; though squeaking wheelbarrows for all manner of freight, with
women on tiny feet sometimes straining in front of them, were numerous.
Feng Yü-hsiang, China’s far-famed Methodist, cleaned up Kaifeng in the
Christian sense during the six months he was ruler of Honan there. He
drove out prostitutes; the extraordinary sight of soldiers sprinkling
chloride of lime with their own fair hands wherever it was needed was
but one of many such during his days. The only scandal that seemed to
hover about his memory was an inordinate love for ice-cream, which
reduced him to the point of sending a soldier for his share on those
Sundays when he could not dine with the American missionaries in person.
But Feng was evidently too good a Tuchun of Honan to suit his master Wu
Pei-fu. The fellow who has taken his place has merely the outward honors
of the office; Wu gives him his orders in everything of importance, and
has his own auditors on the spot. Meanwhile the figurehead enjoys his
opium, his singsong-girls, and his prestige, while the city slips back
into the habits of which Feng attempted to cure it, and soldiers now and
then run amuck in it. A thousand mere boys drill a month or two in
compounds recently walled for them in the very outskirt where the
missionaries built in the hope of an un-Chinese bit of quiet now and
then, and pass on into the ever-swelling armies to make room for as many
of their fellows. Bugles blare seven days a week long before the June
hour of dawn, and all day long the recruits do their worst to sing
scraps of Western music as they march.

The chief interest in Kaifeng to the traveler in quest of the unusual,
however, is its Jews. The Chinese call them “Yu-t’ai,” which undoubtedly
is derived from “Judea,” though whether by word of mouth or merely
geographically is not clear. They came many generations ago, just when
or why neither their neighbors nor they themselves seem to know. To-day
they consist of “seven names and eight families”; that is, there are
eight Jewish families who have between them seven family names, every
one, as I have mentioned before, being compelled by circumstances over
which he has no control to adopt one of the hundred and some Chinese
surnames when he settles in China. Some doubt whether there are a
hundred individuals left; the present head of the clan put the number at
“one or two hundred.” They seem to have lost every vestige of Jewish
identity, except the name they are all known by, which persistently
survives. All those I saw looked less Jewish than do some of the
Chinese; certainly their features would not definitely distinguish them
from their neighbors, though the “head Jew” boasts that several persons
have come to take his photograph “because he has such a big nose.” I ran
this man Chao to earth for a somewhat similar purpose, and found him and
his son keeping a little shop in a slovenly part of town, stripped to
the waist and otherwise conducting themselves quite like Chinese a bit
above the coolie class. Their home behind had not an un-Chinese hint
about it—unless it was a large photograph of the father and son with a
very Russian Jew from New York between them, which occupied a
conspicuous place. But they were if anything more friendly, more
bubbling over with excitement at a visit from a foreigner and the awe
this inspired among their crowding neighbors, than pure Chinese of their
class would have been. The merry little father, it seems, has twice been
in jail charged with murder, if that really means anything concerning a
man’s character in China; the fact that he had gotten out again
suggested that there could scarcely have been much evidence against him,
for the Jews of Kaifeng are not wealthy.

They intermarry with the Chinese, and some have even taken up Chinese
idol-worship; the rite most insisted upon by orthodox Jewry has not been
practised for generations. Formerly they had what they called a
synagogue, but about fifty years ago this was completely destroyed, and
does not seem to have been kept in repair even until then. There has
been no attempt to restore it, and a stone tablet that stood within it
is all that is left. On this last relic is engraved a sketch of Hebrew
history and the names of the patriarchs. Once it bore also the names of
the principal Jewish families in Kaifeng, but these were obliterated in
order to throw off the scent those who tried some decades ago to
persecute them. This tablet, by the way, is now in the compound of the
Kaifeng mission of the Canadian Episcopal Church. No one in Kaifeng, as
far as is known, can read Hebrew, and the clan seems long ago to have
lost any interest in Judaism. Several portions of Hebrew scriptures have
been found on the streets for sale, evidently as mere curios. The chief
Jew proposed one day, in a talkative mood, that he order all the Jews to
become Christian and join the church of the American missionary with
whom he was speaking—because he had had a quarrel with the pastor of the
other church.

The father of two likely-looking Jewish lads who attend the American
mission school is a silversmith and has some means, but as a group the
Jews of Kaifeng have not yet developed any Chinese Rothschilds or
Guggenheims; nor is the wealth of the city in their control. In other
words they seem to have become completely “un-Jewed,” if the expression
be allowed, which is their chief claim to interest. For the Chinese, I
believe, are the only people in the world who have completely broken the
racial tradition of the Jews for remaining a distinct race. The slow and
patient sons of Han have blotted out the marks that have identified the
sons of Abraham for thousands of years, as they have pacifically
assimilated race after race that has come into close contact with them,
and it should occasion no great surprise if the Jewish colony of Kaifeng
were entirely lost within another generation.


Soldiers were particularly numerous on the “Lunghai” line west from
Chengchow, for this led to the headquarters of China’s just then most
powerful general, Wu Pei-fu. Chang and I fell to talking with some of
them in the crowded third-class coach. They were all volunteers—except
perhaps as hunger and its allies coerce—enlisted for three years, new
soldiers drawing, in theory, six “Mex” dollars a month, old ones, for
what our own call a “second hitch,” eight. But in practice none of those
with whom we spoke had ever been paid more than three such dollars
during a single “moon,” at least, as they put it, “in time of peace.” It
would be no great wonder if some of those off now on a furlough to their
homes with only that amount to their names should be cogitating some
violent means of improving that penurious condition of affairs.

One might become an officer within a year, they said, if one proved to
be a good soldier, particularly if one were a friend of some friend of
the general, or had money to scatter in the right quarter. Company
officers seemed to receive about as much as our enlisted men do, with
the privilege of buying their own food and clothing; but there are, as
every one who has passed a bit of time in present-day China knows, other
means by which they, and to a large extent the soldiers under them,
often appreciably increase their official stipend.

[Illustration:

  Chinese farming methods include a stone roller, drawn by man, boy, or
    beast, to break up the clods of dry earth
]

[Illustration:

  Kaifeng, capital of Honan Province, has among its population some two
    hundred Chinese Jews, descendants of immigrants of centuries ago
]

[Illustration:

  A cave-built blacksmith and carpenter shop in Kwanyintang, where the
    Lunghai railway ends at present in favor of more laborious means of
    transportation
]

[Illustration:

  An illustrated lecture in China takes place outdoors in a village
    street, two men pushing brightly colored pictures along a two-row
    panel while they chant some ancient story
]

Disarmament, I reflected, is like those long and complicated cures for
virulent diseases that are so easily caught. When what we somewhat
mistakenly call the most civilized nations of the world set the example
of war, of mighty military forces, the infection cannot but spread to
what seem to us the more backward races. Like a pebble tossed into a
pool, the bright idea is taken up by race after race, country after
province, until by the time the advanced nations are on the verge of
bankruptcy and ready to quit for a while they must keep the thing up as
a protection against the peoples of color and of strange faiths who have
been stirred up by their example. In China there is an added
complication. Soldiery, and banditry, too, are there largely a phase of
the problem of unemployment. If China has the four hundred million
inhabitants popularly attributed to her, any one who has traveled even
in the less crowded northern provinces has seen that at least a hundred
million of them must be perpetually hovering about the brink of
starvation. An ambitious politician, or a general who refuses to lose
his perquisites as such, himself imbued with the centuries-old dread of
becoming one of the hungry, inarticulate masses, gathers about him all
the soldiers he can recruit and find any means of keeping in his
service. Most of these are simple, boyish fellows gleaned from the farms
and villages before they have really taken root in the complicated
society and industry of China. If they are discharged, if they are not
paid, if the overthrow of their leader makes them fugitives, there is
nothing much left for them to do but to turn bandits. Many have served
alternately as soldiers and as brigands for years; many know no other
trade, and, though they did, it is little less difficult to find an
opening in the crowded, ill paid ranks of China’s workmen than to
perform the venerable trick of passing a camel through the eye of a
needle.

Thus the same men who, as soldiers, force helpless villagers to make up
their arrears in pay, find it no great leap, as bandits, to the
torturing of rich Chinese who fall into their hands, until their victims
have subscribed enough to drive starvation once more into the
background. Raids on towns, invitations to chambers of commerce to save
the community from the torch and looting by raising so many thousands of
dollars, are the order of the day in many parts of China; and testimony
is almost unanimous that most Chinese soldiers are as bad as the
bandits. In fact, there are towns which pay the _tu-fei_ fixed sums not
only for promising not to loot them but to keep the soldiers from doing
so. After all, is there any great difference between the flock of
generals or provincial dictators misgoverning various regions of China
as they see fit, by the use of their private armies, and another leader,
who in his day may also have been a general and quite possibly will be
one again, whose followers are referred to as bandits rather than
soldiers? Often the only real distinction is that the one is strong
enough to force recognition from the so-called Central Government, and
the other is not, though they may be equally scornful of its commands
and desires. How faint is the line of demarcation, even in the minds of
the most successful Chinese generals, is shown by the opinion of almost
all of them that when a force is defeated in one of the skirmishes of
China’s almost constant, if unacknowledged, civil war the victor should
take over most of the defeated troops and save himself the job of having
later to clear them out of his region as bandits.

China, it is evident, will never get rid of her bandits until she has
industries to absorb them, and her excess soldiers also. The latter are
commonly “disbanded” merely by some other force coming into the
territory they have been holding and driving them out, instead of
surrounding and disarming them. Thus when they are forced to turn to
brigandage they retain guns, ammunition, and uniforms; and they are
helped by every one, including the soldiers. Understandings grow up
between the two forces; the bandits bury money exacted from their
victims and pass the word on to the soldiers, who pretend to have a
great battle against the outlaws, but really dig up the money and bury
ammunition in place of it. One can scarcely expect Chinese coolies to
risk their lives, or even their skins, merely because they have been
enlisted as soldiers. Moreover, banditry has been more or less
continuous in China for many centuries. It is a rare play on the Chinese
stage in which there is not some reference to the danger of falling into
the hands of bandits; brigand chiefs are the heroes of many an old tale,
just as they are in the popular legends of Spain; more than one dynasty
was founded by some powerful outlaw who outfought his rivals. With
industries to absorb the rank and file, who can say how many of the
generals and chieftains themselves would not find a better field for
their abilities, and a better way to free themselves from the dread of
falling below the hunger line, as “captains of industry”?


I overtook the major at the headquarters of Wu Pei-fu, with whom he had
been an observer during his struggle against the lord of Manchuria a few
months before. It took an hour by rickshaw to reach the place from the
station, along the most atrocious caricatures of roads I had yet seen,
even in China. The route lay through the walled town of Honanfu, better
known to history as Loyang. Kuang Wu Ti made Loyang his capital shortly
before the Christian era, when rebels drove him out of its predecessor,
Changan, in what is to-day Shansi. It is a neglected part of China that
has not been the capital at one time or another. This one was still the
real seat of power not only of Honan Province but of a large portion of
the putative republic. Inconsistently it was more miserably unkempt,
more overrun with visible human misery, than any Chinese city I had yet
come across, possibly because it was thus far the most southerly. Dust
and the beggars squatting and rolling in it were all but
indistinguishable until the latter were cringing almost under the
runner’s feet, beggars as covered with filth as any in India, exhibiting
great open sores, men so diseased that they spent their unoccupied
moments in picking themselves to pieces.

We came at length through clouds of swirling dust to a score of great
modern barracks, housing the division with which its now powerful
commander has served since his lieutenant days. A formidable series of
sentries and functionaries admitted me gradually through a massive gate,
across a much flower-bedecked courtyard, through a voluminous anteroom,
and finally into the official waiting-room. Three foreigners, who
happened all to be Americans, and a baker’s dozen of Chinese were
waiting. The major and a politically-minded youth temporarily released
from Harvard, who was to accompany us on the outward journey, had just
returned from the manœuvers at which the general spends his days on
horseback, riding off daily at seven and returning at five, without
taking food during that time. But many of the Chinese had been in the
waiting-room since morning; indeed, it would have been easy to suspect
that callers sometimes have the privilege of waiting overnight, for in
the four corners stood as many large beds, canopied, but wooden-floored
in the hard Chinese style. A long table occupied the center of the room;
several more or less easy-chairs leaned against the wall. Nothing is
more discourteous in China than to fail to keep a caller supplied with
tea, and several orderlies, taking the leaves out of a familiar tin can
in a corner behind a bed and transferring them to the pot in hands that
showed no visible signs of recent soaping, kept the little handleless
cup before each of us constantly filled and steaming.

Toward sunset there was a stir among the retainers about the anteroom
and court yard, half-whispers of “Ta-ren lai-la” (the great man has
come) from the Chinese visitors, and a few moments later we foreigners
were asked to lead the way across another flowery court to a somewhat
more sumptuous apartment. A young man in a gown of beautifully figured
gray silk, of handsome and strikingly alert features, and speaking
almost perfect English, had taken charge of details with the air of an
accomplished, yet exceedingly cautious, master of ceremony. At least a
score of persons drifted in, all Chinese except the four of us, but from
all points of the compass,—politicians down from Peking for a
conference, or looking for a chance to get there; correspondents of half
a dozen native papers and foreign news services, some widely traveled
and speaking English or French fluently; one or two from far southern
China who could only converse with their fellow-countrymen through an
interpreter or a mutually familiar foreign tongue; and a scattering of
men of purely Chinese manners to whom a polyglot gathering was evidently
a new experience. The assemblage suggested a king’s _levée_, with the
added touch of costumes ranging all the way from the entirely Occidental
to the very Oriental.

While we chatted, Wu Pei Fu slipped in among us almost unnoticed—for an
instant,—until the silence of respect of the Chinese for any one who has
reached power fell with a suddenness that was startling. The general had
laid off his uncomfortable uniform and leather footwear, and was dressed
in the long silken gown and cloth shoes of his native land. Small almost
to the point of being tiny, he had undoubtedly “personality”; there was
something about his vivacious manner and quite evident mental alertness
which quickly set him above many of the larger and more stately men in
the room. Even the “peanut” shape of his close-cropped head, so frequent
in China, seemed to be but an added touch of slenderness; the hands,
ladylike yet with closely trimmed nails, were an index to his whole
appearance, which might have been summed up in the words “dapper yet
strong.” His face was unusually vivid for a Chinese of his type, perhaps
because he spends so much time out in the sun, particularly because of
the extraordinary brilliance of his eyes, which fairly radiated during
the frequent smiles that disclosed a small fortune in gold. Nothing,
unless it was the rather stringy black mustache that fell untrimmed over
the corners of a firm and slightly sensuous mouth, resembled in the
least the oily enigmatical Chinese of our popular fiction. Though we
knew him to be fifty, he could more easily have passed for thirty-five,
and he spoke with what even I could recognize as the rather slovenly
Shantung accent.

At a slight wave of his hand the gathering sat down at two large round
tables set for a Chinese meal, the general apologizing to us foreigners
for not placing us at his table, with the explanation that he had
serious business to talk over with other visitors, evidently the
politicians down from Peking. Politics, say those who know Wu as well as
an Occidental can know a Chinese, partly bore and partly perplex him; he
feels wholly at home only in military matters, but the plane to which
his success as a general has raised him makes escape from political
affairs impossible. They may be right, or they may never have plumbed
below the surface of an unquestionably clever Oriental. The meal
progressed like any informal Chinese dinner. Flocks of servants in and
out of uniform brought bowl after bowl of the favorite foods of China,
from which we fished with our carved ivory chop-sticks in competition
with the rest of the circle. As one of the favorite sports of Japanese
and Russians, as well as of the Chinese, waxed stronger and left us from
the West completely outdistanced, even the staid gentlemen from rural
parts, quite evidently unaccustomed to “outside barbarians,” mellowed
and grew chatty, in an improvised language made up of gestures,
monosyllables, and occasional appeals to the correspondents who spoke
English or French. That sport is known in China as _gam-bay_, and
consists of nothing more than tossing off at a gulp, whenever the head
of the table gives the signal for a toast, the little porcelain cupful
of _samshu_, _sake_, or _vodka_, as the case may be, which servants
constantly replenish, then showing the empty inverted cup to one’s
fellow-guests about the table. It may be a simple little pastime for
those whose gullet has been galvanized by suitable training. But, for a
simple person who has never outgrown in some matters a rather
puritanical boyhood, it is apt quickly to result in embarrassment at the
impossibility of proving enjoyment of hospitality in a way that will be
fully understood. From time to time, of course, wet hot towels were
passed to the guests, and when appetites flagged at last there came the
bowls of lukewarm water in which the Chinese all too audibly rinse their
mouths after eating. Our declining both these forms of ablution caused
more or less wonder among the swarming servants and orderlies, according
to their previous acquaintance with Westerners. Low as most prices are
in China, this presumably daily hospitality to his flocks of visitors
must make an impression on the never too plentiful funds of any Chinese
general in these penurious days. But nothing is so dear to the Chinese
heart as food, nothing rated really genuine without a feast attached;
and to fail in the first rule of deportment would be a proof of waning
fortune and a serious loss of “face.”

It was out in the waiting-room again that we had anything like a
personal chat with the general. His tenacious fellow-countrymen having
been deftly shaken off one by one, he joined us four Americans about the
long, green baize table on which so many hundred gallons of tea a year
are impersonally dispensed. His manner was a mingled hint of relief at
having at last reduced his callers to those who certainly could not have
come to buttonhole him for political preferment, of that respectful
cordiality which Chinese in high places usually show toward any and all
Westerners, whatever they may really feel toward the West, and of a
suggestion of expansiveness apparently due to that fondness for
_gam-bay_-ing which his friends sometimes fear may eventually be his
undoing. Through his polished and cautious young interpreter he
explained that he had come to us last that he might give us more time
and attention, and from this auspicious beginning the conversation ran
on through the fixed cycle of Chinese courtesies, we assuring him that
we had come expressly to pay him our respects, he replying something to
the effect that America has always been China’s greatest and most
sincere friend, and so on for many rounds. But there was never a moment
in which it was not evident that the general took all this buncombe and
froth no more seriously than we; he was not only “democratic” in the way
that has become so widely the fashion of late years, but he was plainly
supplied with a reasonable fund of common sense, even though it might
have Oriental trimmings. Wu Pei Fu is a man of larger background than
many of those who have forced their way to the front in modern China,
being what corresponds there to a bachelor of arts, as well as a
military graduate with a long practical experience in military service.
But the powers of evasion inborn in all Chinese do not seem to have
suffered seriously from these rude contacts. Though we chatted for some
time, nothing really worth recalling issued from the general’s lips,
parted through it all by a toothpick, except the astonishing statement
that there will be no more civil war in China and that the country will
probably be unified within three years, after which he expects to be
sent to the United States as an official representative. It may easily
be that he considered these remarks mere after-dinner chat and expected
us to take them as such. As we bumped back to our lodgings on the other
side of the walled city in an asthmatic Ford which the general insisted
on furnishing us, I regretted that some of us had not had the courage to
ask some direct questions on the subject which just then could not but
have troubled his dreams.

Briefly, banditry had about reached its pinnacle in this very province
where the super-Tuchun held forth—under his very nose, so to speak. Two
nights before, a large force of outlaws had entered the walled city of
Honanfu, barely two miles from the great barracks housing his division,
and, after warning the four thousand soldiers in town not to attempt
resistance, had killed one of the principal merchants, evidently because
he had refused to pay them tribute, and then had thoroughly looted his
establishment and calmly returned to their rendezvous. On the very day
of our visit the Protestant missionaries living and working in a great
compound outside the walls had received unofficial, indirect word from
Wu that they must thenceforth live within the walled town, as he could
not otherwise guarantee their safety.

But these were local matters. What was threatening the general with
complete loss of “face,” throughout China and even abroad, was the
kidnapping of foreigners from his very region of the country. The
bandits seemed to show somewhat of a preference for missionaries,
perhaps because they were most available, possibly, as one of them
assured his worried friends, because the Lord was purposely offering the
apostles this splendid opportunity to convert the wicked. There was no
robbery involved, no demand for a money ransom, no more hardships for
the captives than were naturally unavoidable in the circumstances. They
were allowed to communicate frankly with their friends at frequent
intervals; they were made as comfortable as the circumstances of being
dragged from hiding-place to hiding-place permitted, though this did not
spare them the acquisition of such ills as dysentery and pneumonia
during their forced wanderings. The bandits presented one demand and one
only,—that Wu Pei-fu, of the Central Government, should enlist them as a
part of the army and give them a section of the country to garrison,
_and to tax_! In other words, foreigners whom duty or pleasure took into
the interior of China were to be made the pawns in a local political
quarrel in which they had neither part nor interest. With all the
grievances that exist between different factions in the troubled
republic, there would be ample opportunity for every Occidental
venturing beyond the sea-coast to get an intimate acquaintance with
bandits and their lairs, particularly if this clever little scheme
succeeded and won imitators.

There were strong suspicions that high officers of the Honan armies, if
not Wu Pei-fu himself, were winking at the bandits and their activities,
either because these paid in a share of their loot or for other reasons
too intricate for the simple Western mind to follow. But this
impression, while justly taking the super-Tuchun to task for not
adopting a vigorous policy against the bandits, for using his influence
to coerce Peking while failing lamentably to rule that portion of the
country within gunshot of his barracks’ door, it did not, generally for
lack of personal knowledge, take due account of the territory in which
the brigands were operating. In the pell-mell, tumbled mountains of
western Honan they might circle in and out while a whole modern army
rarely caught a glimpse of them. Bombing airplanes might be an effective
argument, but Chinese armies are poorly supplied with such modern
luxuries, and there was the safety of the foreign captives to be
considered. In other words, the bandits held the best hand, and about
all even a virtual dictator to the Central Government could do was to
enter into negotiations with them as if they were a legal and
responsible opposing faction.

This, at last, is precisely what Wu did. Though it was not until weeks
after our visit to his headquarters, the loss of “face” involved when
nearly a dozen foreigners of half as many nationalities, including women
and children, had been carried off in his own province, added to slow
but moderately stern and concerted measures by the legations involved,
not merely toward the fictional Central Government but against Wu Pei-fu
himself, forced him at last into effective action. One of the main
troubles is that Wu and all his ilk, thanks largely to the supineness of
foreign governments which should impress the opposite point of view upon
the hit-or-miss rulers of present-day China, have on hand a bigger game,
too often of a personal nature, than the rescuing of a few foreigners
serving the brigands as pawns in their own little schemes. A loud and
certain voice from abroad, as was proved in this case, would probably
greatly reduce banditry even in Honan, the centuries-old home of
outlawry, and certainly would make the carrying off of innocent
foreigners as hostages a less simple and commonplace matter. Government,
however, even when it is not ludicrously misinformed on the simplest
phases of the situation in China, seems to be much more interested in
issuing ten-dollar passports and collecting income taxes from its
nationals abroad than of lending them the protection these should
involve.

[Illustration:

  In the Protestant mission compound of Honanfu the missionaries had
    tied up this thief to stew in the sun for a few days, rather than
    turn him over to the authorities, who would have lopped off his head
]

[Illustration:

  Over a city gate in western Honan two crated heads of bandits were
    festering in the sun and feeding swarms of flies
]

[Illustration:

  A village in the loess country, which breaks up into fantastic
    formations as the stoneless soil is worn away by the rains and blown
    away by the winds
]

In this case all the foreign captives were released, gradually, within a
week after the legations began to show real signs of life, not greatly
the worse for wear, and with an absorbing after-dinner topic to last
them for years to come. But it was easy to guess what splendid arguments
stray foreigners are to prove in domestic Chinese controversies, of
which they may be as supremely ignorant as uninterested, during perhaps
years to come, now that this little scheme of the bandits had been
crowned with such signal success. It is easier still to see how much
bolder they will grow in gathering such arguments, how much rougher,
when it serves their purposes, in the use of them, and how much the
self-seeking militarists of China will care how far the acknowledged
outlaws go in the matter, so long as a wishy-washy policy, supremely
ignorant of the first rules of Chinese psychology, continues to
represent the Western world in this matter.

Just what argument had been brought to bear on the brigands remained for
several days a more or less profound secret; but the “old China hand”
had his suspicions, which turned out to be fully justified. He suspected
that temporizing, compromising, and weakly yielding had been the
consecutive orders of the moves, for long experience has taught him the
more outstanding features of the Chinese character. When it could no
longer be concealed, word seeped up out of Honan that virtually all the
demands of the bandits had been granted in full. Their chieftains were
given high rank and official titles, and the men themselves were
incorporated into the “national army,” whatever that means, any world
agreements toward disarmament notwithstanding. Not only that, but their
organizations had been left intact and given a corner of the province to
rule, particularly to “tax,” instead of at least being split up among
other organizations in which some slight curb might be put upon their
activities. The Chinese populations involved protested, in so far as
they dared, but of course in vain. That is another misfortune of the
supine policy of foreign governments, that the law-abiding Chinese
masses suffer all the more accordingly. But, after all, perhaps they are
more or less responsible for the low state of authority in present-day
China, and subject to a corresponding discount of sympathy.

Months later down in Yencheng, the center of the foreigner-capturing
brigandage of Honan, I picked up a few details of their calling. Though
the outside world hears much more of it, there is hardly, so far, one
foreigner carried off by bandits to a thousand Chinese. The usual method
is to attack a village and take a man of standing, or his son of fifteen
or so, for ransom; but rather than run the dangers of dragging the
captive about with them, the outlaws often hand him over to some
resident of a neighboring village, perhaps only a woman, with the threat
to burn the house and kill its occupants if the hostage is not there
when they return for him. Many a helpless family is thus left stranded
between the devil and the deep sea. Occasionally girls are taken, but
the girl or woman who is kept overnight loses her reputation and is not
worth ransoming. Therefore they are either returned after negotiations
lasting a few hours, or are kept as camp property. When they are after
money or material advancement, Chinese brigands do not mistreat women;
these suffer more when soldiers run amuck and loot a town. Like
banditry, this is old Chinese history; in the days of Kublai Khan, of
whom we hear such romantic stories, Mongol Buddhist priests or lamas
were given an iron ticket from the emperor which gave them the right to
enter any house in China, drive out the men, and install themselves in
their place. For a fortnight a year during the Mongol dynasty, popular
Chinese history records that the country was given over to promiscuous
debauchery; bearing these things in mind one is surprised at the
comparative lack of abuse of women by Chinese malefactors.


On the way from the Peking-Hankow main line to Honanfu there had been
much of that clay-sandy earth called loess, and in the rambling half-day
from there to the rail-head there was more of it. Cultivation, rain,
wind breaking this down to varying levels, leave fantastic forms of
earth as striking as the rocks of Namur, precarious cliffs in which are
cut cave-dwellings, shrines, even temples; indeed, for long stretches
there were few other kinds of buildings. Hundreds of little fields, one
could see even from the jolting train, were gradually but irretrievably
wearing away to a common level that would eventually make cultivation
out of the question. A doubly uncertain world this, where one’s home is
a hole in the cliff-side that may any day slough off, where one must
always walk cautiously along the edge of either field or veranda, lest
it at any moment drop from under. We passed through many tunnels, always
thankful to find them stone-faced. How this soil ever succeeds in
holding together even as long as it does was one of the mysteries that
beguiled all that morning’s journey.

At the scattered town of Kwanyintang the railway abandoned us to our own
devices. Fortunately the Tuchun of Honan Province, China’s far-famed
“Christian General,” did not. All the way from Kaifeng, where the major
had gone to visit him, he had sent one of his aides to smooth the way
for us. This handsome and intelligent fellow, still in his quilted
silky-gray uniform, had once been a lieutenant-colonel but had given up
his rank in order to work for social welfare among the soldiers. He
carried several bundles of Chinese pamphlets in hectic covers, which
turned out to be translations of various books of the Bible, to be
distributed among the country people. What distinguished him still more
from the mass of China’s swarming soldiers was the fact that he insisted
on paying his fare. Had not this idiosyncrasy of the “Christian
General’s” troops already been familiar to the officials of the Lunghai
Railway, it is quite possible that we should have seen a pair of them
faint away with astonishment at the door of our unupholstered
compartment.

In the far reaches of China there is a comradeship among all
foreigners—perhaps the word “European” or “Caucasian” would be more
exact—stronger than that between fellow-countrymen in many parts of the
world. Let a rumor drift to a traveler’s ears that there is a
_wai-guo-ren_ in town, or indeed within reasonable striking distance of
his route, and he feels it as much his duty to call, quite irrespective
of the stranger’s particular nationality, as the latter does immediately
to offer him hospitality. There was nothing unusual, therefore, in the
fact that we were met at the present end of the line by an Armenian, a
Greek, and a Rumanian, all members of this Belgian-French railway
concession, who at once turned their office over to us as a lodging. Nor
was there any reason to be surprised when a Russian Jew, who had just
ridden down from Chinese Turkestan in record time, turned up there
hoping to sell us his horses. He was true to his race, however, when the
question of price came up, and we were not seriously tempted to alter
our original plan to leave Kwanyintang in mule-litters.

It is proof that our aide from Kaifeng was something more than Christian
that he had the expedition we required gathered, signed, and sealed
before nightfall. The usual system in such cases is to leave the whole
matter to some responsible innkeeper. He sets the price, engages mules
and whatever conveyances are necessary, and assumes responsibility for
the proper carrying out of the contract. In this case, as is also usual,
he came bringing a great sheet of flimsy paper daubed with Chinese
characters in red—the contract in question—and decorated with several
red “chops,” the personal seals of responsible residents of the town,
which serve as a cross between recommendations and sureties. He had also
come to ask for three fourths of the sum agreed upon, which was sixteen
“Mex” dollars per litter for the journey of 280 _li_ to the first town
over the Honan-Shensi border. Ten Chinese _li_, it may be as well to
specify once for all, make approximately three miles, though in practice
there are “small _li_” and “large _li_,” in mountainous country two or
three times as many _li_ going as coming, or vice versa, and
occasionally a complete unintelligence as to road measurements. The
innkeeper must have expected that we had taken the trouble to inform
ourselves and were aware that at most only half the amount involved is
advanced, but the Chinese never risk losing an opportunity to profit by
the possible ignorance of a foreigner. When we declined even to pay the
customary half until we could inspect the mules next morning, we ran
some risk of undoing all the labor of our more than Christian aide; for
the sons of Han hate even more to make the slightest rebate on custom
than they do not to be able to overreach it a few points. Had we been
Chinese, probably negotiations would have halted then and there until
the money was forthcoming; but foreigners still have some of their old
prestige and reputation in the Chinese Republic.

Our precaution really was hardly worth the trouble, for the night was
too black when we began to load to tell a mule from a corpse or a litter
from a lumber-pile. A Chinese mule-litter consists of two pieces of
telegraph-pole some ten feet long, which are fastened together at either
end with a crosspiece that sets into a pack-saddle, and beneath which
are two straddling wooden legs to keep the contrivance high enough off
the ground when the two animals are taken from beneath it. Between the
two poles is looped a network of ropes covered with a straw mat, with
sag enough in them to hold the traveler’s baggage and leave him room to
spread his bedding and to sit or stretch out at full length upon it.
Over all this there is an arched roof of straw matting, not dissimilar
in appearance to that of a “prairie-schooner.” My own custom of living
on the country during my travels had become so fixed that I had still
not adjusted myself to the major’s notions of a proper equipment. We had
two army-trunks, one of them very full of canned foods. Folding cots,
bedding-rolls, spare garments sufficient even for the wintry weather we
expected before the journey was over, and a small mule-load of merely
personal conveniences were enough to render speechless a wanderer long
accustomed to carry all his possessions on his own back. When to all
this was added a “boy” and a cook, and all the equipment necessary for
them to function in a fitting manner, I felt more as if I had again
joined the army than as though we were merely setting off on a little
personal jaunt. It will not be unduly anticipating, perhaps, if I
mention now that, while my companion sometimes realized he was not
living at home, and solicitous persons back in Peking fancied we were
roughing it, memory of many another cross-country tramp made this one
seem to me like traveling in extreme luxury; and the worst of it is that
I thoroughly enjoyed the change.




                              CHAPTER XIX
                     WESTWARD THROUGH LOESS CAÑONS


We were off at six, with the night still black about us. But that did
not mean that we actually got started so early, for it would be a
strange Chinese journey that began without a hitch. This time it was one
of the mules which we had been unable to examine in the darkness. He
turned out to be small, gaunt, and ratty, and long before we had passed
through straggling Kwanyintang he became so lame and wabbly that there
seemed no possibility of his even lasting out the day. Fortunately we
were in a position to have our desires heeded. By order of his chief,
our aide from Kaifeng had instructed the local commander to furnish us
an escort of ten soldiers. We were quite familiar with the ancient jest
that having a guard of Chinese soldiers is worse than falling into the
hands of bandits; but at least, if they did not succeed in outsprinting
the brigands in case of an attack, they could assure them that we were
not worth the robbing or holding for ransom. Besides, were we not out
mainly if not exclusively for experience? Now the escort proved its
worth at the very outset; for even though it may have little influence
over large bands of outlaws, such a Chinese guard is useful in prodding
simple citizens into prompt action when those they are escorting express
a wish. Ours was barely mentioned to the lieutenant in charge of the
detail when he slipped off into the darkness as if he meant to make it
so “snappy” that even Americans would applaud. That did not prevent the
sun from peering with a red and swollen face up over the uneven pile of
tile roofs to the southeast of us before he gave any sign of continued
existence. But when he did come back there came with him a larger,
sturdier mule than any of those already in our service, with its
old-fashioned owner—who still wore a cue, which was turning
iron-gray—ambling a bit sullenly, we thought, beside him. The transfer
was made, and we were soon off in earnest, in a cavalcade that left the
throngs of passers-by invariably staring after us.

The lieutenant, it gradually transpired, having found the innkeeper who
had contracted to furnish us transportation unable to replace the ailing
animal at once, had calmly commandeered the first likely one he came
upon. This being the chief worldly asset of the helpless owner, he had
been forced to come along, to set off on a week’s journey on extremely
short notice. Being mere Americans, we could not see why one of the
other drivers, of whom there was one to each litter, could not have been
intrusted with this extra mule, particularly as they all lived in the
same town and were under bond, so to speak, through the innkeeper. But
one soon learns that it is far the best plan to let the Chinese get
their results in their own time-honored way, and not to peep too much
behind the scenes, nor conclude that what is absurd, or unjust, or even
cruel to the Western mind is necessarily so to the people of the Middle
Kingdom. Each litter and pair of mules, we found in time, without openly
showing curiosity, belonged to one man, either the driver who plodded
all day long in the dust beside it, constantly quickening the pace of
his two animals with an explosive “Ta! Ta!” and a few choice Chinese
“cuss-words” which there is no call to add to our Western stock, or to a
man who stayed at home and hired some one to muleteer for him. Naturally
our declining the lame mule and the substitution of another divided the
sum that was paid for that litter, and there was bad blood evident
between the two men who trotted beside it as long as the journey lasted.

A summery autumn spread over the land, and the ten soldiers who deployed
on either side of us soon asked permission to toss their cotton-padded
overcoats into the litters. Their low cloth shoes and wrapped
trouser-legs, Chinese fashion, were well suited to tramping, especially
in the flour-like loess. Besides his fairly modern Mauser rifle and at
most a dozen cartridges, each seemed to have a few small personal
possessions tucked away about his person, and one middle-aged fellow
with a face worthy a “hard-boiled” American “top sergeant” of the old
school carried a hooded falcon seated on his crooked arm for the whole
thirty sometimes hot and often laborious miles. Merely another example,
we supposed, of the Chinese fear of trusting one’s belongings out of
sight. Except for one long and somewhat stony ridge, the loess formation
was unbroken, and dust swirled to the ears at every step. Beggars, often
in a horrible state, rolled in it at the roadside, not only in the towns
but at most unlikely spots in the open country. Surely their gleanings
could not have totaled even a modest meal a day, and it was this working
of such unlikely territory which impressed one particularly with the
depths of Chinese poverty.

Of the pitilessness of it we had had an impressive example before
leaving Kwanyintang. In a dust-deep gutter beside its most densely
thronged thoroughfare lay, the afternoon before, a boy of perhaps
sixteen, a single filthy rag covering him merely from shoulders to
navel, several immense surfaces of his exposed body eaten away by some
loathsome disease. Evidently he was writhing in real pain instead of
more or less pretending it for sympathy’s sake, as did so many of his
rivals along the way, for several men had paused to talk with him, and
that is an extraordinary mark of solicitude in China toward roadside
mendicants. But evidently no one did anything else for him; for as we
rode by the spot before daylight next morning, while the night was still
bitter cold, there he still lay in the same all but naked state,
powdered over with dust, and evidently dead—at least we sincerely hoped
so. The poverty of China is so general, and native charity and
compassion so slight—for even the minority who are above suffering
cannot but be more or less constantly obsessed with the dread of
themselves falling into beggary—that even what we would call “very
deserving cases” must put forth great efforts to attract attention to
their needs. Some of these are so ingenious as to be humorous, as well
as pathetic, which may be intentional, for no one on earth enjoys humor
more or responds to it more quickly than a Chinese. In one of the deep
loess cañons through which we passed, a man whose feet seemed to have
rotted away knelt close up against the precipitous earth wall in a spot
which gave him just room enough to keep from under the hoofs of animals
and the feet of pedestrians passing in such constant droves that he
seemed to be bathing in dust. Through this rose his raucous voice in the
monotonous sameness of some phrase of distress, accompanied by the
ringing of a hand-bell. At regular intervals of at most thirty seconds
he ended these sounds by fetching his head down with a terrific wallop
on a big stone that lay in the road before him. Pausing to wonder why he
did not crack his skull, I gradually became aware of the fact that he
always struck the bell in his right hand into the dust in exact
synchronization with the blow of his head, thereby of course cleverly
increasing the apparent thud and at the same time inconspicuously
breaking the blow. But, for all that, his forehead was almost raw with
the constant pounding, and the exercise alone must have proved a real
day’s work before the day was done. Yet the passing throng, being itself
by no means affluent, seldom gave him more than a casual glance. The
wicker farm scoop that lay beside him had barely half a dozen “cash”
scattered about it, and this was typical of all the roadside beggars we
passed for days to come. Whenever one of us tossed a copper into such a
receptacle amazement overcame even the bystanders; for a copper is worth
ten whole “cash,” though it is about the equivalent of one fourth of an
American cent!

For the first few miles there was an endless string of coolies carrying
bags of cement and of flour, and less evident supplies for the railway
construction-camps farther on. A tunnel a mile long was nearing
completion, and grading and cutting continued for some distance. Within
a year, optimistic officials hoped, trains would be running to the
Shensi border, and in two or three would reach at last the famous old
western capital, Sian-fu. Then there were quantities of cotton coming in
from the west, and every other imaginable thing bobbing at the ends of
those springy poles across coolie shoulders which are so often miscalled
bamboos, since they are more nearly hickory, polished and varnished to a
mahogany brown. Itinerant craftsmen of every sort, peddlers of anything
there is a chance of selling, portable restaurants for the feeding of
all this multitude, hundreds of jogging coolies carrying their beds and
their few belongings on their quest for work, all use this pole for
bearing their burdens, so that the vista as far as the eye can reach was
like a river of undulating men and things. Much of the way lay high, and
gave us splendid views off across mountainous country fantastically
broken as only loess can break, terraced on a hundred different levels,
ever falling away at the edges, a world, as it were, that was wearing
out. Or again the road, which never for an instant was worthy of any
such name, would plunge into one of the chasms it had worn for itself
during centuries of plodding through this friable soil, chasms a
hundred, two hundred, in places surely three hundred feet deep, which
might continue for many miles before there came another glimpse of the
surrounding country. To walk in these is like shuffling through a
cement-factory; let the least breath of wind blow, and one heartily
longed again for a gas-mask. The walls being absolutely sheer and the
sunken roads very rarely wider than a single cart, let one of these get
ahead of us and we must inhale and swallow its dust for many weary _li_;
while the tasks of passing those constantly appearing from the opposite
direction required the patience and the profanity of a Chinese muleteer.
Of the joys of fetching up in one of these endless channels at the rear
of a camel caravan, probably at least a hundred strong, and many times
more famous for raising dust than speed, no mention shall be permitted
to sully the pages of what aims to be the veracious story of a perfectly
respectable journey.

[Illustration:

  I take my turn at leading our procession of mule litters and let my
    companions swallow its dust for a while
]

[Illustration:

  The road down into Shensi. Once through the great arch-gate that marks
    the provincial boundary, the road sinks down into the loess again,
    and beggars line the way into Tungkwan
]

[Illustration:

  Hwa-shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China
]

[Illustration:

  An example of Chinese military transportation
]

However, we were by no means confined to the bottoms of the cañons. A
mule-litter, we quickly discovered, resembles many another contrivance
in this imperfect world, in that it has both its advantages and its
drawbacks. Shaped like a bath-tub, it might perhaps be quite cozy could
one merely make it up as a bed and crawl into it. But when it is already
half filled with such odds and ends as steamer-trunks and bedding-rolls,
there is only a limited space left for the mere passenger. Moreover, the
straw mattings are neither sun- nor dust-proof, and while one may in
time and with patience learn either to sleep or to read in a litter, in
spite of the camel-like motion varied by a sudden disconcerting lurch
every quarter-hour or so, when the plodding driver outside concludes
that the poles need leveling on one or the other mule, the average
traveler is more apt to pass his time drowsily gazing at the plethora of
red pompons and trappings on his lead-mule and listening to the
monotonous tinkling of his bell. Litter-riding is an art that must be
learned. As the rolling motion is prone quickly to unbalance the
contrivance, proper bestowal of the body is closely akin to tight-rope
walking. If one be of a restless disposition and accustomed to change
the lower leg for the upper at certain intervals, one must not let the
attention grow drowsy; if one persists in the reprehensible habit of
smoking, then in laying down the pipe in the right hand great care must
be exercised that the can of tobacco be at the same instant deposited
with the left, lest the excess of weight prove fatal. In all our journey
my own litter turned over upon me but once, and that was in an inn-yard
where assistance was at hand to drag me out from under the trunks, cots,
suit-cases, and what not under which the mishap buried me; but if there
were ten consecutive minutes when I did not expect it to do so, they
were probably during the many times that I was not inside it. We met in
the west foreigners of long Chinese experience who did all their
traveling in litters, some indeed who lined and carpeted theirs with
felt, put a stove inside, and journeyed for weeks at a time, even in the
depths of winter, reading many volumes during the journey. But while we
are quite ready to admit without controversy the comfort of a
mule-litter as compared with a “Peking cart,” I for one found the finest
thing about it the fact that one could get out and walk.


This we did early and often, and thereby frequently kept out of the
dust-swirling cañons entirely for long stretches. For the constant
procession of coolies plodding up and down this route had worn at least
one, and often as many as half a dozen, hard smooth paths along the
brink of the chasm, paths undulating and meandering just enough to be
delightful. From them we could look far down the sheer cliffs, seldom
fifteen feet apart, upon the endless mule-trains, broken here and there
by cumbersome two-wheeled carts, ox or horse drawn, or by a disdainfully
leisurely string of camels, all so tiny with the depth sometimes that
they seemed a procession of children’s toys. At the same time we enjoyed
a brilliant sunshine—often too brilliant, in fact, though October was
all but gone—now and then a delicious breeze, and views of the life of
the region and landscapes frequently approaching the magnificent, all of
which were unknown to the man who was drowsing or attempting to read in
his litter far below. The average speed of our conveyances, though they
were the swiftest things in the defiles, was scarcely equal to a
reasonable walking pace, so that we could here and there wander a bit
from the straight and narrow paths for a glimpse of something that
seemed worth the deviation.

There were places, for instance, where rows of old earthenware jars were
set up in ridges of earth and filled with water, often carried from long
distances, for the watering of passing animals—trust the people of
cruelly crowded China not to overlook any chance to pick up a few stray
“cash.” The latter, by the way, were now almost the only money seen, and
passing coolies carried a string of them looped over a shoulder or some
other convenient projection. Sometimes a row of enormous bowls formed a
wall, shutting off a compound, instead of the commonplace structure of
yellowish dried mud so generally serving that purpose. Naked children
swarming everywhere and men with bronzed torsos bared to the waist
working in the fields seemed to give the calendar the lie. Blindfolded
animals plodding an endless round, a pair of men, or a man and his
crippled wife, manipulating a big, crude windlass, brought up water from
the field-wells scattered hither and yon, and unsuspected, if the
superstructures were lacking, until one had all but stumbled into them.
The vagaries of the loess soil were often fantastic, sometimes
incredible. Extremely friable, wholly unstratified, yet surprisingly
solid, too, its contrasts were a constant astonishment. There were
villages in which it had split and gashed and fallen away into some
adjoining rivulet cañon to such an extent that the mud houses seemed to
be strewn helter-skelter among a forest of cathedral-spires and Gothic
roofs, perched at every possible height and dozing serenely on
perpendicular chips of earth which it seemed impossible that the first
slight breath of mind should not precipitate in a mere cloud of yellow
dust into the terrifying chasm below. Its persistence in standing long
after it must surely have fallen was one of the wonders of the sunken
roads. Here a great slice of it, split wholly free from the main
precipice and seeming to hang like a curling wave a hundred feet or more
directly above our passing litters, gave every appearance of being on
the very point of breaking and burying a score of travelers beneath it,
yet somehow it never did, at least in our presence. Innumerable such
catastrophes must have come to pass during the long centuries in which
this “national road” had become a cañon; but the Chinese way, no doubt,
had been for the survivors to plod calmly on over the collapsing earth
before the dust had settled, secure in the knowledge that if their own
particular godlets held them in favor they were free from similar
danger, while, if they were not, precautions were mere wasted breath.

Many a time the paths we followed along the crests seemed to have
reached the day when they must spill down the face of the precipice, yet
they always carried us safely past. Of cave-dwellings cut far back into
these cliffs there was no end, by far a majority of the population
having only such homes. But what perhaps was most startling of all the
astounding caprices of this strange soil was to come, in a stroll across
what gave every appearance of being a flat unbroken field, suddenly upon
a great square hole in the ground, fifty or more feet in length and
breadth, and as many deep, which was nothing more nor less than a family
courtyard. Farm-implements and domestic animals littered its floor; into
its side walls, sheer and exact as those of a box, were cut a dozen
caves, high arched but with the usual small doors in each mud-bricked
front—the dwelling-places of the numerous family, probably of three
generations. There was nothing about such a farm-yard different from the
ordinary ones all over China, except that the high mud wall surrounding
it is the solid earth, with an inconspicuous tunnel often of
considerable length connecting it with the outside world. Let this fall
in, and there is not a ladder in rural China long enough to bring the
hole-dwellers to the surface, on which lie their hard earth
threshing-floor and their fields.

The threshing-floors were everywhere busy at this season, beating out
the last of the grain with flails or rolling it out with huge stone
rollers drawn by languidly ambling animals. Whole families took part in
the operation, the more than half-naked children teasing the leisurely
beasts to keep on the move; the women, who generally knelt to spare
their crippled feet, pawing about through the straw and now and then
even helping the men to toss the grain up into the chaff-clearing wind.
About the edges of every floor were stacks of hay and straw, all
plastered over with a kind of clay roof, as seems to be the fashion in
Honan.

But the prize sight of all was the terraced fields. I had seen some in
the Inca lands of South America that seemed remarkable examples of human
persistence, but they are mere children’s pastimes compared with these
of western China. Those in the Andes are faced with stout stone walls
and run only part-way up an occasional hillside, or bring a too steep
valley under cultivation. Here a most remarkable series of terraces, of
thirty, forty, even fifty levels, rose to the very summit of every
mountain we saw not only for days but for weeks, covering it completely
with low steps of endless giant stairways. Yet here stone is unknown;
the facing of each field is merely the loess itself, constantly
crumbling away upon the field next below. Geologists are more or less
agreed, I believe, that the loess regions of North China, covering a
quarter of a million square miles, are due to the destruction of the
forests centuries ago, a destruction so complete that even the roots
were grubbed out for fuel, so that a soil which with its natural share
of rainfall and vegetation was all that man could wish has become a
powder-like earth ready to break down and fly away at the first breath
of wind. If they are right, what a splendid justice it would be to send
those who are doing their best to deforest our own fair land to struggle
for existence with the hordes of China, where the pressure of population
has driven the farmer not only to the very crest of arid mountains but
into every tiniest depression in the soil! Absolutely treeless, with
never a suggestion even of brush or grass, these loess regions were
everywhere for day after day the same bare yellow brown, beautiful
enough in the changing phases from sunrise to sunset, but of a monotony
that wearies the eye for all the extraordinary forms in which the ages
have cast it. In spring and summer perhaps, when the terraces are waving
with crops, there may be green enough. But it was hard to believe it in
this autumn season, when even the rare remnants of a cotton or a corn
field have the same shriveled, moistureless, yellow-brown hue as all the
far-spreading and tumbled landscape.


But walking always became a perspiring form of locomotion long before
noon, and some convenient cañon-mouth or a stretch where the road came
to the surface for a breathing-spell found us climbing into our litters.
From then on until toward evening our view of the world about us was
likely to be confined to the triangular bit of it visible between the
red pompons on the lead-mule’s back and the straw roof of the litter,
often still further reduced by the walls of the narrow ditch which so
frequently was the road nearly all day long. Through this we saw more,
however, than might be expected. A camel-train, or one of many
mule-drawn soldiers’ wagons, loomed up out of a dust-fog so thick that
collisions were narrowly averted in spite of our slow speed. Loess soil
would not be so bad, at least so far as the traveler is concerned, if
only it would lie still, instead of insisting on exploring the innermost
recesses of any one or anything with which it comes in contact. Let a
breath of air sweep down the road—which was certainly no unusual
experience—and we could barely see the next litter before us. Then there
was nothing to do but cover the face with a handkerchief and lie
listening to the endless _dingle-dingle_ of the little mule-bells and
the slight creak of the swaying litter, broken frequently by the
“mule-train coughing in the dust”—cough the weary animals did,
indeed—and now and again by the vociferous “Ta! Ta!” of the drivers
whose footsteps made no sound in the powdered earth, or a long-drawn
“Trrrrrrrrrrr!” when they wished to bring the animals to a halt. An old
and very experienced traveler is authority for the assertion that the
road from Honan to Sian-fu is perhaps the most trying bit of cart-road
in China, and, strong as such language is, we were inclined to agree
with him. Yet it is a journey I would not have missed for several times
its many minor discomforts.

Sometimes the road escaped from the cañon for several miles, and then
there was sure to be plenty to catch the eye. Perhaps it was a little
house, temple, or dove-cote at the top of a high slender pillar of
earth, for rain and wind may have washed the world away from about it
and left an unbelievably frail support. Soldiers we were constantly
meeting in great numbers; occasionally we passed large groups of
recruits not yet furnished with weapons, simple-faced boys who might
much better have been left in their native cave-villages to till the
terraced mountains than to add still more to China’s most serious
problem. But this draining of the country districts of able-bodied young
men goes merrily on all over the republic—and the training of eventual
bandits seems to have no end. Our own escort and long files of their
armed fellows bound in the opposite direction now and then showed
themselves on the sheer edge of the cliffs high above us, they and their
guns silhouetted against the cloudless sky. We constantly met veritable
crowds of travelers, mainly pedestrians. Endless strings of coolies came
and went, their beds and tools and all their earthly belongings in blue
denim rolls on their backs, or balancing from the swaying pole over
their shoulders. I often caught myself wondering why they could not all
stay where they were and save themselves all this laborious shuttling
back and forth, so exactly alike were the long files of them plodding
eastward and going west. There were very few women travelers; compared
with the great throngs of men there were almost none, and they were
always riding, naturally, since the most they could do otherwise would
be to hobble a few hundred yards an hour on their dwarfed feet.
Sometimes one of them loomed up out of the dust astride a donkey, always
with a man prodding the animal on from behind, his easy stride seeming
to emphasize the helplessness of the crippled legs tapering down to all
but useless little feet on either side of the biblical animal. Children,
swarming everywhere, were rarely on the move along the road, though
occasionally we passed the cart or litter of a better-to-do Chinese
carrying his family with him. But even if the heavy cloth front door of
his conveyance was not closed, we rarely caught more than a glimpse of
the peering faces of women and children tucked away behind the man and
the driver in what must have been extremely tight quarters.

Several times widows in white or sackcloth passed, usually seated alone
Turkish fashion on an uncovered cart, as if to make their grief as
conspicuous as possible. Some of them were surprisingly young; generally
their faces were completely covered; and invariably they rocked back and
forth on their haunches and wailed at the tops of their voices, whether
in passing through a town or out in the open country, at least whenever
there was any one except their plodding driver to hear them. This public
display of grief seemed to be a custom of Honan; at least, we seldom if
ever saw it farther west. One morning while we were still walking we
heard a choral wailing from afar off, and at length came upon the
mother, wife, son of six, and baby of a man who had just died, all
squatting together on the outdoor threshing-floor at the edge of their
village, and all of them, including even the infant, pouring forth their
sorrow to the four winds. A pathetic, almost touching scene it was to
me—until I chanced to glance back just in time to see the old woman
pinch the boy in a very sensitive spot, and thereby redouble the wailing
which the sight of a passing foreigner had almost silenced.

Once in a while a bride passed, conspicuous in all her finery, and
looking as if she, too, could easily weep the length of her tedious
journey, did custom permit it. Then there was the wheelbarrow-brigade,
in some ways the most interesting part of all the endless procession.
The thought of a man wheelbarrowing a heavy load clear across a province
or even farther had a mixture of the pitiable and the ludicrous about
it—something reminiscent of a nonsensical election-bet. Yet it is
doubtful whether any man in all our broad land, with the possible
exception of champion athletes at the climax of their exertions, perform
such grueling labors as do these Chinese wheelbarrow-men, who passed us
in veritable regiments, sometimes in close unbroken file for a mile at a
time. Given the weight of the big clumsy, creaking contrivances
themselves, an incredibly heavy and often awkward load, a “road” which
no untraveled Westerner would recognize as such, with steep hills,
cañons ankle-deep in dust, and the constant struggle for right of way on
the crowded caricature of a thoroughfare, and it was no wonder that the
man straining at the handles, with the stout strap from them passing
over his shoulders, all but invariably resembled a marathon runner at
the end of his greatest contest. In northwest China the _tui-chu_ is not
a passenger vehicle, as in some parts of the country; but this ceaseless
one-wheeled cavalcade carried almost everything except human beings. The
luckiest seemed to be those whose bulky load was merely cotton; the
heaviest burdens, with rare exceptions, were evidently the two to four
black-brown bags of wheat, a bit smaller in circumference than our
two-bushel sack, but nearly twice as long.

All possible manner of aids had been enlisted by the sweating men at the
handles, though the great majority toiled onward without assistance.
Sometimes another man, perhaps a donkey, once in a while a mule, an aged
horse, a small ox, pulled in front of the wheelbarrow. More than one man
had pressed his son and heir into service, and boys of all ages added
their by no means insignificant bit to the drudgery. The detailed
picture still stays with me of one child who could not have been more
than six, his little bronzed body completely naked except for the red or
blue diamond-shaped stomacher which most Chinese consider indispensable
to health, steadily tugging away for all he was worth at the rope over
his bare shoulder. He and his brawny father behind were plainly many
toilsome days away both from home and their destination, yet on the
child’s face there was not a suggestion of protest, but more than a hint
of joy at this splendid opportunity to see the world. Indeed, the
generally contented, not to say joyful, attitude toward their arduous
fragment of life of these slaves of the wheelbarrow, of the coolies, of
the toiling masses of China in general, is one of the astonishments, and
delights, of Chinese travel. Possibly these men were paid the equivalent
of fifteen American cents a day for their cart-horse exertions,
furnishing their own food and lodging on the way; yet a surly face was
as rare as a lazy body, and laughter always burst forth upon the
slightest provocation. Those who pulled in front, I noticed, no matter
how young or how weak, were never reproved or admonished to greater
exertions from behind; it seemed to be as natural for them to do their
unflagging best as for water to run downhill, and the thought of their
slacking or of being capable of more never appeared even to suggest
itself to the man at the handles.

Twice, possibly three times, I saw a woman tugging at a wheelbarrow
rope, but in each case the load was light and the distance evidently
short; it must have been, in fact, for she could not have struggled far
on the little goat-like feet and muscleless legs which time-honored
custom had left her. I suppose the several brilliant Western
“authorities” that are at the moment engaged in “interpreting” China to
us would cite as another proof of the ascendancy of esthetic over
material things in the Chinese mind the fact that, though her unhampered
labor is very necessary to him, the Chinese peasant and coolie still
insists on having his wife beautified at the sacrifice of her physical
usefulness. On the threshing-floor or in the cotton-fields the women
could be worked to somewhat better advantage than on the road, and there
one saw more of them. For they could do most of this work kneeling, and
nearly all of them, even girls of eleven or twelve, wore thick
knee-pads, not unlike the shin-guards of a football-player, to soften a
bit the hard lot that had befallen them. In the towns one often saw
wives or servants crawling about the dirty earth floors on their knees
in the performance of their household duties.

The cotton-fields, by the way, were almost endless, though not much else
could be said in their favor. The plants, from six inches to a foot
high, were of a dead-dry brown, of the same color as all the landscape
to the summit of the terraced mountains, and the miserable little bolls
that remained did not seem worth even the trouble of such
poverty-stricken pickers as here and there still wandered about in
search of them. There had been no rain all summer in this region, they
told us, and unless some fell within the next two months and saved the
winter wheat, there would be another famine as serious as that of 1920.


[Illustration:

  Coal is plentiful and cheap in Shensi, and comes to market in Sian-fu
    in wheelbarrows, there to await purchasers
]

[Illustration:

  The holy of holies of the principal Sian-fu mosque has a simplicity in
    striking contrast to the demon-crowded interiors of purely Chinese
    temples
]

[Illustration:

  Our carts crossing a branch of the Yellow River fifty _li_ west of the
    Shensi capital
]

[Illustration:

  Women and girls do much of the grinding of grain with the familiar
    stone roller of China, in spite of their bound feet
]

The first night out of Kwanyintang we slept in the house from which a
Greek, and ate in the house from which a Frenchman, both officials of
the advancing railway, had been taken by bandits a few weeks before.
They were still in captivity among the mountains somewhere to the
southwest, the nucleus of the considerable little party of foreigners by
whose unwilling assistance the brigands eventually won their way into
the national army. In fact we slept on unfurnished beds and were offered
unnecessary apologies by our polished French host and Japanese hostess
at dinner because of the looting that had taken place at the time his
predecessor was carried off. There was still a certain atmosphere of
suppressed dread among the few foreign residents, for none of them was
sure how soon he might become the next victim; but mankind quickly
learns to live without discomfort under many unpleasant circumstances.

Our soldier escort changed each day, and we were entertained each
evening with the long “face-saving” process that took place before the
detail could accept the gratuity we offered them. The struggle, which we
turned over to Chang as more finely versed in Chinese etiquette than we,
was particularly arduous on that first evening, for the commander of the
detachment was a real lieutenant, and instead of the thirty-two
vociferous and violent refusals which seemed to be required of a mere
sergeant or corporal before he accepted what he really had no intention
in the world of declining, the lieutenant was still pushing back the
detested silver with fine effect when we lost count and went inside.
Three Mexican dollars distributed among ten men for a hot and arduous
thirty-mile tramp for the possible protection of a pair of unknown
foreigners might not strike one of our own “doughboys” as anything to
write home about; but for men whose daily pay was nothing like their
share of this sum, and who draw their pay much more often in theory than
in practice, the major’s insistence that they “have a good feed on us”
could not really have sounded so immoral to them as they pretended.

The second afternoon was still fairly young when we reached the large
walled town of what its residents, at least, called Lüngbau. The escort
was to stop here, but the sergeant in command thought he could get
permission to go on with us another twenty _li_, or get the next detail
to start at once, if we would let him go into town and see the
commander, while we continued around the edge of it, as most through
travel does in passing crowded walled cities. Near one of the farther
gates a soldier sent by the local commandant overtook us. His chief, he
said, could not send a detail on such short notice, and he did not think
it wise for us to go on without one. Bandits had been very active in the
immediate region ahead and might even have heard of the “important”
foreigners and be looking for them.

All this moved us little, for both the major and I knew from long
experience that it is always the _next_ stage of the journey that is
perilous for the traveler, never the one in which he actually is.
Besides, ten straggling, poorly equipped soldiers of the Chinese type
would scarcely prevent the bandits from adding us to their collection if
they really meant to do so. But we were reckoning without our muleteers.
They had already expressed a desire to stop in Lüngbau; the report from
the commandant made them doubly anxious to stay. We were pooh-poohing
their fears and deciding to order a new start when, following the eye of
one of them, I glanced up at the city gate close beside us. It was a
picturesque little portal, but that mere fact would not of course have
drawn the attention of a Chinese muleteer. What had aroused his interest
was two frail crates, thrown hastily together of narrow strips of wood,
fastened to the face of the gate on either side just above the arch, and
each containing a human head. I had often read of such dainty
decorations on Chinese city gates, on those indeed of our medieval
ancestors; but they had always seemed far away and long ago, something
pertaining to the “good old days,” which a prosaic modern wanderer would
never have the privilege of seeing. To come upon them, therefore, in the
present year of grace and in the full light of the ordinary, every-day
life about us, tacked up against two torn posters depicting the delights
and excellencies of a widely known brand of cigarettes, was—well, was at
least a pleasant reminder that the picturesque customs of old China had
not yet all gone into the discard, that even the modern wanderer, if he
wander long and far enough, may still once in a blue moon come upon some
of those little details linking the phonographed, sewing-machined world
of to-day with the cave-man, which he has so often envied the travelers
of bygone centuries.

These two bandits, explained the soldier messenger, prompted now and
then by the solicitous crowd that always gathers in China about any
suggestion of a controversy, or of a foreigner, had been caught four
days before in the very town where we must spend the night, if we
persisted in pushing on. I suppose the crated heads were what any
ladylike person would have called a “gruesome sight,” but I fear they
struck me merely as interesting. In China one quickly and unconsciously
gets a sense of the cheapness of human life, so that things which would
ruin a night’s sleep at home are forgotten around the next corner. The
heads each lay on one ear in the bottom of their open-work crates, half
grinning down upon passers-by. Having a southern exposure, they had
already greatly profited by the three or four days they had been
separated from their original, evidently rather youthful, possessors to
disguise their identity. They were yellow, not the mere yellow of the
Chinese, who so far north are scarcely yellow at all, but of the yellow
of a pile of crude sulphur, of a ripe lemon; and they were in that state
in which even the most careless housewife would quickly send a cut of
meat out to be buried—deep. Moreover—and all the writers on head-adorned
gates I had ever read had never given me a hint of this little
detail—they were swarming with flies, which seemed to consider this a
particularly luscious feast.

We yielded to the reluctance of our muleteers and turned back to a
near-by inn. The sun was still high enough for a stroll through the
extramural suburb, often the most crowded part of a Chinese town, then
across Lüngbau itself, and around a half-circuit of its broad wall, from
which we could look down into many of what in other lands would have
been domestic secrets. We saw by chance, for instance, that the big
sturdy man who had followed us into the inn-yard on his knees, because
he had carelessly frozen his feet off one night, had a big family with
whom to share the remnant of a roast leg of lamb we had given him.
Somewhere among the crowded bazaars some one succeeded in telling us
that bandits were worse in this region because it was fairly rich and
they could live on the country; but the teeming life of Chinese streets
certainly flowed on its even way in complete indifference to those heads
upon the gate and to the dangers they stood for. What was still more to
the point, there was time to take a leisurely view of the silky-brown
terraced mountains that bounded the southern horizon, and to watch the
unclouded sun sink into a fiery furnace behind them.

But for that more or less forced stop at Lüngbau we should have ended
the mule-litter stage of our journey late on the third day. However,
that might have interfered with the major’s extraordinary success as a
hunter, which was not a commonplace, vulgar matter of quantity, but of a
finesse that even a Buddhist could have applauded. We had waded through
a considerable mountain pass—at least this wearing down of roads into
cañons sometimes appreciably shortens a climb—and had come down a steep
incline to the broad flat shores of the Yellow River. Castor oil in its
native state grew head-high for some distance along the deep sandy
trail; but what roused our genuine interest was the fact that the
lowland, half a mile wide, between us and the river, was swarming with
magnificent wild ducks, and probably geese. The major snatched the
shot-gun which some trusting sky-pilot in Peking had unwisely lent him
for the journey, and strode out into a forty-acre field literally
covered with the birds. Now and again a great flock of them rose and
circled in a great curtain across the lower sky, but this mattered
little, for there were always more where those came from; in fact, had
they all risen at once, the air could scarcely have contained them.

Nothing of course could be more reprehensible, more dastardly, in fact,
than to breathe a breath of criticism upon the marksmanship of a host,
as it were, who has risen so high in the profession in which
marksmanship is so essential; and fortunately there is not the slightest
occasion to do so. For surely the failure to make a perfect score can
honestly be accounted for by the fact that the weapon used was already
doing service long before our forefathers began to laugh at the idiot
who fancied that some day some one would invent a “horseless carriage.”
If birds will have the decency to stay where they are until the hunter
can step on their tails before firing, such a contrivance leaves nothing
to be desired. But wild ducks and geese, even in so rarely hunted a
paradise as the Yellow River valley, are not especially cordial to
strangers; one might, indeed, almost charge them with aloofness.

However, the major did fire at last, both barrels at once, so that at
least there would not be a second recoil to embitter his disappointment,
and in spite of the fact that he had not succeeded in getting quite near
enough to his quarry to make it really worth while to throw the weapon
itself after them. Strangely enough, one of the birds gave every
evidence of having been struck, or else of having had the scare of its
life. For instead of following its myriad fellows into the now teeming
air it ran erratically along the ground, with the major and Chang, and,
I believe, two or three of the muleteers, possibly even the cook, in hot
pursuit. The most fleet-footed of this throng—I chanced at that moment
to be hovering between turning and not turning over with my litter, and
hence can give no trustworthy testimony on the subject—at length laid
hands upon the fugitive. If it had been struck, the shot, naturally, had
not penetrated the thick feathers; perhaps it had careened off its
lightly clad skull and left it a hazy view of the situation until it was
for ever too late. At any rate, the major has the distinction of having
captured in perfect health a magnificent specimen of the wild duck
family, larger than any domestic one and beautiful as a pheasant—with a
shot-gun!

One of the soldiers carried it the rest of the morning, as another had
carried his hooded falcon the day before. Our entourage attempted to
convince us that such birds were not fit to eat, but its superiority to
a Thanksgiving turkey when it appeared before us again next day
suggested that they may merely have been offering, Chinese fashion, to
throw it away for us.




                               CHAPTER XX
                             ON TO SIAN-FU


Early on the fourth day we climbed up out of a great road cañon to a
mammoth stone archway that marks the boundary between Honan and Shensi
provinces, and immediately pitched down again into another chasm of
equal depth. Nor was there any improvement in the fragile soil, in the
endless lines of coolies going and coming, or in the mangy beggars who
squatted, loudly lamenting, in the dust here and there along the sunken
road all the way into strongly walled Tungkwan. This important outpost
of Shensi Province lies just over the Honan border, on the Hoang Ho,
yellow river indeed here at this shallow season, across which one may
see the loess hills of the province of Shansi, just then suffering
acutely from drouth. The world had worn away from about the massive wall
that surrounds the town, as it does from about even a mud shrine in the
loess country, so that we had to climb again, rather stiffly, to reach
the imposing city gate that admitted us.

In strict duty, no doubt, the soldiers straggling about it should have
demanded our passports, which the Wai-chiao-pu in Peking, whose
privilege it is to look after “outside-country people,” had smeared with
half an acre of red-ink-stamped characters purporting to be permission
to visit five specified provinces, after which they must, officially at
least, be returned to Peking for further desecration. But all the
soldiers said was “Pien-tze,” and the Chinese visiting-cards we produced
in answer to that laconic request were evidently all they wanted as
proof of our identity. Since the major’s name chances to begin with Ph,
forcing him also to pass as Mr. Fei in Chinese, we were at once taken
for brothers, even in the face of decided facial proof to the contrary,
and passed on our way unquestioned.

The native pastor of the _Fu-ying-tong_, as the Chinese call a
Protestant mission, was not in town. But in the interior of China any
Caucasian passes at face value, at least until he has definitely been
proved a counterfeit, and we were soon installed in several dusty,
slightly furnished rooms of the rambling, temple-like compound, while
Chang and the cook explored the kitchen with the caretaker. Had we
arrived an hour earlier we might perhaps have gone on at once and
reached Sian-fu that same night. For, strange as it sounded, there was a
motor-bus line running more or less daily half-way across “Hidden
Shensi,” from Tungkwan to the capital. But the buses started early in
the morning; moreover, with all our dunnage we should probably need a
special car, and there was just then none in town. If we really wished
to go on next day, it would be best, they told us, if the major in his
official capacity should wire the Tuchun at Sian-fu, to whom this little
venture in less sluggish transportation personally belonged. Meanwhile,
there was the matter of settling with our muleteers, and deciding how
much _cumshaw_—without which no transaction in China is considered
properly closed—we cared to give them. Tungkwan, too, was large and
interesting enough, with a wall which clambered for a long way along the
crest of a ridge high above us; but there is much sameness to most
Chinese cities, and this one seemed to offer nothing unique. But at
least there was something of that quality in a leisurely half-day for
the ablutions, razor-wieldings, resorting, and repose of which we were
in arrears.

It did indeed require a special car for all our expedition, and even at
that I was forced to banish to the running-board the chauffeur’s
assistant, who habitually fills out the front seat of any public
conveyance of this sort in China. His duties seemed to be to crank the
car, to attend the wants of a perpetually parched radiator, to tinker
with the engine whenever there was the slightest chance to do so, and in
general to help the imported chauffeur to reduce the exiled vehicle from
a movable to an immovable object as soon as possible. The driver had
been brought all the way from Tientsin to grace Shensi’s new enterprise,
having been chosen evidently because of what he did not know about
automobile engines and their proper manipulation, and therefore sure to
be free from prejudice. If we understood rightly, the conveyance had
been carried piecemeal through the loess cañons on mule-back, and no
doubt some of the parts had been assigned tasks for which they had never
been trained. But it is axiomatic that nothing short of total
dissolution will prevent a Ford truck from functioning, and less than
two hours after this one had been requested to start we were staggering
in spasmodic jerks out through the western city gate.

It is 290 _li_ from Tungkwan to Sian-fu, almost exactly the same
distance as we had made in mule-litters in more than three days; so that
though we never attained breathless speed the journey felt rapid by
comparison. Once through the massive stone archway that separated city
from country, the going did not at first seem to be appreciably better
than the alleged road behind us; one gasped at the temerity of any one,
especially the timid Chinese, actually setting out on so ideal a route
for an obstacle race with the expectation of really reaching a
destination nearly a hundred miles away. But in time we came to realize
that it was what the Chinese consider an unusually fine road. Loess had
for the most part given way to a somewhat more cohesive soil, and there
were no real cañons. When he was Tuchun of the province, the “Christian
general” had built, mainly with soldier labor—the two words seem
incompatible in China—this raised highway beside the old haphazard route
all the way from the frontier to the capital. His intentions had been
excellent; but his funds were limited, the soil available contains not a
hint of stone or gravel, and public coöperation was of course wholly
lacking. The general had done his best to replace this last un-Chinese
asset by board signs set up at frequent intervals along the way, with a
warning that the highroad was reserved for automobiles only, and that
any other use of it would be severely punished. His successor had
evidently tried to keep in force this unprecedented interference with
Chinese freedom of individual action, and his authority was certainly
considerable, as witness the fact that only here and there had the
sign-boards even yet been turned into fuel. But the Tuchun could
scarcely be expected to patrol the famous highway personally, and even
at that he could not have kept an eye on all parts of it at once.
Therefore it was much more densely thronged than the typical Chinese
road down below it. Donkeys, mules, pack-cattle, rickshaws—these often
run the eighty-seven miles in less than two and a half days, and make
the round trip in five, at a cost to the passenger of about two American
dollars—innumerable wheelbarrows, especially coolies in never ending
procession, prefer to ignore the sign-boards, if indeed even the slight
minority who can read them consider the prohibition as really meant.
Worst of all, whole regiments of the Tuchun’s own soldiers were moving
eastward, evidently in order to be more immediately available to their
real commander-in-chief, Wu Pei-fu, and more than half the carts that
carried these and their helter-skelter paraphernalia were themselves
frankly disobeying the placarded order. These sharp-tired, two-wheeled
contrivances are magnificently designed for ruining a road, particularly
one built merely of earth, in the shortest possible time, and the result
of the trespassing of even the few thousand we passed during the one day
can readily be imagined. Then there were many spots where the Chinese
genius for never repairing anything until repair is absolutely
unavoidable manifested itself, and here and there some farmer had
frankly chopped the highway in two to make a passage for his
irrigation-ditch, a privilege as time-honored as China’s written
language.

[Illustration:

  An old tablet in the compound of the chief mosque at Sian-fu, purely
    Chinese in form, except that the base has lost its likeness to a
    turtle and the writing is in Arabic
]

[Illustration:

  This famous old portrait of Confucius, cut on black stone, in Sian-fu,
    is said to be the most authentic one in existence
]

[Illustration:

  A large town of cave-dwellers in the loess country, and the terraced
    fields which support it
]

[Illustration:

  Samson and Delilah? This blind boy, grinding grain all day long,
    marches round and round his stone mill with the same high lifted
    feet and bobbing head of the late Caruso in the opera of that name
]

There was a certain satisfaction in seeing Nemesis, in the form of our
staggering, stuttering truck and the regular bus we sometimes passed,
sometimes dropped behind, overtake these lawbreakers whom neither
authority nor public opinion was able to curb. There are few automobiles
in Shensi Province, probably never more than ten, and few of the throng
along even its most nearly modern road are in a frame of mind to meet
one without what the “movie” world calls “registering astonishment.”
Most of them register a very exaggerated form of it, which not only
affects all the muscles of the body but often manifests itself even in
their domestic animals. With their creaking wheelbarrows and a heavy
head wind to hamper their hearing, many permitted us almost to step on
their heels before they showed any inclination to give us the right of
way; but this selfish attitude was more than offset by the alacrity with
which they did so when once their minds were made up. At times the road
immediately ahead was so crowded with coolies and mule-drivers fleeing
wild-eyed at cross-purposes that we were forced to pause and even to
halt until the atmosphere had cleared itself sufficiently to make out
the ruts again. The conventional line of action was to abandon
wheelbarrow, animals, or pole-slung burdens at once and to go, quite
irrespective of destination. The road being from six to ten feet above
the surrounding country, barely wide enough in most places for one car
to run comfortably, with sheer sides and often a deep trench on either
hand, the punishment which overtook many of the trespassers almost
fitted the crime.

The coolies invariably grinned broadly or laughed aloud at their own
discomfiture, with that quick and genuine sense of humor which
transforms their rude, comfortless lives into a kind of perpetual game
and makes them, for all their many less agreeable qualities, almost
lovable. The few travelers of the haughtier classes, however, strove to
preserve the dignified deportment due their high standing, even in the
face of this ridiculous contrivance of inhuman speed from the barbarous
outside world. But they did not always succeed in upholding all the
precepts of Confucius. Among scores, probably hundreds, who performed
extraordinary feats of agility for our beguilement during that day, the
prize should be awarded to a man we passed less than two hours out of
Tungkwan. He was unusually well dressed, as if of the wealthier merchant
class, and was also bound westward, seated high above his stout mule on
the pile of bedding and baggage in cloth saddle-bags which the
well-to-do Chinese long-distance traveler carries between himself and
his saddle. The mule under him was jogging comfortably along on the edge
of his own side of the road—which in most of China is the left—though
not on his own road, leaving us room to pass without more than the
hazard to which the brink-loving chauffeur habitually put us. The animal
showed every evidence of self-control and the ability to handle the
situation without mishap, but he reckoned without his merely human
master. We were perhaps ten yards behind them when the man’s ears and
brain coördinated and he looked around. His first impulse was evidently
to snatch the reins and attempt to better the already perfect behavior
of his mount, but the un-Confucian speed with which we were lessening
the already slight distance between us confirmed him in the impression
that it would be safer to dismount with all seemly haste and leave the
animal to its own fate. Without losing an iota of his poise or dignity,
or even his position for that matter, the haughty gentleman calmly
slipped off his high seat on the ostensibly safe side, still in the
right-angled attitude of a sitting person—and admirably maintained that
pose until he disappeared, seat first, into a cross between a swamp and
a lake which unfortunately bordered the road at that particular place.
The chauffeur and I had the exclusive benefit of this portion of the
performance; the rest was reserved for those bouncing on our baggage in
the truck itself. When the major first became aware of the existence of
the haughty trespasser, it was in the form of a mere head, topped by a
dripping Chinese skull-cap, protruding from the body of water alongside,
and his last view of him as he receded into the horizon was of a
water-gushing figure clinging to the edge of the road and shaking his
open hand after the disappearing truck in the gesture which the Chinese
substitute for shaking the fist, while the mule stood just where he had
been abandoned, patiently awaiting the good will of his temperamental
master.


With the end of October it had turned distinctly colder, which was
fortunate; for the heat of Honan would have made the exertions often
required of us much less of a pastime than they were. Though it had been
smilingly new when it reached the province three months before, our poor
old truck resembled some maltreated, ill fed donkey which even its
heartless Chinese owner must soon turn out to die, yet which faithfully
toiled on to the very best of its ability. So long as it hobbled along
beneath him, the alleged chauffeur had not a worry in the world; but
whenever the slightest hill or sand a bit deeper than usual brought us
to a halt he was as helpless as a Hottentot with an airplane. Having
roared the engine almost out from under its hood, as the only antidote
suggesting itself to him, he sat supinely back in his seat, at the end
of his resources, and waited for some one else to do something about it.
Luckily there are always plenty of coolies within call on any important
route in China; but their natural timidity increased in the presence of
the strange snorting monster that most of them had only seen hastily
from a distance, and it required the force of example to get them to
approach and exert themselves. Thus it came about that, though we had
paid rather generously for the transporting of our expedition from the
boundary to the capital of the province, we furnished the motive-power
ourselves for a considerable fraction of the journey.

For one short distance there were a few rocks and trees; but we were
soon in swirling loess again, dust so thick that it covered our faces as
with a white mask. Now and again we passed a high-walled town, usually
through the inevitable extramural suburb, a long line of ramshackle mud
huts, with men crowded together under the thatch awnings, eating all
manner of strange and unsavory-looking native dishes. Even in the rare
cases when we entered the city itself there was nothing much more
imposing. All morning long Hwa-shan, second only to Tai-shan among the
five sacred mountains of China, walled off the southern horizon with its
series of jagged ranges, shaped not unlike a mammoth sleeping elephant,
their sunless northern slopes like a great perpendicular wall of
beautiful blue-gray color, topped by a wonderfully fantastic sky-line.
About 2200 B.C. an early emperor of what was China in those days, with
this region as a nucleus, used to go to Hwa-shan to offer sacrifices and
to give audiences to his subjects, and the range has been sacred in
Chinese eyes ever since.

One might have fancied that a world war was on again, so often were we
held up by endless east-bound trains of soldiers, most of them lounging
in straw-roofed carts of two wheels, red banners with white characters
flying. It was noticeable that no one but the soldiers had horses, of
which most of China has been drained by her swarming, autonomous
militarists. Companies, even battalions, were busily drilling here and
there; two or three times we passed large military camps in tents of
wigwam shape, with a modernity about them that looked incongruous
against such backgrounds as a great medieval, anachronistic city wall
blackened by the centuries. Twice we passed mule-carts laboring east or
westward with the mails; all day long a distorted line of
telegraph-poles bearing a sagging wire or two stretched haphazard into
the distance.

The country grew a bit more rolling, with even less suggestion of loess,
as we neared Sian-fu. For miles the way was lined with countless graves,
ranging from dilapidated little cones of mud to immense mounds. Bygone
glories lay all over the landscape, monument upon turtle-borne monument,
so much more important from the Chinese point of view than passable
roads. At length the great east gate of Shensi’s capital rose above the
horizon, like some huge isolated apartment-house, and just as the last
daylight of October flickered out we roared our jerky way up its broad
main street to our destination.


To say that I was disappointed in Sian-fu would be somewhat overstating
the case. But as nearly as I can recall the preconceived picture, always
so swiftly melting away in the glaring sunshine of reality, I expected
something more “wild and woolly,” something a bit less like an abridged
edition of Peking. Surely the city that was for centuries the chief
Manchu stronghold of the west, almost their second capital, which had
welcomed the cantankerous old dowager fleeing before the justifiable
wrath of the Western world, which had seen such cruel and unnecessary
bloodshed during the birth of the republic, which had so often been the
outpost on the edge of a great Mohammedan rebellion, might at least have
had some faint thrill, some little hint of hidden danger, left to cheer
up the jaded wanderer. Instead, there was the same flat, placid city
partly within and partly without a mighty stone wall, swarming with the
harmless pullulations of petty traders, cheerfully enduring all the
time-honored discomforts of China, quite like those which lie scattered
like unto the sands of the sea in number over all the vast land that so
long gave Peking its undivided allegiance.

One stepped out of the big post-office compound where most
English-speaking foreigners find hospitality, upon that surprisingly
broad main street, to find it paved with something that has long since
lost the smoothness essential to comfortable rickshaw riding, and lined
for much of its length with houses unusual in northern China, being of
two stories. Along this one may come upon wood-turners quite like those
of Damascus in their methods—a little shallow, frontless shop, a kind of
Indian bow with a loose string for lathe, a sometimes toe-supported
chisel. Perhaps a householder would find more interesting the long rows
of wheelbarrows, filled with huge chunks of that splendid anthracite so
abundant and so cheap in northwestern China, backed up against the curb
and patiently awaiting purchasers. But at the big bell-tower marking the
center of the city this broad street contracts to squeeze its way
through the resounding, dungeon-like arch, and never again regains its
lost breath. Here the paving is of big flagstones, worn so convex that
riding is not merely uncomfortable but well nigh impossible, except to
those who are inured by generations of such experiences, or to whom the
loss of “face” would be fatal. Others, at least new-comers, may rather
welcome this unspoken invitation to dismount and stroll. For though
there may be nothing in it not to be seen in a hundred other places in
China, “sights” are as compact in this busiest street of Sian-fu as if
they had purposely been gathered together here as into a museum.

This main thoroughfare, and the one crossing it at right angles beneath
the bell-tower, cut the Shensi capital into its definite quarters. The
one on the right hand, as one comes in from the east, is, or rather was,
the Manchu city, given over now largely to great open spaces; for here
hundreds of the then ruling class jumped into wells or otherwise
violently did away with themselves, or were violently done away with, to
a number popularly estimated at more than five thousand, when China last
threw off an alien yoke and announced itself a republic. Mere mud walls,
with the brick or stone facings gone to serve in some other capacity,
mark most of the compounds of what were perhaps for centuries Manchu
palaces. Of the palaces themselves there are few traces; dust and bare
earth are much more in evidence, though trees have survived to an extent
almost suggestive of Peking. Beyond this, filling the northwest quarter,
is the Mohammedan section, much more crowded and with few open
spaces—with none, perhaps, except they be public or private courtyards.
There are towns in western China where Moslems must live outside the
walls; but Sian-fu has been more charitable toward her unabsorbable
minority, and even during the great rebellion they retained their
intramural quarter, suffering little more than constant surveillance,
and no doubt occasional reviling. Whether or not they would be driven
back into it again if the worshipers of Allah chose to live in some
other part of town matters not, for custom is as strong a bond with them
as with their fellow-Chinese, and whatever is Moslem about Sian-fu will
be found in this quarter, at least when bedtime comes. Here are all the
mosques; here are women who have scarcely stepped outside their
compounds in a generation, not even with covered faces; from here set
forth each morning the water-carriers, the muleteers, the common porters
who profess the faith of Medina. Outwardly the stroller through this
quarter may find it scarcely at all different from that Chinese half of
the city which lies to the south of its main thoroughfare. He may note
that the skullcaps of men and boys are more likely to be white than
black, that he sees only the most poverty-stricken class of women, and
not many of those, that many of the passers-by have liquid black eyes
and a very trifle more self-assertion, a slightly less lamb-like
expression than the common run of Chinese. Possibly it will occur to
him, too, that more of the little mutton-shop restaurants wide-opening
on the pulsating main street are on the north side of it, and that the
men who tend and patronize them also favor white skullcaps and have
something intangibly redolent of the Near East in features and manners.
But his eye is likely to be caught by more conspicuous things along the
stone-hard thoroughfare,—big whitish loaves of bread nearly two feet in
diameter and only two or three inches thick, the splashes of color of
myriad heaps of ripe persimmons, an occasional woman with natural feet,
relics not of Mohammedan but of Manchu custom. There live half a million
people within the city walls and as many more in the environs, say
unofficial guessers, and about one in ten of these are Moslems and a
bare two thousand Manchus, the latter now mainly servants and
recognizable to the others by their Peking dialect and the somewhat
different dress of the women.


I picked up a man of standing in the Moslem faith one morning and
strolled out to the chief mosque. Outwardly there was nothing to
distinguish it from any Chinese compound, enclosing perhaps a temple, to
judge by the typical tile roofs and the tree-tops rising above it.
Indeed, the courtyard itself, beautiful with its old trees and
buildings, filled with the twitter of birds, which seemed to make it a
kind of sanctuary, restful and peace-loving in atmosphere, would not
easily have been recognized as containing anything but the usual
promiscuous mixture of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs.
There were the same wooden tablets bearing two or three big Chinese
characters leaning out from under the eaves; the same curious little
figures adorned the upturned gables; there had been a genuinely Chinese
indifference about cleaning up after the birds. But closer inspection
brought out the underlying Mohammedanism. Not far from the entrance
stood a big stone tablet, purely Chinese in form, even to the top-heavy
dragon carvings; but the text that covered it was not Chinese but
Arabic. Here and there were other stone-cut bits of that same tongue;
“Yalabi” the not inhospitable group that had gathered about me called
it, though one or two murmured something sounding like “Toorkee.” The
beautiful little three-story tower of pillar-borne roofs turned out to
be the minaret from which a Chinese muezzin singsongs the faithful to
prayer. Certainly it was leaving Chinese custom behind to be required,
however courteously, to leave my shoes at the door of the mosque itself
before I could step through the cloth-hung opening of a building which
up to that moment might have been anywhere in China. But inside we had
at last left China entirely behind. Not a suggestion was to be seen of
those myriad fantastic and demoniacal figures which clutter up the
interior of Chinese temples; the Koran’s prohibition of graven images
had been obeyed to the letter, and the final sanctuary itself, where the
men of Sian-fu’s northwest quarter gather each Friday to turn their
faces westward toward Mecca and pray, was as severely beautiful in its
Arabic style as if it had been directly copied from the Alhambra.

The Islamites of China, or at least of Sian-fu, seem to have lost that
fierce inhospitality toward the unbeliever which makes it impossible for
those not of the faith even to enter many a famous mosque farther west.
Centuries of dwelling among them has given even the intolerant
Mussulmans much of the tolerance, or at least of the easy-going, almost
indifferent attitude, toward their religious paraphernalia, which is so
characteristic of the Chinese. There was no objection, so long as I
removed my shoes, to my wandering at will in every part of the mosque,
to stepping within the niche in the west wall which takes on much of the
sanctity of Mecca, not even to my photographing it. The Chinese Moslems,
indeed, seem never to have heard of the Prophet’s implied injunction
against permitting one’s likeness to be transferred to paper; any
refusal to stand before my kodak among the group that trailed me about
the compound was probably due to mere Chinese superstitions, coupled
with that dread of giving their fellow-men the faintest opening for
ridicule which is one of the strongest traits in the Chinese character.
For these fellows were essentially Chinese, for all their religion,
their swarthier complexions and more Semitic noses; even the few among
them whose features would not have been conspicuous in a throng of Turks
or Arabs had all the little mannerisms, and to all appearances the
identical point of view, except in their alien faith, of their
fellow-countrymen.

Though there is no intermarriage between the Chinese Mohammedans and
their neighbors, the blood that runs in their veins is largely the same.
When the militant faith of Islam swept in upon China from the west, at
the time when it was spreading in all directions, and was halted in our
own only by the activity of Charles Martel in France, the surest way of
escaping the sword was to embrace the new faith; and no one moves more
quickly under the inspiration of fear than the Chinese. Then, too, the
conquerors needed wives, or at least women, and took them from among the
conquered. Perhaps its greatest gains were during the inflow of trade
following the victories of Kublai Khan. For a long time it was, and
probably still is, the custom to adopt Chinese children into Mohammedan
homes. Thus the Turkish or Arabic features of the invaders have been
greatly modified, and even the few who have a trace of these left seem
to be greatly outnumbered by the purely Chinese descendants of those who
embraced the faith under compulsion, so that even within a mosque
compound it is often only by inference, or the catching of some slight
detail of custom or costume, that the stranger can recognize a
“Hwei-Hwei.” Foreigners resident where the Mohammedans are numerous
claim to be able to tell one at sight, if only by a faintly more
stiff-necked attitude toward the rest of the world, a drawing of the
line, beyond which he refuses to be imposed upon, just a trifle closer
to his own rights than do his pacific Chinese fellows. Step into a
temple at any time, and you will receive nothing but profound courtesies
from the Chinese, however unwelcome you may be at that moment, say these
experienced Westerners; enter a mosque when a service is in progress,
however, and while the customary outward politenesses may not be
lacking, the atmosphere will be charged with something that says as
distinctly as a placard, “This is not the time to call.” I had a little
hint of this myself just before taking my departure. A high dignitary,
what we might call a bishop, wearing a strange blue costume and
supported as he tottered along by two lesser officials, issued from an
inner court on his way to perform some ceremony in a private family. My
request to photograph him was declined, not discourteously, but very
definitely and very promptly, as if, being a _hadji_ who had made the
pilgrimage to Mecca, he was well aware of the ban which the Prophet put
on the making of likenesses, whatever might be the general ignorance of
it about him; and something gave me the feeling that if I had attempted
to act contrary to his wishes the smiling group of his coreligionists
about me would have found some unviolent Chinese way of preventing me.

The non-believers among whom they live have, of course, other terms than
“Hwei-Hwei” for the Moslem minority, some of them so far from
complimentary as to be out of usage in any but the lowest society. One
of the less unkindly ones is “Pu-chih-jew-roe-ren,” the don’t-eat-meat
people. The Mohammedans have a name or two for themselves and their
religion so respectful and self-complacent that their fellows decline to
use them, so that the middle ground of “Hwei-Hwei” is the one on which
the two sections of the community commonly meet. This term means
something roughly corresponding to “the associated people,” the single
character for _hwei_ meaning, approximately, “association.” The Y. M. C.
A. which functioned—under a boyhood friend of the major, from Maine, it
turned out—in the quarter of Sian-fu opposite to that of the mosques was
known as the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” which is quite the same as our own
abbreviation, except that our third letter, with all that it stands for,
is left out. This does not of course mean that the religious element is
lacking in the organization as it exists in Sian-fu—quite the contrary
seemed to be the case; but to stroll into the purely Chinese compound,
with its Chinese buildings, its board placards covered with only Chinese
characters, was also not to realize at once that one had entered the
precincts of another alien religion. The “Hwei-Hwei” establishments
looked outwardly pure Chinese partly because of the fear of persecution
in the past; the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” I believe I am safe in saying, did
so mainly because it had been forced to house itself in such quarters as
it found attainable.

It would, by the way, be unfair to the score of men and women, a few of
them our fellow-countrymen, who are giving their best efforts to
educational, medical, and, not disproportionately, I trust, to
denominational matters in the several Christian missions scattered in
and about the Shensi capital, not to make mention of them, even though
they may not vie, in the minds of those of us from the West, in
picturesqueness and local color with the mutton-sellers in the
market-place. They live unmolested, even befriended now by most of the
rank and file and by nearly all the higher officials, and in a comfort
befitting modest human beings; but the time is not so far distant as to
be by any means forgotten when they came nearly all to being martyrs to
their cause. The man who stood all night to his neck in a pond, holding
his baby girl in his arms while the rest of his family was murdered by
the mob that circled for hours around him, is still there at his post,
with a new family to certify that he still has faith in those to whom he
has chosen to give his life’s work. Lest neither side forget entirely,
however, there is a modern brick Memorial School in the western suburbs,
with its bronze tablet in memory of the victims,—one mother, one young
man, and six children ranging from eight to fifteen. It was no
antiforeign feeling, in the accepted use of that phrase, which gave the
missionaries of Sian-fu their most dreadful experience; that is, they
were not attacked either as missionaries or as Westerners. The
revolution that was to bring the republic had come; the hated Manchus
were fair prey at last; and while some of the rougher element no doubt
took full advantage of their sudden brief opportunity, there was
honestly no distinction in the minds of the uneducated masses between
Manchus and any other “outside-country people.”


The temple of Confucius out near the south wall was as peaceful, as
soothing a spot as could have been come upon within sound of human
voices, with that aloofness from the world so befitting the philosophy
of the great sage. But here, too, there was something beneath the
surface not inherent in the ancient architecture or the rook-encircled
tree-tops. A modern touch had been introduced; one suspected the hand,
or at least the influence, of Feng Yü Hsiang, the “Christian General,”
who had only lately ceased to be Tuchun of Shensi to become that of
Honan. Feng’s penchant for anything, ancient or ultra-modern, which will
bring the results he seeks is well known. The Confucian Hall had several
walls covered with very up-to-date placards in colors, ranging all the
way from illustrations of the awful depredations of the fly—it was hard
to imagine the Chinese worrying about a little thing like that—to the
graphically pictured assassination of Cæsar and such scenes as the
Nativity; for Confucius, of course, has nothing of the intolerance
conspicuous in Christianity or Mohammedanism. In another section there
were portraits of many famous foreigners, Washington, Lincoln, and
Franklin being the only Americans among some forty. There is surely
nothing reprehensible, though something more than incongruous, in trying
to make Confucius a modern teacher and his temple a place of propaganda
against the merely physical ills.

So near the temple of Confucius as to be dully audible from it all day
long is the famous “Forest of Monuments.” Centuries ago, you will
remember, a Chinese emperor ordered all the classical books to be
burned. In order that such a catastrophe should never be possible again,
all the important texts in those classics, gathered together from odd
volumes that had escaped the flames, or from the memories of old
scholars, were carved on scores of stone monuments—hundreds, I believe
one might safely say, after wandering through the several long
temple-sheds or shed-temples in which they stand close together in long
rows. There all day long, from the end of the New Year’s debauch of
loafing until the New Year comes around again, stand dozens of men
taking rubbings of the famous texts. The head-high monuments are covered
over with big sheets of what is almost tissue-paper, and coolies and
boys, perhaps not one among whom can read a single character of the many
thousands about them, pound and pound with wooden mallets until copies,
covered with a kind of lamp-black except where the indented characters
have left them white, are ready to be added to the stock of shopkeepers
near the entrance to the grounds. The consumption of these flimsy
facsimiles throughout the Far East is evidently enormous, for the
dullish _rap-a-rap_ of many mallets is seldom if ever silent from sun to
sun.

Off by itself in a conspicuous spot stands the Nestorian Tablet, most
famous of them all, at least to those from the Western world. For on it
is carved the story of the first coming of Christianity to China, long
before even the Jesuits included that land in their field of operations.
To the ignorant Occidental eye it looks quite like any other
turtle-borne stone carved with upright rows of intricate characters,
except that above them there is cut a well defined Greek cross. The
Nestorian Tablet, I believe, was not considered much of a find when it
was first dug up out of a field in the neighborhood of Sian-fu; but the
fame of that jet-black slab has since grown so great that the not
over-distinct characters are likely to become even less so with the
constant taking of rubbings.

No less ebony black is the stone at the far rear of the same compound on
which a few thin white lines sketch what is widely reputed to be the
only authentic portrait of Confucius. The austere simplicity of the
execution and the not unkindly severity of the portrayed face are at
once a contrast and a rebuke to the silly gaudiness of demonology that
clutters almost all Chinese temples. Then, before Sian-fu can be left
behind, there are the famous stone horses, mere bas-reliefs of galloping
steeds done centuries ago, yet so full of life and action as to be the
despair of any living sculptor. These race low along the outdoor wall of
a corridor in the local museum, and imperfectly now, for a vandal all
but destroyed them. He was a Frenchman, and the love of art was so
strong within him that he resolved to steal the famous horses of Sian-fu
and carry them off to his native land. The big stone slabs were
impossible to transport entire; the art-loving Gaul broke each of them
into several pieces, of course with the connivance of bribed Chinese,
and the carts bearing them were already many miles on their way when
they were overtaken. It is such little adventures as this, justly
distributed throughout China, which make it strange that
“outside-country people” are so generally treated with respect by nearly
all the four hundred million, and only very rarely as “foreign devils.”


Perhaps the major would have been detected through his incognito of a
man on a purely personal jaunt anyway, but it was that wire from
Tungkwan concerning motor transportation that gave the game away
entirely. We had barely begun to deplore with our host in Sian-fu the
difficulties of filling portable zinc bath-tubs with hot water that must
be purchased and carried in from the outside, when two Chinese officials
called. One was merely a magistrate, but the other was high up in the
“foreign office” of the province, as well as no less fluent in our
tongue than in his own. He had come at once to pay his respects, to
welcome us to the province, and to bring the startling information that
we were expected to lodge in some yamen or palace which the Tuchun’s
soldiers had spent all day in preparing in a manner befitting the
American military official who was unexpectedly honoring Shensi with his
presence. I was not grieved that the delicate task of declining these
accommodations fell upon the major’s broad shoulders. We could not, of
course, put the Tuchun to any such trouble; we were already installed in
the capacious dwelling of the postal commissioner, who not only was
British but had innumerable other qualifications to recommend him, who
was keeping bachelor hall and was entitled to company, who was a very
old friend—the major did have, I believe, a note of introduction to
him—and who from time immemorial had been the accepted host of any
visitor to Sian-fu whose native tongue was English and whose evolution
had passed the eat-with-your-knife stage. There was no necessity of
divulging such further facts as the fear that even the Tuchun’s ideas of
supreme hospitality would probably include wooden-floored beds, unswept
corners, and a perpetual crowding by curious and irrepressible
retainers, and that civilized toilet-facilities, effective
heating-arrangements, and freedom to come and go without formality were
quite as sure to be lacking. The chief emissary, being versed in foreign
ways, probably knew that all these thoughts were none the less existent
for remaining unspoken, and accepted our declination in what seemed to
be good spirit after far less than half the usual number of repetitions
required by full-blooded Chinese courtesy.

But that did not prevent us from being overwhelmed with official
formalities during our stay in Sian-fu. Formality is fully as sturdy and
omnipresent a crone in China as in Latin America. It would have been the
height of discourtesy, of course, not to make a formal call upon the
Tuchun soon after our arrival; this, in the case of so distinguished a
visitor as the major, a fellow in arms, had to be returned; there was
old precedent for giving us an official feast, which could only properly
be reciprocated by getting our host to invite the Tuchun to an elaborate
luncheon; the civil governor and the corpulent head of the “foreign
office” must at least be honored with a call, which we must be prepared
to have retaliated; it would have been discourteous not to return the
kindness of our first two callers, even though the magistrate was so low
in rank that we could not remain with him more than five minutes; each
group of missionaries in town expected us to dinner, or lunch, or tea,
or, if worse came to worst, to breakfast; the Chamber of Commerce and
other bodies of important citizens expected speeches—fortunately some
engagements hopelessly conflicted—and, not to go particularly into
details, there was a complete round of farewell calls that could not
under any circumstances be omitted. Looking back upon it, I am amazed to
realize that we spent only three full days in Sian-fu, and even at that
managed to see most of its worth-while “sights”; and that we left it
still in tolerably good health in spite of the fact that we accomplished
as many as five incredibly heavy meals, not to call them “banquets,” in
a single day.

This feat was made possible by the fact that Chinese feasts come at
about eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon. Thus we could
stagger away from either of these just in time to sit down with a
deceptive smirk of pleasure at the repast prepared by some of the
foreign groups with a special view to assuaging our ravenous road
appetites. In anything concerned with the Tuchun at least, we were
obliged to save “face” both for him and for ourselves by bumping about
town in a “Peking cart” such as all Sian-fu residents of standing
regard as one of their most indispensable possessions. In fact, the
Tuchun sent his own for us. There were two of them, gleamingly new,
but nicely graded as to caste in details invisible to us, yet as
plainly publishing to the Chinese the distinction between a great
foreign official like the major and a mere traveler like myself as if
their blue cloth sides had been daubed with red characters. A huge,
well groomed mule drew each of them; they were upholstered, padded,
and cushioned not only within but on the sort of veranda where those
of lower caste may sit, while the two wheels were magnificent examples
of that universal to-hell-with-the-public attitude of China which
dictates great sharp iron-toothed tires that would destroy any road in
record time, yet which have absolutely no justification except
swank—and perhaps the fear of skidding on wet corners during the
three-mile-an-hour dashes about town.

In calling upon a Chinese official one first sends one’s Chinese card
over by a retainer, in order that the great man may be prepared. Within
half an hour or so one may follow, presenting another card to some
underling who will be found waiting where, in the case of a Tuchun, one
might otherwise be casually run through with the naked bayonets which
the swarms of soldiers about such a place so generously display. The
underling disappears for some time, because the great man is sure to
hold forth in the far interior of the flock of buildings filling his
long compound, where he could be reached only with difficulty by an
unauthorized visitor, even though he knew its devious passages well. In
time he returns, and marching before the visitors and holding their
cards above his head spread out fan fashion, names to the rear, like a
hand at poker, he conducts the way. Gradually more important
functionaries take up his task, until the callers are invited to seat
themselves in a sort of ante-guest-room by a man who may even be of high
enough rank to dare to open conversation with them. This anteroom is
usually furnished with a platform built into one wall and upholstered
into a divan littered with red cushions, with a somewhat raised space,
or a foot-high table, in the center. Tuchuns, however, even of the far
interior, have in most cases adopted a foreign style in this as in
military uniforms, and one finds oneself instead in a larger and very
commonplace room furnished with a long, cloth-laid table surrounded by
chairs, with at most a Chinese scroll or two on the walls as the only
hints of local color. But a flock of servants and orderlies, setting a
little handleless cup of tea before each guest and under no
circumstances permitting him to empty it, keep him reminded of his
latitude and longitude. If he is of any importance, he is also furnished
a cigarette—by having a single one laid on the cloth in front of
him—which, if he shows any tendency to consume it, some one lights for
him before he realizes it. If he is a man of extraordinarily high rank,
such as a military attaché from “Mei-guo” on the other side of the
earth, the principal flunky offers him a cigar. This invariably is of
some sad Manila brand—the Chinese word for cigar is “Lüüsung-yen,” or
“Philippine tobacco”—this time in the box, and usually a full box,
whether in the hope that he will not be so bold as to disturb the
symmetry of the precious contents or because cigar-smokers are so rare
in China that the box seldom loses its pristine fullness. At length the
great man himself appears from behind a blue cloth door reverently
lifted by several soldiers; there is a general uprising about the table;
the host and his guests each fervently shake hands with themselves and
bow times innumerable, like automatons hinged only at the waist; and at
a graceful gesture of the Tuchun’s hand the gathering finally subsides
into the chairs and proceeds to converse on things of no importance as
fluently as the guests’ command of Chinese or the ministrations of an
interpreter permit. If the call is nothing more than that, it ends in
the anteroom where it began. After another long series of bows the
guests are accompanied to the door, and as much beyond it as befits
their rank. This is one of the most delicate points of Chinese
etiquette, the one on which the foreigner, at least if he is newly
established in the country, is most apt to stumble. For there is an
intricate gradation of ranks in society even in “republican” China, with
many factors modifying each under different circumstances; and not to
see one’s guest far enough is as serious a social blunder as to
accompany him beyond the point to which his caste entitles him. In a
Tuchun’s yamen—in theory they call such a place _gung-shu_, or “people’s
house,” since the rise of the republic—there may be nearly a dozen doors
or openings of some sort between the inner depths and the front
_p’ai-lou_, and at each of them courtesy requires much “you first” stuff
and pretended protests from the guest against his host’s going any
farther, so that when the final leave-taking is far out on the threshold
of the last gate, as in the case of an official representative of great
America, a glance at a watch is likely to be startling when one finally
does at last break away.

Our first call on the Tuchun of Shensi was at his military headquarters
in the ex-Manchu quarter of town. Here his predecessor, Feng Yü Hsiang,
had turned the largest available open space within the city walls into a
drill-field with long rows of modern brick barracks. On the big
stone-and-mud wall enclosing all this there were painted at frequent
intervals huge Chinese characters. But these are not the shoe and
tobacco advertisements the resemblance to a baseball-field might lead
the uninformed stranger to conclude; they are some of those moral
precepts with which the “Christian General” is famous for surrounding
his soldiers. Much of the material for wall and barracks, by the way,
was said to have come from the palaces in which the Dowager Empress of
sinister memory lived with her pet eunuch during the year following her
flight from Peking in 1900. The former military governor saw no good
reason to keep up this imperial establishment under a republican régime,
and now there remains but little more than a field scattered with broken
stones where less than a year before our visit there had been something
mildly resembling the Forbidden City in Peking. Speaking of the crafty
old shrew in question, we no longer wondered so much at her cantankerous
disposition when we realized that she rode all the way from Peking to
Sian-fu in a “Peking cart,” eating the dust of the loess cañons, and
spending her nights at the odoriferous inns along the way, some of which
still boast of that fact by their names or decorations.

The Tuchun’s dinner in the major’s honor was an exact replica, except in
location, of the call of respect we had made the day before—up to the
time when we had begun to take our departure on that occasion. This time
the whole party began about five o’clock to drift toward the
“banquet-hall” at another end of the compound, with as much contention
at every portal along the way as if each had been a dead-line upon which
a nest of machine-guns had its muzzles trained. The guests included all
the foreigners in town—that is, adults of the male gender—even to a
Japanese official who had come to collect an indemnity from the province
for the killing of a stray cotton merchant from Nippon; and the flock of
Chinese officials mingled with them lacked no one worth while in the
political circles of Sian-fu. The three provincial military chieftains
with whom we dined during our western journey all go in for
foreign-style dinners on official occasions, and attain their intentions
in this respect as far as local information and the extraneous learning
of their cooks can carry them. The result is an entertaining gustatory
hybrid resembling its alien parent perhaps a bit more than its Chinese.
Of the irrepressible swarming of persistent flies over all the
sumptuousness of that lengthy table I really should have said nothing,
for it is surely not the duty of a Tuchun to squander his military
genius against such insignificant enemies. That the soldiers flocking
almost as thickly about us should have passed slices of bread in their
hands instead of using a plate was as genuinely Chinese as were their
several other minor _faux pas_, and merely improved the local color. At
least the great Oriental institution of _gam-bay_-ing held its unaltered
own, even in the presence of half a dozen Protestant missionaries and a
chief guest of honor who lamentably failed to hold up his end of that
pastime.

[Illustration:

  The east gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the capital of Shensi,
    rises like an apartment-house above the flat horizon
]

[Illustration:

  All manner of aids to the man behind the wheelbarrow are used in his
    long journey in bringing wheat to market, some of them not very
    economical
]

[Illustration:

  The western gate of Sian-fu, through which we continued our journey to
    Kansu
]

[Illustration:

  A “Hwei-Hwei,” or Chinese Mohammedan, keeper of an outdoor restaurant
]

The privacy of the military governor—and therefore usually the
dictator—of a Chinese province must indeed be slight. When he has
guests, swarms of soldiers and servants crowd every doorway and fill
every window with staring faces, if, indeed, they do not flock into the
room itself. Every joke, every slightest scrap of information picked up
from the conversation is instantly, and often more or less audibly,
passed out into the yard and relayed to the last coolie within the
compound. Most Tuchuns have the reputation of double-dealing to feather
their own nests; how on earth they ever succeed in privately arranging
any of their little deals is a mystery, for there must surely always be
some underling about to listen to the conversation. This is not
eavesdropping but the frank presence of servants and the like, even of
mere strangers struck with curiosity, in situations where the worst bred
ignoramus in the Western world would never dream of intruding; and as
the Chinese desire for privacy is as slight as their sense of it, such
intrusions are not only seldom rebuked but probably in many cases not
even noticed. Even a private home is little more respected than a public
office. When the Tuchun came to lunch with us his soldiers poured into
the house of our host, crowding the doorway of dining-room or parlor
and, as we ate or chatted, fingering their Lugers, unconsciously
perhaps, but as if they were expecting us at any moment to attempt the
assassination of their chief.

Shensi’s ruler at the time of our visit had been civil governor of the
province under the “Christian General.” Upon his own accession to chief
power he retained, and apparently honestly attempted to keep up, many of
the reforms and policies of his predecessor, though he made no
profession of Christianity. Feng, for instance, had abolished the “red
light” district and actually driven the inmates out of the province, a
very unusual and to most of the population an incomprehensible action.
Several times the Sian-fu chief of police had petitioned the new Tuchun
to allow these places to be reëstablished, because they brought large
increases to the provincial treasury—to say nothing, of course, of the
liberal “squeeze” to all officials concerned. His refusal was still
apparently genuine at the time of our visit. But pity the poor officials
of present-day China who wish to be honest and progressive, and perhaps
even moral in the Western sense; a Tuchun must at least have money to
pay his troops, must he not? When Feng took over the province of Shensi
it had been for some time under the rule of a former bandit, who had
followed an honored precedent in collecting all land and other possible
taxes for years in advance. This left the new Tuchun the rather scanty
_likin_ taxes and a few minor sources of income on which to run his
government and keep his troops up to their unusually high efficiency. It
could not be done; and after he had appealed to the Christian
missionaries to show him any possible means to avoid resorting to that
extreme, Feng fell back upon the lucrative tax on opium exported from
his province or passing through from Kansu beyond, however illegal such
traffic is and whatever his personal feelings toward it were. A mere
local detail this; but it is symbolical of hundreds of problems facing
those who really wish to work for the future betterment of China, and it
is not difficult to guess what happens in the case of the many more weak
or indifferent men who have attained to some degree of power, with still
no vision beyond the universal corruption which sank its roots deep into
Chinese society in the old imperial days.




                              CHAPTER XXI
                         ONWARD THROUGH SHENSI


Our good British host of Sian-fu conceived the nefarious project of
sending us on to Lanchow in “Peking carts”; but the few unavoidable
churnings in those of the Tuchun had firmly convinced us that anything
else was preferable. Anything else boiled down to a single choice,—the
transformation of pack-mules in the postal service into riding-animals
by the simple expedient of disguising them as such with the American
army saddles and bridles we had brought with us. For militarists had
drained the provinces of horses; good riding-mules could be bought, if
at all, only for a fortune, and could not be hired for so long and
hazardous a journey under any circumstances. We took two carts also, it
is true, a “large” and a “small” one in Chinese parlance, though the
difference in size was not great and the three mules of the one hardly
better than the two of the other. But these were for the baggage and our
two servants.

An inventory of the whole expedition may be mildly of interest, not so
much for the information of other travelers as to show that the most
modest of foreigners can scarcely escape a princely retinue when they
travel in the interior of China. The “large” cart exacted forty-four
dollars; the small one twenty-seven dollars; each pack-mule sixteen
dollars, with a dollar “tea-money” at the end (specified in the
contract). This included a driver for each cart, a _mafu_, or groom, on
foot to attend to the riding-animals—for most of the way, it turned out,
we had two of them—all self-sustaining, except their mere lodging at
inns and, of course, a certain inevitable “squeeze” through
understandings with innkeepers. For a journey of fifteen hundred _li_,
or four hundred and fifty miles, the sum total did not seem excessive,
particularly as it was merely in “Mex” and but little more than half
what it would have been in American currency. The trip, we learned, was
usually divided into eighteen stages and could scarcely be made with
such an outfit in less than sixteen days. We took the precaution of
promising a dollar a day _cumshaw_ to each of the cart-drivers for every
day they bettered the ordinary schedule.

Fifty _li_ beyond Sian-fu the alleged road went down into the broad
river-bed of the Wei, a sturdy tributary of the Hoang Ho and in certain
seasons several times wider than it was now. Far out at the edge of the
water was gathered a mighty multitude waiting for the very inadequate
ferry to set them across to the large walled town of Sienyang on the
further shore. A typical Chinese ferry is a marvelous example of the
worst way to cross a river, and this one was no exception to the rule.
Out in the sand close alongside the still broad stream there were
densely crowded together, in all the disorder of which the Chinese, who
are adepts at it, are capable, carts piled high with all sorts of
awkward cargo, mules, donkeys, and a few old hacks of horses, all under
cumbersome packs, laden wheelbarrows by the score, and coolies without
number, each carrying with him a donkey-load of something or other. All
this assortment, not to mention dozens of mere Chinese travelers of less
good-natured mien than the coolies, and all sorts of journeying odds and
ends scattered through the throng, was lying in wait for one of three
clumsy, home-made barges which at long intervals poled and singsonged
themselves from shore to shore. Wherever a Chinese crowd gathers there
quickly flock those eager to minister to its wants, so that out here on
the bare sand there had sprung up several straw-mat restaurants, a
shoemaker’s hasty establishment, a blacksmith-shop, which could have
been packed up entire in five minutes and carried off over the smithy’s
shoulder, for those who wished to take advantage of the delay by having
a horse shod or some unavoidable repair done, while the hawkers of
everything hawkable to such customers struggled through the chaotic mob
chanting their wares in all the tones from diphtheritic hoarseness to
the shrillest of falsettos. Then of course there were the inevitable
beggars, young and old, sickly and sturdy, slinking in and out through
every possible opening.

It would have been un-Chinese to take turns or conform to any other
system that might have made easier the task in hand, so that when the
first of the three craft, more overloaded than any American “trolley” in
the rush hour, began to show signs of where it purposed to land, there
was a helter-skelter in that direction which resulted in many personal
discomfitures. Luckily foreigners are usually given a wide berth in such
stampedes; whether it is out of sheer respect or merely due to some old
tradition of one of these strange-looking “outside-country people”
suddenly “making his hand into a ball” and chastising in an
unprecedented manner those who were so unfortunate as to jostle him,
there is almost always alacrity and generally respectful cheerfulness in
giving one of them full right of way. Personally we might not have taken
advantage of this attitude and made chaos more chaotic by demanding
first place; but Chang, like any Chinese in the service of a foreigner,
could not resist impressing that fact upon his fellow-countrymen; and
before we realized it he had somehow forced our expedition to the front
at the spot where the boat at last concluded to ground. For it would not
have been conventional to prepare a place where the craft might actually
land, any more than it would have been for it to carry a real gang-plank
in place of the two warped and writhing slabs that were at length
disentangled from the welter of everything on board and slid over the
side. For one thing, a real gang-plank could probably not have survived
some band of thieves for a single night; for another, how could the
swarms of tattered men hanging about either shore earn their meager food
if carts and wheelbarrows could be gotten aboard without their
assistance? Had there been any suggestion of authority to keep the one
throng back far enough for the other to disembark, the boat’s stay might
at least have been cut in half. But China is preëminently the land of
individual rather than communal liberty, and there ensued something
superior by many times to any college rush. That a few who wished to
disembark had been swept back again upon the boat, and vice versa, was
of course no unusual experience. When at last comparative quiet began to
settle down about us, and the half-dozen polemen at the stern took up
their weird chantey, we found that while we ourselves and most of our
animals were on board none of our carts had won the mêlée. Carts could
not get on board under their own natural motive-power, but, having been
unhitched, they must be bodily lifted and shouldered up the crazy
substitutes for gang-planks.

Though the opposite shore was a stone-paved road close under the city
wall, landing facilities were far worse than where we had embarked. For
one thing, the craft grounded fully ten feet from shore and could not be
coaxed to move in either direction until all the coolies, who made up
three fourths of the passenger-list, had been driven overboard, packs
and all, and left to scramble as best they could up the stone facing of
the bank. Many of them were carrying cotton in loose bundles or in high
cone-shaped baskets, and now and then in their shrieking, disorganized
struggles a boll or two of the precious stuff fell into the muddy water.
The dismay at such a disaster, though only on the part of the owner or
carrier, who screamed with excitement until he had rescued the
threatened bit of property, was not merely both absurd and pathetic, but
a striking commentary on the poverty of China’s great masses. Eventually
the boat was poled close enough to what should and could easily have
been a stone runway so that the frightened animals could be forced to
walk the teetering plank without more than two or three of them falling
overboard, and some two hours after we had reached the river our own
carts were manhandled ashore from a following boat and our expedition
was once more organized.

Thousands of people, and probably at least hundreds of carts, cross the
Wei at Sienyang every day in the year, and have done so for centuries;
yet the several simple little improvements that would make the crossing
a brisk matter of routine have evidently never been thought of—except by
critical foreigners—much less ever attempted. No Chinese concerned would
feel really happy if the thing were not done in the very hardest
possible way consistent with its being accomplished at all; that would
make him feel out of touch with his worshiped ancestors. Besides, whom
do you expect to make those improvements? Not the local authorities, for
they probably get more “squeeze” under the present system; not the
boatmen, for the longer the boat is in loading the fewer times they will
have to pole it across; not, certainly, the flocks of hangers-on who
find in the difficulties of embarking and disembarking their only source
of livelihood; and surely not the passenger, for his only interest is to
get across, not to make it easier for other people, for whose weal or
woe he has a Chinaman’s supreme indifference.


Beyond Sienyang the whole dust-hazy landscape was covered as far as the
eye could see with graves, not the little conical spatters of earth to
be seen in myriads all over China, but immense mounds by the score, some
of them veritable mountains—and nowhere a touch of any color but the
yellow brown of rainless autumn. Once perhaps there had been small
forests about these tombs, but at most now there was left a rare broken
stone horse of clumsy workmanship and perhaps the remnants of a few
other more or less mythological beasts. What noble beings had been
worthy the heavy task of piling these great hills over their mortal
remains, or when they had graced the earth, no one along the way could
tell us. Once or twice a day we passed a huge oblong old bell of
elaborate design that had once hung in a temple, and was now rusting
away in some moistureless mud-hole, like the abandoned sugar-kettles
which litter several islands of the West Indies. Perhaps the temples
themselves had fallen entirely away again into the dust from which even
holy edifices are constructed in the loess country, and left these
abandoned bells as the only remembrance of their former existence.
Sometimes one of these had been rescued, whether out of piety,
superstition, or some lucrative inspiration, and hung in the one and
only tree of which an occasional larger village boasted.

On the second midday we lunched in a cave, and paid even for the water
drunk by the mules, as well as their chopped straw and beans; or at
least their owners did. In fact, cave dwellings had become almost
universal, and were to remain so for many days to come; villages, whole
towns of caves, stretched in row after row up the face of great loess
cliffs, like the terraced fields that covered every foot of the
mountainous world from river-bottom to the crest of the farthest visible
range. In all this tumbled expanse often the only touch of color was the
persimmons, like big orange-tinted tomatoes—persimmons by the
ox-cart-load; wheelbarrows creaking under their double straw boxes of
persimmons; baskets of them hanging from the shoulder-poles of jogging
coolies; wandering persimmon-sellers everywhere singing their merits;
millions of them for sale, millions more being dried in the sun. Even
the dust which covered everything and everybody without distinction
could not disguise the persimmons’ splash of color, nor hamper the
natives from wolfing them entire as often as their worldly wealth
warranted the acquisition of one. Dust and skin aside, we also found
them the best thing late autumn had to offer—a drink, a lunch, and a
dessert all in one.

We crawled out of our sleeping-bags at five each morning and were off at
six, except on the few days when we varied that program by making it an
hour earlier. With the sun so low that it only overtook us some twenty
_li_ away, those daily departures were not only dark but increasingly
cold. For though men working in the fields were still sometimes stripped
to the waist, at least when the cloudless sun was high, as late as the
tenth of November, any suggestion of shadow or of night air became more
tinged with serious meaning as the earth underfoot rose higher and
higher above sea-level. The roads for the most part were still cañons,
sometimes mightier cañons than we had even yet seen; at others they
clambered over loess ridges and hills, gashing themselves deeply into
these wherever time, traffic, and soil coincided sufficiently to do so.
In strict speech there were no roads at all, as there seldom are
anywhere in China; not that they were merely atrocious routes of
transportation, but because the Chinese scheme of things does not make
provision even for a place on which to build a road. Every foot of
territory pays a land-tax; the unfortunate landholder on whose property
the public chooses to trespass in its strenuous struggles to get itself
and its produce from one place to another must pay for that which
belongs to him only in name. The result is that a road is a homeless
orphan, welcome nowhere, driven from field to field, and ruthlessly done
away with by plow or shovel whenever an opportunity offers. The attempts
of each of China’s myriad tillers of the soil to chase the un-public
highway off his own precious little patches of earth, added to the fact
that a driver has only a limited control over the wanderings of his
lead-mule, and has no training in directness and time-saving himself,
make the average Chinese road the most incredible example of aimless
wandering on the face of the earth. There are no fences in this land of
walls; the Chinese walls in his home, his towns, his country, but never
his fields, which would seem to need it most. For traffic has not the
slightest consideration for the damage it may do. It marches serenely
over newly planted grain or ripening crops whenever there is the least
incentive to do so, and the only redress of the owner is some such
feeble protest as digging traverse trenches at frequent intervals along
the edge of his land in the usually vain hope that carts will be obliged
to keep outside them, or to take advantage of some favorable season of
slight travel to uproot the pesky road and throw it away entirely.

There were defiles so narrow through the great loess cañons that carts
could not have passed a sedan-chair; and through these came such a
constant train of traffic that it is strange the lighter west-bound
travel moved at all. Ponderous two-wheeled carts, weighing several times
as much as our farm-wagons, drawn by six or seven mules, were not
uncommon. All had at least three animals, one in the shafts—and many of
these shaft-mules were splendid specimens of mulehood—the rest in front
in pairs or trios, with perhaps a lone lead-mule setting the pace. Rope
traces running through a large iron ring suspended from each of the
shafts attached all the animals directly to the axle. A Chinese
shaft-mule’s life is no sinecure. At every incessant bump and lurch of
the massive cart he is similarly jolted by the two cumbersome logs that
imprison him; if the cart overturns he must go with it; and all day long
his head is held painfully erect, not by a mere bit, but by a rawhide
thong between his upper lip and the gums. The other animals get off
little more cheaply, and with the wicked loads of wheat in long slender
bags which endlessly poured in past us from the west, the gasping of the
animals as they toiled in the deep sand-like loess, particularly when
the cañon led steeply upward over the high ridges which here and there
cut across the route, was like the death-rattle of beasts suddenly
stricken down.

Under each axle of these carts hung a long bell of cylinder shape, and
the dull booming of scores of these could be heard for miles before or
behind them. Apparently these wheat-trains traveled day and night. We
met them at dawn with all the signs of having already been on the road
for hours; all through the night the booming of passing carts could be
heard by any one who cared to lie awake; very rarely did we come upon
them halted long enough even to feed the jaded animals. There were at
least two men on every load, one, whom we suspected to be the driver off
duty, stretched out at full length and apparently sleeping as soundly as
if the jolting, careening sacks of wheat were a sailor’s hammock. There
was really nothing strange in this; the Chinese are trained from birth
to sleep under all manner of catch-as-catch-can conditions. With the
loess soil constantly swirling about under the least disturbing
circumstances, and with a high wind often blowing, the Chinese on their
carts, as well as those astride or afoot for that matter, looked
ludicrously like an endless procession of clowns with flour-powdered
faces, or of mimes wearing death-masks.

Here and there the file was broken by some more leisurely conveyance,—a
cart with an ox in the shafts and perhaps a steer and a donkey in front,
sometimes with still more incongruous combinations. The narrow cañons
were often so congested with beast-drawn traffic that the hundreds of
wheelbarrows had to join the pole-shouldering coolies and other
pedestrians on the paths along the cliffs high above. These _tui-chu_
(push-carts), as the Chinese call them, had every manner of aid, from a
child to a donkey, which we had seen in use in the wheelbarrow brigades
east of Sian-fu, and one ingenious fellow had rigged up a large sail
over his load and was creaking along nicely before the strong west wind.
I never ceased to wonder where the never ending stream of coolies was
coming and going from and to, and why. Their toilsome tramps to change
places, bag and baggage, seemed a mere waste of effort, like carrying
sand from one river-bed to another.

The coolies of Shensi, or at least most of those we saw in that
province, seem to long to be mistaken for scholars—an honor, of course,
which would bring joy to any Chinese heart, in contrast to the insult it
would often convey in some other lands. Some clever salesman had
profited by this strange Celestial longing by selling to more than half
the coolies we met a huge pair of rimless spectacles made of plain
plate-glass, and of course of no optical value whatever. Had they been
in the form of goggles, one might have concluded that they were merely a
protection from the dust, but there was nothing about them that could by
any stretch even of a coolie imagination be considered anything but
ornamental.

Cues have appreciably decreased in China since the fall of the alien
dynasty which required them as a badge of submission; but once a custom
is established among the conservative Chinese it is harder to eradicate
than ragweed, however uncomplimentary may have been its origin. It may
be a slight exaggeration to say that every other man we met on our
western trip wore a cue, but certainly there is still wound about coolie
heads material enough for all the hair-nets that America can consume in
another century. Old men, though only a tiny gray braid may be left
them, would, it is said, “rather lose their heads than their tails.” In
this west country boys are as likely to be adorned with them as not; in
any busy street the itinerant hair-dresser may be seen combing out the
long black tresses of his coolie clients, calmly seated out of doors
even in the depths of winter, and often adding a switch for good
measure. Among upper-class Chinese the cue has largely disappeared, but
with the masses it is as common a feature in many provinces as the long
pipes protruding from the backs of coolie necks when not in use.

A corpse journeying to its ancestral home between two pole-joined mules,
the white rooster demanded by ancient custom sitting on top of the
ponderous coffin in a little wicker cage, was one of the infrequent,
though not rare, sights of the journey. Sometimes we met a long file of
black pigs moving slowly eastward under the impulse of several patient
men, one marching in front unarmed, the rest with very long but rather
harmless whips, and all singing to coax on their charges. It was an
addition to my slight knowledge of natural history to learn that hogs
are moved by music; but there is no telling what Chinese music may
accomplish until it has been tried. We rode, of course, or rested our
cramped legs by walking, up out of the cañons as much as possible. Here
the variance in the point at which a man or a mule registers dizziness
sometimes led to serious differences of opinion between ourselves and
our mounts. Along most of the cliffs high above the sunken roads there
are several paths, some of them already appreciably wearing down toward
the ultimate common level, others narrow ridges of a rather harder
streak of earth with barely room on them for two feet at a time.
Invariably, whenever there was a choice in paths, the mule would choose
the one closest to the edge of the road chasm, the very edge of it, if
possible, often with a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more directly
under the off stirrup—and the loess soil everywhere seeming ready to
collapse at any moment. Sometimes a path worked its way out on the face
of the cliff before one noticed, to where it would have been as
impossible to dismount as to turn about, and the helpless rider could
only prayerfully intrust his future to the mule, wholly free apparently
from any suggestion of the trepidation which ran in hot sprays up the
human spine. Certainly a mule has no worry-bacteria in his system—and
probably has fewer troubles in a lifetime than almost any other living
creature, which should be food for reflection to worrying humanity. Once
I had the hair-lifting experience of seeing most of the rear end of the
major’s mule just in front of me go over the cliff with a crumbling bit
of path, but the animal never for a moment lost his mulish poise, nor
hesitated when the next chance offered to take the most edgy of the
paths again.


On the evening of the second day out of Sian-fu our muleteers
respectfully sent word that they would like us to start “ten _li_
earlier” next morning, “because the road went up-stairs.” That was one
of the contrasts between Chinese mule-drivers and those, for instance,
of South America. Here they were always ready to start at any hour we
named, and sometimes asked us to advance it. We accordingly got up three
miles earlier, and before the day was done congratulated ourselves on
having done so. All morning the road, freeing itself from loess cañons
and taking to river-valleys and ever higher plains, ascended at so
gradual a pace that we hardly realized we were rising unless we glanced
back at the lower and lower world behind. But just beyond the village
where we made our usual hour-and-a-half noonday halt, the earth surged
up like some tidal wave suddenly commanded to stand still. The road did
indeed go up-stairs; nothing could have been a more exact description of
its zigzagging course, which at length, hours after we had left the
village, brought us in straggling formation to the summit, four thousand
feet above it, then plunged even more swiftly down into the bed of a
slight stream which trickled away through a region of huge rocks and a
formation for a time more solid than pure loess. But this was only a
brief and imperfect respite. The crumbling soil soon monopolized the
landscape again, and for many days afterward filled our eyes and
nostrils with its stifling and all-penetrating dust. Peculiar sights,
indeed, the loess often gives. Fertile enough with sufficient water, one
might easily have concluded that not a drop of rain had ever fallen
here. Mud would have meant more prosperity, but when it does rain these
already ankle-deep roads at the bottoms of the great cañons must surely
be in close proximity to the infernal regions.

Any suggestion of this was spared us, however, as we were denied any
hint of the great transformation that spring brings to the loess
country, turning it from the delicate light brown that is as unbroken
during the autumn and winter as the blue of the cloudless sky overhead
to a vernal green which those who have seen it say is seldom surpassed
in beautiful landscapes. Such loess cliffs as no words can describe
became commonplace, almost unnoticed sights along the way, cliffs
falling gradually from sky to abyss so far below as almost to seem
bottomless. All the population for long distances burrowed in human
rabbit-warrens dug in these cliffs, row above row of caves, like cities
of ten- or twelve-story cliff-dwellings. Many of the caves proved at
close sight to be ruined and abandoned; usually these were fallen in,
with a great round hole in the roof. Of course the former inhabitants
had dug a new home elsewhere—unless they were buried in the old one—and
the population was not so dense as the myriad holes in the
mountain-sides suggested. There was a great difference, too, in the
grades of dwellings even among such unlikely homes as these. A cave
could be as noisome a hut as any hovel out on a plain; sometimes a mere
hole in the cliff looked like nothing in particular, until a closer
glance showed it to be the entrance to a long passageway leading to
several courts that were surrounded by a dozen or more arched
cave-dwellings, perhaps all well below the level of the sunken road.
Sometimes the proud family had even gone to the trouble of putting an
elaborate inscription over the doorway, and had fitted it with wooden
sills. But this was unusual, for with such slight exceptions literally
everything was made of the quickly crumbling earth,—the “devil screen”
across the way from the entrance (though this very important feature of
Chinese architecture was rare in the west), the wall filling up the
great arch of the cave, with a small door cut in it, even the _k’ang_,
or stone-hard family bed, inside.

Thus everything, walls, houses, cliffs, terraced hillsides, even the
dreary cave-dwellers themselves, had the selfsame monotonous color, and
in all the autumn landscape there was nothing to break it, to give it
the faintest contrast. A sad place surely was this for man to live, like
an aged world that was wearing out and would soon be fit only to be
discarded. Indeed, the process of dissolution was going on under our
very eyes. There were often places where the road had very recently
dropped away into a mammoth cañon so deep that to peer over the brink
was to catch the breath in what might easily have been a spasm of
dizziness; yet heavily laden carts still shrieked and lashed their way
along the sheer edge of it, and all the miscellaneous traffic passing
the spot where the next crumbling might carry it to perdition gave it no
more attention than Chinese give to the open, unprotected, curbless
wells that abound all over China like gopher-holes in our western
prairies.

A world wearing away, and apparently there is no cure for it. The trees
which might have held it together with their roots, to say nothing of
the rain they would bring, were completely grubbed out centuries ago by
those very ancestors whom the wretched modern inhabitants so highly
honor. Those short-sighted forebears were all for the past, or at best
for what was to them the present; and their living descendants have no
choice but to follow the same short-sighted course, for the present is
an unremitting struggle for mere existence now, and the future surely
holds out little promise. To repair the fatal tree-wastefulness of their
revered ancestors would require something like forcing every man in
China to plant a tree a week, promptly lopping off the head of any one
who cuts one down, and keeping this up as long as their ancestors took
to grub out the forests that once graced the land; that is, for
hundreds, if not thousands, of years.


We think we know something of poverty and physical suffering in America,
but in crowded, despoiled China we realize our ignorance. Here are
perhaps the lowest forms of human beings, creatures in the image of man
who are not merely akin to beasts but a kind of living offal. Nor are
the dregs of the population to be found in this more roomy western part
of the country; there the poorest might be called a middle class, though
they are so poor that they burrow in caves and are out long before dawn
and late into the night with basket and wicker shovel wandering the
roads ready to fight for the droppings of passing animals. Perhaps there
are some of them who take life by the forelock and force it more or less
to do their bidding. But though here and there were what we would call
“tough-looking characters,” even they seemed to be harmless, at least
where foreigners were concerned. We hear much in these days of the
anarchy of China, and in so far as a responsible, effective government
goes the word is not ill chosen. Yet there is a cohesion, a momentum in
Chinese society, in the great masses that populate the land, which makes
a failure of formal government mainly a surface manifestation, with
often scarcely a ripple disturbing the even flow of life in general, as
it has gone on for centuries and perhaps will for centuries to come. In
all west Shensi we saw hardly a soldier, and almost as little of any
other coercive force; yet though there may not have been any bandits
left in the province, as its Tuchun boldly asserted, nothing would have
been easier than for any group of these thousands upon thousands of
sturdy coolies for ever plodding to and fro, or the village crowds which
gathered in the inn-yards to watch us eat modest noonday lunches which
must have seemed to them princely, to fall upon a few stray foreigners
lost in the great sea of Chinese humanity and despoil them of what in
this land of utter poverty was their great riches. Not only was there no
suggestion of such a thought, not only did they show us all the respect
which the most haughty participant in extraterritoriality could demand;
they were frankly friendly, neither out of fear nor hope of favor. Given
the slightest provocation and they invariably smiled; the men, that is;
the cripple-footed women never, and small wonder. Behind us lay a
constant trail of childlike comment on our appearance, and especially on
the stirrups of our army saddles. The Chinese are so minutely
conservative that even to wrap a patch of leather about something which
they have always hitherto seen without it is to arouse amazement. Often
this amazement expressed itself in a burst of laughter, but never once
was there anything about its unforced heartiness which could have been
taken for ridicule. Possibly they did find covert ways to make fun at
our expense; they nearly always called us _moo-sha_, for instance, which
means missionary. But there was every reason to believe that this
startling error was due to pure honest ignorance, perhaps once in a
while to a desire to be complimentary; never, I feel sure, was there a
deliberate attempt even to be unkindly.

The major likened the rank and file, the coolies at least, to our
Southern negroes, with whom his army experience had given him a
considerable acquaintance. There is a certain similarity of temperament;
one might, indeed, follow up the thought and find a resemblance between
the more morose, yet still Chinese, non-laboring classes and the mulatto
or lighter types of negro, who so often have an air of brooding over
their intermediate state of heredity. But one could easily carry the
thought too far. There is much the same easy-going view of life—laughter
easily provoked, often in the face of things which seem rather to call
for tears; but beyond that the two races part company. The negro still
loves his African leisure; if there is any one on earth without a trace
of laziness in his make-up, surely it is the Chinese workman—though this
be due merely to centuries of bitter competition for existence. Nor do
the poorest of our cabin-dwelling blacks suffer anything like the
poverty of the toilsome masses of China; even those of Haiti do not
approach it. There are worse places in China, but even in this
comparatively thinly populated northwest thousands of people quite
willing to toil from sun to sun at anything promising them the slightest
remuneration live under conditions in which it would literally be
illegal to keep pigs in any well governed section of the Occident. You
can always get men to do anything do-able, on short notice, in China;
there is such an enormous surplus of them. If there is a little stream
across the trail, there are sure to be men waiting to set those who are
shod across it for a brass “cash” or two; if there is a load too
cumbersome or too heavy for a donkey or a pack-mule, you can easily pick
up men to carry it. Most of us have the comforting impression that,
being inured to them for countless generations, they do not feel their
hardships and sufferings as we should. No doubt they do not, for if they
did it would be beyond human power to produce that cheerful atmosphere,
as wholly devoid of surliness as of melancholy, with which they seem to
surround their bitter lives.

It was one of the surprises of our journey that feathered game was more
than abundant where every other thing, down to the last grass-blade and
the tiniest bit of offal, is laboriously gathered and fully utilized,
where hunger drives into the pot everything that can possibly be made
quasi-edible. Wild ducks and geese all but obscured the sun along every
important river-valley; partridge, quail, and beautiful pheasants
covering many a bushy slope, often even the planted fields themselves,
as thickly as sparrows a barn-yard, were to be had almost for the
shooting. Cliff-sides blue with pigeons, the air filled with
drapery-like swirls of them, ceased in time even to draw the attention.
Were the major less sensitive to the difference between this and big
game stalking, I might mention that single shot which brought down eight
of these silky-blue birds; though that, to be sure, was before the
attempt to coerce a recalcitrant mule with the butt of a not too young
and sturdy—not to say borrowed—shot-gun resulted so disastrously. There
seldom was a time during all our long journey out through the west that
a little exertion could not add wild fowl to our canned larder; yet, as
far as we were ever able to discover, the hungry people of that region
made no attempt to kill or capture them—nor to destroy the swarms of
magpies, crows, sparrows, and rooks which it was hard to believe left
anything of the crops for the men and beasts who toiled to raise them.
The laws had nothing to say on the subject; we saw it proved that there
is no prejudice against such food when it can be had, and granted that
guns are rare and ammunition too expensive for a Chinese peasant,
certainly the race has given proof enough of ingenuity and of
accomplishing under difficulties to warrant astonishment at the apparent
indifference to what in many regions is the most valuable product still
ungathered.


Every few hours we came upon a walled city. I never broke myself of the
feeling that romance and the picturesqueness of the Middle Ages were
sure to be found within them, a welcome relief from the sordid, filthy
monotony outside. Yet invariably, when we had made our way through the
long dusty suburb, crowded with outdoor eating-places and miserable
shops full of everything to a coolie’s taste, with the din of the eager
shouting of wares in our ears, and had passed through the big frowning
gate towering above the massive old crenelated wall, we found the same
filthy, uneven earth streets lined by the same miserable shops, in fact,
shops often poorer and less energetic, conservative old establishments
which had grown effete, while the comparative new-comers outside the
walls still had the activity of youth. Black swine wandering at will,
pariah dogs covered with great open sores, human beings in little better
condition, were as common to the enclosed town as to the suburbs. Often
the city itself seemed half deserted, with as many ruins and open spaces
as occupied mud-dwellings, though its extramural outskirts might be
densely crowded. Many towns were so poor and uninviting that our cartmen
drove around them—always on the south side, we noticed, close beside the
walls—and stopped at inns outside. There was at least one advantage in
this, and perhaps one disadvantage. Though the city gates are in theory
opened “when the chicken first sing,” as Chang put it, they might still
be closed as late as six, and thus hold up our departure until we could
rout out several sleepy soldiers with candle-lanterns, present
visiting-cards to prove our rights to extra attention, and perhaps not
be on our way again until the eastern horizon began to pale. On the
other hand, there was, of course, whatever danger existed that bandits
coming upon us in the night would have us at their mercy outside the
walls. Yet I confess to having ridden through those outwardly mysterious
old walled towns whenever it was reasonably possible, and to going for a
stroll within them when we lodged outside, always in quest of that
romantic something that seemed sure to be found there, yet never was.

[Illustration:

  In the Mohammedan section of Sian-fu there are men who, but for their
    Chinese garb and habits, might pass for Turks in Damascus or
    Constantinople
]

[Illustration:

  Our chief cartman eating dinner in his favorite posture, and holding
    in one hand the string of “cash,” one thousand strong and worth
    about an American quarter, which served him as money
]

[Illustration:

  A bit of cliff-dwelling town in the loess country, where any other
    color than a yellowish brown is extremely rare
]

[Illustration:

  A corner of a wayside village, topped by a temple
]

The smaller towns and hamlets that lay scattered along the way, and
often thickly over the surrounding country, were also monotonously
alike, always filthy and miserable, a few women in crippled feet
hobbling about the doors of their caves or mud huts, numerous children
with running noses and bare buttocks making the most of the dismal world
about them, usually a group of the older men squatting in a circle in a
sunny corner out of the wind and gambling for brass “cash” with small
cards bearing no resemblance to our own. Throughout China it seems to be
the convenient custom to dress small children in trousers cut out at the
seat, so that they need no attention; and in this northwest country, at
least, the people believe in hardening their offspring by exposure. In
the depths of winter both boys and girls, between about five and ten,
wear nothing but a ragged jacket of quilted cotton reaching barely to
the waist, and wander disconsolately about with the lower half of the
body naked, chapped, and begrimed, like the mittenless hands of the
otherwise fully dressed adults. Undoubtedly this Spartan treatment makes
those who survive less susceptible to cold, which is an important asset
in the life of the Chinese masses.

If something caused one of us to halt a moment in town or village, all
the community that had no possessions requiring a watchful eye quickly
flocked closely about us,—dogs, boys, youths, men of all ages, and very
young girls, though never, of course, the women. Did we chance to
scribble in our note-books or fill a pipe, the crowding all but pinned
our elbows to our sides. In larger towns or places where market-day had
brought a throng, the dust raised by the dense crowd encircling us
became a menace to the lungs. Fortunately timidity equals curiosity in
such a gathering. Sometimes when suffocation seemed imminent I have
sprung suddenly to my feet with a shout, and a kick or a blow that
purposely fell short, and the stampede that ensued would wholly clear
the vicinity for a hundred yards around in scarcely the time it takes to
draw a long breath. It might be that two or three of the dispersed
throng were men of higher caste, the town’s most important merchants or
its scholars, and these, being more fearful of “losing face” before the
common herd than of having an injury done them by the dubious stranger
from another world, would retreat to a lesser distance with as leisurely
dignity as their legs would permit, and stand there with an expression
which seemed to say, “I dare you to maltreat a great man like me as if
he were a common coolie, though I admit that I will retreat if you
attempt to do so.” Then, the atmosphere having been cleared and one’s
elbows freed from pressure, one had only to smile, implying that it had
all been a joke, to have the crowd instantly roar with laughter at its
own discomfiture—and soon close in again as tightly as ever.

Especially exasperating to the photographer is this tendency of the
Chinese quickly to crowd about any one or anything unusual, for it is
often impossible to get far enough away to get them in focus. My old
trick of looking sidewise into the finder and pretending to photograph
something else at right angles to the real victim was also not so
effective as among the stolid, solemn, incurious Indians of the Andes.
For if the instantly gathering crowd did not cut off the light or
obscure the subject, the latter was almost sure to dash forward for a
close view of the kodak. More than once, in trying to catch some street
scene, I have pretended to be interested elsewhere until all the
floating population in the vicinity was packed about me, then, dashing
suddenly through the throng, I have sprinted to the spot previously
chosen and snapped the shutter; yet in almost every such case there are
at least several blurred objects in the foreground of the picture which
in real life were Chinese youths or men who led the throng that pursued
me.

Pinchow was the largest town we saw in western Shensi, evidently a place
of bygone glories, for a great wall climbing the crest of a high hill
surrounded it, and just beyond stood the largest pagoda we had seen in
the province. Terraces and caves were piled high, like mammoth walls, on
two sides of it, and the road by which traffic from the east descends
had been one of the steepest of all the journey, a dust-swirling gully
down a mountain-side reëchoing from top to bottom with the panting, as
if in death-throes, of the hundreds of mules still bearing eastward
wicked cart-loads of wheat. It was in Pinchow, too, that we were forced
to drive a sleeping coolie out of one miserable room and hang a
saddle-cloth across the door of another in order to find accommodations
in a miserable ruin of an inn, where Chang and the cook had to do their
best over a little fire of dung and twigs out in the bare, wind-swept
yard. By this time the nights had grown bitter cold, and the broken
paper windows of a room did not need an open door to aid them.

Here, too, things came to a head with the owner of our riding-mules.
Evidently the man who contracts for the carrying of the mails out of
Sian-fu had agreed to furnish us animals and had accepted the advance on
them first, and had turned his attention to getting the animals
afterward. For the first man who accompanied them turned out to be a
mere coolie, without money even to buy them food; and when he was
overtaken by the owner himself on the evening of the second day, the
latter had the unwillingness of one who had been forced to do something
against his will. He had with him, in a long sock-like purse worn inside
his quilted garments, most of the silver dollars we had paid in advance,
the contractor having kept the rest as his commission or “squeeze.” But
he hated to transform those dollars into food for his mules, and he was
constantly hinting that he should be allowed to take the animals and go
home. Just why was not apparent, since we were paying him more than he
habitually got for the same journey with loads of mail weighing half
again what we did, and which never got off and walked; and of course he
had always plodded on foot after his mules just as he was doing now.

It was still black night and we were about to leave Pinchow behind when
this fellow suddenly fell on his knees in the yard before us, and,
bowing to the earth, like a suppliant before a Chinese emperor, implored
us to let him go home, for he was losing money on the journey and so on.
The average American, I fancy, does not like to be prayed to; in fact
his reaction is likely to be what ours was, such a mixture of disgust
and anger at such degraded nonsense as to make it difficult to keep from
administering a kick. Yet there was a hint of the pathetic about the
fellow—until we reflected that of the dollar a day he was getting for
each mule he was paying out only a hundred “cash” or so to feed him. He
could not spend more on them, he wailed, because he had a family of
twenty to feed and clothe. Chinese families, however, are elastic
institutions, and we advised him to let a few of his useless dependents
starve and feed the mules, who were doing the work. For if he did not
give them a reasonable amount, we warned him, we would feed them, and
take the cost of it out of what was to be paid him at the end of the
journey. This was not a completely effective cure, but at least it
substantially increased the share which the animals had in the reward of
their labor.

For many _li_ beyond Pinchow we followed the valley of the King Ho,
walled with cliff-dwellers on either side as far as the eye could see.
There were persimmon orchards in the rich flatlands close to the stream,
the last of the fruit being picked from pole-and-vine ladders, and acres
of it drying in the sun by day, with reed-mat covers over them to keep
off the night frosts, and little cave-shaped watch-houses near-by to
protect them from the omnipresent crop-thieves. Some of the cliffs above
us were of sandstone, and the caves dug in these were much smaller than
those in the loess. Once we passed a big temple carved in the sandstone
mountain-side, with huge colored Buddhas smirking at us from the foot of
it farther on; and in two or three places the river crowded our side of
the valley so closely that the road had dug itself in along the face of
the cliff. Donkeys each carrying two huge lumps of what looked like
magnificent anthracite coal began to clutter the way, for some of the
best of Shensi’s many mines are in this vicinity. Small wonder the
traffic of centuries had worn cañons in the soft loess; we passed places
that day and the next where cart-wheels had worn gullies axle-deep in
solid rock. Let a cart get caught in one of these, and not a wheel of
the long procession could move until some means had been devised to drag
it out again. Jang-wu—to spell it as it sounded—was a once high-walled
and important city which both man and nature seemed to have decided to
scrap. It appeared to be mainly Mohammedan, with a mournful, surly
atmosphere, and was mostly deserted, except perhaps on market-days, the
loess worn away in mammoth moats on both sides of its half-ruined wall,
and all about it myriads of graves. Then one morning, almost
unexpectedly, we found that we had left the province of Shensi behind
us.




                              CHAPTER XXII
                            CHINA’S FAR WEST


From the moment that it enters the province of Kansu, the most westerly
of China proper, the ancient route from Sian-fu to Lanchow is lined by
huge old willows, supplanted here and there by a sturdy poplar. A
heritage from some far-seeing ruler of the province under the old
dynasty, these flank with four rows, and occasionally with six, the wide
strip of land on which a road might long since have been built, had it
not been in China. But though there seems to be some strong sentiment,
probably with fear as its main ingredient, against cutting them down,
not a few of the trees are missing; and the many more that stand with
their roots indecently exposed explain what befell those that are gone.
For how can a tree live to ripe old age in a loess region where the
earth is constantly dropping away or blowing out from under it?

Yet this unusual bit of Chinese forethought arouses a grateful feeling
in the passing traveler. In cloudless summer the shade must be a
godsend; and though the November sun was so welcome that travelers had
already worn paths along the edge of the winter wheat on the south side
of the shaded route, the long rows of waving branches were a joy merely
to look upon in a region where one may journey for days at a time
without catching sight of another tree, or even the slightest living
thing of the vegetable kingdom, as far as the eye can reach on either
hand. Magpies and crows build great stick nests in these branches, but
it was noticeable that boys who will struggle for the possession of a
twig or the most unseemly substitute for fuel on the ground below never
climb up after the abandoned nests that would make such a fine haul. The
reason is probably simple: they are afraid; for while his Western
contemporary is constantly risking his neck in hazardous feats which
have no economic value, the Chinese boy displays that timidity which
habitually remains with him as a man, even in the face of material
rewards for a bit of courage.

We found it 430 _li_ from Sian-fu to the border, and crossed it at the
village of Yao-tien early on the fifth morning. By this time we were up
on the plateau which, gradually rolling higher and higher, culminates in
the lofty land of Tibet; and though here it may not be more than three
or four thousand feet above the sea, this was enough to give appreciable
aid to advancing winter. All that day there was a wind fit to blow us
off the map, with every promise of a snow-storm to come, and everywhere
women and children, and not a few men, were out gleaning the little dead
willow branches as they fell, almost in showers. With the sun gone it
was bitter cold now, and we were forced to walk almost as much as we
rode. It was on this fifth day that we met two Russian Jews with long
beards, and a string of carts the first of which flew a makeshift white
flag bearing some Chinese characters and the assertion, “Belong Americun
firm from New Jork.” Possibly, the misspelling aside, it did, but in
these days allegiances are often quickly made by those foreigners in
China who would otherwise lose their rights of extraterritoriality and
the greater protection for their persons and their belongings which goes
with it.

Some sage has asserted, in the face of ample proof to the contrary, that
it never rains but it pours, and on that day at least we were inclined
to agree with him. For barely an hour afterward, while we sat eating a
cold lunch on the cold _k’ang_ of a miserable little inn, with only hot
tea to improve the situation, two more foreigners walked in upon us.
They were big sturdy Catholic priests, Hollanders and twin brothers,
also in great forests of beards, and wearing cassock-like Chinese gowns
that showed signs of long and arduous travel. One had been for thirty
years, and the other for three, in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan, and
having been ordered to another post in northern China, they had set out
in August and been already three months on the road. The natural route
to their new station would have been northward from Lanchow, down or
along the Yellow River, but bandits were said to be so active along it
that they had struck eastward instead. It would be unjust to assume
another reason which may not have existed; but personally, if I had
lived for thirty years, or even for three, in Sinkiang, I should have
gone a little out of my way, bandits or no bandits, to travel on
railways and see at least Peking and get a little bit in touch again
with the Western world before burying myself once more in the far
interior of China. The animation of the padres during our brief
conversation in English and French and an occasional word of Chinese
proved that they had not grown indifferent to Caucasian intercourse for
all their long exile; indeed, they somewhat resembled in manner college
boys who have just reached home after a freshman year without vacations.
The new pope, they said, and we had confirmations of the statement on
our western trip, was filling all the posts in a large area of central
Asia with German priests, and moving the former incumbents, among whom
Belgians predominate, to less strategic positions.

In all the sixteen days between the capitals of Shensi and Kansu we did
not, unless my memory fails me, meet another traveling foreigner; hence
our astonishment at seeing four in one morning. There was, indeed,
appreciably less native travel in the new province, though great chunks
of coal were still coming out on donkey-back, and wheelbarrows were
creaking under all sorts of loads, particularly of huge pears for which
the province is famous, and which, persimmons growing rare, constituted
our chief dessert all the rest of the journey.

Several wandering trails that kept us out of the chasm—though on the
plain above the unhampered wind threatened at any moment to lift us from
the saddle—came to agreement at last with the road, and we went down a
mighty descent, which toward the end was rudely stone-paved, into the
populous town of Kingchow. Here the earthquake of two years before,
greater reminders of which we were to see farther on, had among other
feats neatly broken in two both a high hill and the temple that stood
upon it, so that a score of heathen idols in intense discordant colors
and devilish postures stood out only half protected from the cold windy
world. A church steeple rather incongruously broke the sky-line of the
lower town, and in the neat compound beneath it we found hospitality for
the first time with those Scandinavian-American missionaries scattered
all along our western route. The sturdy couple—sturdiness is an all but
necessary asset for inland China mission-fields—who had been cultivating
this not too promising human garden since the days of their youth, had
had their share of adversities; but the one that came most nearly
shaking their faith had happened within the last two years. After
decades of struggle with contributors at home and workmen and
contractors on the spot, they had at last reached the proud day when
their imposing black brick church was not only completed but relieved of
its mortgage. While his wife and coworker superintended important
operations in the kitchen and dining-room, the pastor sat down to write
the glorious news to his religious constituents in America. “At last,
dear brethren,” he began, “our church, center of a vast district that
has no other, is fin——” “_Brrrrum!_” came a sudden roaring and cracking
of walls and ceiling, apparently even of the ground itself, while
pictures swung to and fro from their pegs, and the furniture danced a
sort of improvised Virginia reel. It was all over before the
missionaries had wholly realized that a great earthquake had occurred,
but when they went out to look at it the new church was cracked and
split and broken, an all but useless ruin.


The threat of snow was gone next morning, which was calm and bright,
with hardly a breeze where the raging wind had been. The route lay up a
river valley all the way to Pingliang, and fully half the populace along
the way, it seemed, was out sweeping up with their crude
bundle-of-sticks brooms the last vestige of leaves and twigs from under
the willow-trees. In this all but fuel-less land there is an added
meaning to the old adage beginning with something about an ill wind.
There were countless half-ruined mud-wall compounds along the valley,
from the edge of which sprang the inevitable piles of terraced fields.
Strings of donkeys, each with two huge yellow-brown glazed jars filled
with smaller ones in straw, looked at a little distance like some
curious type of land-crab. We had scarcely seen a soldier since leaving
Sian-fu, but now we began meeting long lines of them again, whole
armies, at least as the word is used in China, moving eastward in carts,
on horses, and on mules, and once or twice on long strings of camels.
They were dark, rather surly-looking fellows, I fancied, though this may
have been only fancy, or the effect of an outdoor life on men with the
higher bridged noses that suggested a considerable strain of Arab blood.
In Shensi Moslems are not recruited as soldiers; but in Kansu, the
stronghold of the Chinese Mohammedans, there are many thousands of them
in uniform; and here they marched freely over the winter wheat, an inch
high, with that complete indifference to the rights of the laborious
peasants along the way which is typical of bandits and soldiers alike
throughout China.

Yet our hosts of the night before had assured us that the soldiers of
Kansu were well disciplined; for instance, they cited, they always took
off their hats when they entered a church—perhaps, I reflected, as they
would expect us to take off our shoes in their places of worship—and let
down their cues. For it is as great a discourtesy to come indoors with
the cue tied around the head as it is in the old-fashioned parts of
China to speak to an equal or a superior without removing the
eye-glasses.

[Illustration:

  The Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed about once a month by the
    itinerant barber. This one is just in the act of adding a switch.
    Note the wooden comb at the back of the head
]

[Illustration:

  An old countryman having dinner at an outdoor restaurant in town on
    market day has his own way of using chairs or benches
]

[Illustration:

  A Chinese soldier and his mount, not to mention his worldly
    possessions
]

[Illustration:

  Mongol women on a joy-ride
]

The town where we made our midday halt was denim blue with market-day.
There were big, upstanding six-foot men whom America would hardly have
recognized as Chinese; and some of them, from back in the hills, though
they had heard of white people before, had never seen them. These and
their hardy, red-cheeked boys timidly crowded nearer and nearer the
knock-kneed table which Chang had somehow found and placed for us in a
wind-sheltered, sun-flooded corner of the inn-yard, retreating in a
pell-mell mass if we rose to our feet or looked fixedly at them. In
China market-day is usually a fixed institution, frequently recurring in
most towns. Then the wooden-box bellows with a stick handle manipulated
by a boy or a coolie, which is indispensable to craftsman or cook
reduced to a mainly dung fuel, may be heard thumping by scores or
hundreds along the thronged street. The shallow eating-shops, which
thrust their customers out of doors to squat on raised strips of board
or on their own haunches, steaming bowl and chop-sticks in hand, are so
busy that they almost cease to shout for clients. The outdoor
hair-dressers for men may sometimes not move their portable
paraphernalia from a chosen spot all day long, and take in what to them
is a small fortune, though their charges would by no means keep an
American barber in soap. Wielding a razor suggestive of a carpenter’s
draw-shave, a wooden comb which the maker across the way saws out by
hand with a dozen or a score of others from a single round block, and
carrying a most scanty supply of other essentials, they all but
transform the hirsute countrymen who fall into their hands. For they are
not satisfied with mere shaving as we understand it, but wipe out
everything the broad blade encounters—down the upper cheek, a stray hair
on the nose, the eyebrows, the hair itself, leaving the victim a
striking resemblance to a boiled onion, unless he calls a halt with the
information that he still considers the cue essential to his beauty and
well-being. Even then, they say, the barber sometimes talks him out of
the old-fashioned notion—though it is hardly that in Kansu—and he joins
the growing ranks of Chinese men, who, having recognized the pigtail as
a badge of servitude rather than an honorable adornment, go as far to
the opposite extreme as is consistent with a whole—no, often a sadly
gashed—scalp. But if the client’s taste is not to be changed by
preaching or example, the last rite is the combing out of his often
magnificent black tresses, reduced of course in area to about the size
of a saucer, and the making of them into a braid which may perhaps not
be undone again for two or three moons.

But our carts perhaps are creaking out again through the inn-yard gate,
and we must ride after them, leaving the hundred other scenes of
market-day for some other place, for they are constantly repeated
everywhere. Caves and terraces and cañon roads continue; the afternoon
is June-like, the leaves of the willows and rare poplars hardly
beginning to turn, though November is stepping on. Down in the river
valley the soil is somewhat harder, so that for a little time we move
without being enveloped in a cloud of dust; but the air is so dry that
cigars and lips suffer. Passing coolies carry their money in strings of
“cash,” a thousand to each string, broken up into hundreds by knots and
the ends tied together to make carrying easy. We would hardly call it
that, however, if in addition to already mighty burdens we had to plod
our way across a thirsty country with ten pounds of money worth less
than an American quarter; for in this region the exchange averaged
twenty-three hundred “cash” to the “Mex” dollar. This does not, of
course, reduce the perforated brass coin of China to anything like the
low estate of the Russian ruble or the German mark, but those are of
paper and may be printed in any denomination, while the “cash” always
remains the single coin, both in weight and bulk. I do not recall
offhand any commodity that represents the value of a “cash”; I might say
it is worth about one peanut, but that would be true only in China, and
only in certain regions during the most plentiful peanut season,
certainly never in America, for it takes fully forty “cash” to make an
American cent. Perhaps a match comes most nearly being an even exchange,
and then the wonder comes up that they do not use those instead, and
save weight and some of the difficulties of reckoning, and always have
something of real immediate value as well as a nominal and fictitious
one. But your Chinese coolie, once out of gunshot of the big cities at
least, and even the merchants up to a surprising grade, prefers his
money in “cash,” irrespective of weight and all its other drawbacks.

In Peking and the treaty-ports small transactions are usually in
coppers, which are worth a whole fourth of an American cent each; and
silver ten-, twenty-, and fifty-cent pieces, unknown and unacceptable in
Shensi and Kansu, are as frequent there as the “Mex” dollar of which
they are fractions. It is no uncommon thing, indeed, for Peking coolies
to accept bank-notes, if they are sure of the giver and if the issuing
bank is not Chinese but foreign, with a local branch. But, after all, a
copper is not much lighter than ten “cash,” and less convenient, having
no hole for stringing, and next above that in the west comes the dollar,
which is more than many a coolie ever owns at one time, and may turn out
to be false anyway; while, as to bank-notes, they are no more current in
the interior than Confederate shinplasters are in New York. Our own
funds, by the way, we carried in the form of letters of credit issued by
the Chinese post-office in Peking and payable by the postal commissioner
at the several large cities we visited, in which he was either a
foreigner or the graduate of a foreign school. But even our cartmen, who
were well above the coolie status, lugged strings of “cash,” usually
about their persons, and every morning and every noon they unfailingly
engaged in a loud and heated controversy with the innkeeper and all his
functionaries, down to the ragged fellow who drew water, over the amount
that should be transferred from the traveling strings to those that
remained behind. Only in a few cases was there a grooved measuring-board
to obviate the laborious task of counting the miserable bits of poor
brass one by one. For of course no one could take it for granted that
there were a hundred “cash” between each knot; and usually he would have
been swindled if he did. Aside from the all but universal Chinese custom
of short-changing wherever it is possible, in many regions accepted
fictions in money matters reign, so that in one town a “hundred cash” is
really only ninety, and if you are informed that six walnuts cost a
copper you hand over nine “cash”; and perhaps in the next place a string
of “cash” is nominally a thousand but really nine hundred and forty, and
“nine coppers is ten coppers here, master, only if it is in ‘cash’ it is
nine and then a little bit, and so....” And so, while we might have been
able to get along without Chang, or the cook either, for that matter, so
far as mere eating and the like go, he became indispensable in saving us
from insanity in the handling of money.


Pingliang was the largest city on our route between Sian-fu and Lanchow.
In a way it was the most picturesque, too; at least there were few such
pictures as that down its swarming, shop- and hawker-crowded
thoroughfare seen through the outer gate with the inner one in the
middle distance. I reached it somewhat ahead of the others, and as I was
worming my way through the second barrier, leading my mule and showing
every evidence of having been on the road for a week, a man in the human
stream bound in the same direction addressed me. It was not until his
second remark that I realized that he was speaking English, and even
then I took him to be some inn-runner who was trying to induce me to
patronize his miserable establishment. We had looked forward to being
spared that fate in Pingliang, for several sets of Protestant
missionaries had made us promise to look up their co-workers there. I
replied, therefore, still giving my attention to the picturesque chaos
about me rather than to the speaker, that I expected to stop with
foreigners at the Fu-ying-tong. How should I have known that I, suddenly
bursting into town in the guise of anything but a reputable person, was
informing a total stranger that I expected him to take me in as a guest
as soon I could find his house? For it was the first time in my life
that I had met a foreigner parading the streets in Chinese garb;
besides, the Swedish-American head of the Protestant work in Pingliang
happens to be of a physical size not inclined to make him conspicuous in
a Chinese crowd.

Before the days of the republic, I learned later, when in spite of my
barbarism we were comfortably installed in his home with the glorious
prospect of a hot bath in the offing, he had sported even a blond
pigtail, like many of the inland missionaries. I need hardly add that
this was removed when, on rare occasions, he visited the “home church”
in Ruggles Street, Boston. His son also wore native garb and, being born
in Pingliang, could not be distinguished from a Chinaman in the dark, as
a native policeman once discovered to his discomfiture. On second
thought, when one had recovered from the slight shock involved, of
course native dress is the thing to wear in such cases. For one thing,
it is many times more economical than foreign garb, which would have to
be individually imported. Chinese clothing is much better adapted to
Chinese living conditions; and not the least of the advantages in cities
of the interior where only two or three foreigners live is that they can
go about their business unnoticed in the throng, instead of becoming the
center of a gaping, jostling mob whenever they halt for a moment.

I cannot, naturally, give any testimony as to the efficacy or value of
the missionary work of a host of barely twenty-four hours, though I can
speak very highly of his hospitality and of the spick and span
efficiency of whatever we saw in his two compounds. In one the church
was reached through the hospital, which seemed a fitting and sensible
arrangement. Pingliang is not well supplied with curative facilities,
and naturally the mission hospital is overworked to a point where even
charitable foreigners unconsciously grow more or less callous to mere
human suffering. Chinese strolling into the place in what to us seemed
horrible conditions were such commonplace sights to those who had spent
a generation among them that they showed little more feeling over them
than over a cut finger. “Oh, been in a fight, I suppose,” was the sum
total reply to my anxious inquiry about a man whose face and chest were
cut into ribbons and who seemed to be half groping, half stumbling his
way toward the hospital. With beggars of both sexes and all ages
wandering the town and sleeping out of doors all winter in a few
fluttering rags that expose far more skin than they cover, their
cadaverous faces blue yellow with starvation, it is hardly to be
expected that a young man born amid such scenes should lose much sleep
over them.

Pingliang, I discovered in a stroll about its wall, is not so large as
the first impression suggests, being long and narrow, with nearly all
its movement in that busy main street by which we passed through it. The
suburbs were so crowded, we found, because no Mohammedan is allowed to
live within the walls. The soldiers of the local dictator had just been
paid, and many of them were sauntering about town with six or eight
strings of “cash” over their shoulders, pricing this and that. One had a
full ten thousand looped about his neck, a veritable millstone, yet his
weighty wealth only amounted to about $2.30 in real money. I have said
that interior China has no paper money; hence I must apologize for the
oversight. For there are paper “cash” by the millions. Boys were
stamping them out of great sheets of a kind of tissue-paper, piled
twenty or more thick, so that each blow of the die accomplished
something worth while; and great cylinders of the finished coins, still
loosely held together, hung shivering in the breeze along the busiest
street of Pingliang. But this is dead man’s money, to be burned at his
grave along with paper horses and servants and perhaps a “Peking cart”
of the same material, so that he shall not find himself penniless and
unattended in the next world. The mere living must be content with solid
brass.

The soldiers, we noticed, actually paid for what they purchased. Not
until they got a day or two out of town, our hosts said, did they dare
give only what they chose or drop the word “pay” from their vocabulary
entirely. In theory Pingliang and its district are governed from
Lanchow, as the latter is from Peking. But the local general had his own
soldiers and obeyed the Tuchun ten days westward about as absolutely as
the Tuchun did the alleged Central Government. Lanchow had sent out
orders to stop the growing of opium. The dictator of Pingliang passed
the order on, in the form of a public proclamation, and at a same time
issued secret instructions—in so far as anything can be secret in
China—to his district rulers to encourage the planting of poppies, to
compel it if necessary, since he needed the money to be derived from the
traffic. An honest mandarin in Kingchow, refusing to obey secret
instructions, effectively put an end to the planting in his district—and
barely escaped in the night across the river and through the mountains
to Lanchow, disguised as a coolie. In a region west of Pingliang, we
learned when we reached it, the orders from opposite directions had been
so nicely balanced that no one dared either to plant or not to plant,
whereupon nature took upon itself the decision and grew nothing. Yet in
these very regions poor peasants have been put in cages and left to
starve because they dared to let the poppy beautify their fields, and
perhaps the very next year some neighbor was prodded into chronic
invalidism by soldiers’ bayonets because he had not planted poppies.
Thus things go on throughout a large part of China, and opium is
probably produced in fully as large quantities as ever, all the noisy
demonstrations of burning, in a few of the larger cities, piles of
opium-pipes and confiscated opium to the contrary notwithstanding. One
large section of Kansu through which we passed was threatened with a
famine because Shensi grew opium on the fields where she should grow
wheat, and then offered such high prices for Kansu wheat that it all
flowed eastward, as we had seen, and left the region that grew it to
starve. But China’s many autonomous military rulers must have money, for
without money they cannot keep soldiers, and without soldiers they
cannot hold sway over their chosen territories; and of all their few
scanty sources of revenue the tax on opium is the most remunerative.
Naturally few if any of them openly permit the planting of poppies or
openly tax the product. Has not China’s Government guaranteed to
suppress the opium traffic, and must not even an all but independent
Tuchun of the far interior take care what rumors reach that outside
country from which protest and pressure and sometimes even military
intervention come? The Chinese temperament is always for finesse as
compared with boldness or force. In each provincial capital, and in
other large centers, there is an Anti-Opium Office, the ostensible
business of which is to stamp out the traffic. But the head of it is
either appointed by the military ruler or subject to his influence; and
if the latter issues secret orders undermining his public proclamations,
the Anti-Opium Office collects the taxes and sets them down as fines,
and there you are. There are, in fact, many districts where opium taxes
are collected for years in advance, and as they are high the peasants
have no choice but to plant poppies to recoup themselves.


A day’s journey beyond Pingliang there is a range 2350 meters high,
crossed by roads so steep that one marvels how the clumsy two-wheeled
carts get over it. Were the animals not hitched in tandem they never
would, and even if we had not by this time made concessions to what at
first strikes most Westerners as the “idiotic” Chinese way of doing
their hauling, we must certainly have done so here. Pheasants almost as
tame as chickens fed in the kind of heather and brown grass covering the
lower slopes by which we approached. Terraces and caves had for a time
died out; sure-footed men came down sheer paths with bundles of dry
brush that would be an unusual and a welcome addition to the straw and
dung fuel of the region. The range itself was made up of bare hills
without a sign of bush or tree except the rows of now somewhat stunted
willows which still escorted the wildly zigzagging road. There were many
short cuts, heart breaking if your mule was so small or so tired that
the carrying of the empty saddle up such a slope seemed work enough for
him. On foot it was a stiff climb of some two hours’ duration which
brought back memories of my Andean days that were not unpleasant. But
here there was a constant sense of security, not to say of
self-indulgence, in the knowledge that I was closely followed by ample
food and a cook, and best of all, by a bed.

Donkey-loads of joss-sticks in two big square packs to each animal
carefully picked their way down from the summit. The view from this
showed a gashed and gnarled, a haphazard and truly chaotic world,
monotonously yet beautifully light brown in color, to the faint edges of
the far horizon. Over the top, coolies carrying whole chests of drawers
on the ends of their balancing poles came swinging up the swift descent
almost as if it were level ground. Once or twice before we had met the
“fast mail” hurrying eastward, and now we came upon it again,
jog-trotting over the mountains. Two men in the early prime of physical
life, with a bundle of mail-bags at each end of the poles over their
shoulders and a square glass lantern lashed on somewhere, are all this
consists of in interior China. They carry some eighty pounds each in
relays of twenty to thirty miles made at surprisingly good speed and on
the second day return with a similar load, all for ten or twelve dollars
“Mex” a month, depending on their length of service. Few postal systems
are more reliable than that of China; and even though its high officials
are mainly Europeans (this time the word is not meant to include
Americans) no small credit should be given to the poorly paid coolies
who are the chief links in the service in many parts of the country.
Letters mailed in Peking a week after we left there were awaiting us
when we reached Lanchow—for the coolie “fast mail” travels night and
day; and the loss of anything posted is perhaps the rarest complaint
heard even from those foreign residents who have developed into chronic
grumblers against anything Chinese. Other mail-matter, up to a limited
weight, may also be sent by letter-post, at increased postage; the bulk
of it goes by long trains of pack-mules, such as we had already several
times passed, at an average of twenty-five to thirty miles a day.

There were a few patches of snow, and a region somewhat more
prosperous-looking, in the Chinese sense, over the range, with a more
solid, reddish soil, though all was dreary brown and utterly bare with
autumn now. Cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, fat-tailed sheep, goats,
pigs, and chickens, not to mention blue clouds of pigeons, were
everywhere. Yet the people seemed to live as miserably as ever, wholly
without cleanliness, comfort, or plenty; and before long we found
ourselves surrounded again by broken, swirling loess. Such regions
confirmed the theory that man is made of dust; the children looked as if
they had just been finished, and not yet polished off.

The dreariness, the dismal lifelong existence of the great mass of
Chinese seemed only emphasized by such scenes as a pair of blind
minstrels entertaining a village by beating together resonant sticks and
singsonging endless national ballads or ancient legends. Nothing
whatever of the myriad simple enjoyments of more fortunate peoples, not
even grass to sit on and trees to sit under, lightens their
bare-earth-dwelling lot. Yet few peoples show themselves more contented
with what they have, perhaps because discontent increases with
possessions and possibilities. Lofty philosophers there are who, though
nothing could induce them to spend a night out of reach of a hot bath,
commend to us the contentment with little, the patience under
deficiencies, of the Chinese. These are virtues, no doubt, up to a
certain point; beyond it the traveler far afield in China comes to the
conclusion they become a curse, and the Chinese surely have in many
things passed this limit.


[Illustration:

  Two blind minstrels entertaining a village by singsonging interminable
    national ballads and legends, to which they keep time by beating
    together resonant sticks of hard wood
]

[Illustration:

  The boys and girls of western China are “toughened” by wearing nothing
    below the waist and only one ragged garment above it, even in
    midwinter
]

[Illustration:

  The “fast mail” of interior China is carried by a pair of coolies, in
    relays of about twenty miles each, made at a jog-trot with about
    eighty pounds of mail apiece. They travel night and day and get five
    or six American dollars a month
]

[Illustration:

  A bit of the main street of Taing-Ning, showing the damage wrought by
    the earthquake of two years before to the “devil screen” in front of
    the local magistrate’s yamen
]

We came at length to Long-te, surrounded by a big mud wall, but with
little except ruins inside. There were great mud buildings spilled into
heaps of broken earth, threshing-floors where men and women were tossing
grain and chaff into the wind, open fields, many straw-stacks, ponds
frozen over, all within the walls, and still plenty of room for the
shrunken population. For the earthquake had been serious here. The big
city gates were wracked and twisted, sometimes split from top to bottom,
in one case overthrown entirely. Mat and cloth tents and makeshift
canvas buildings occupied what had evidently once been the business
street, and here a market-fair was in full confusion. Some of the
toughest, dirtiest coolies I had yet seen were packed in a soiled-blue
squirming mass, which seemed to be mainly Moslem, about an improvised
gambling-table. Two dice in a porcelain box, which was overturned in a
saucer that was twirled, constituted the game. It might have been swift
if the evil-eyed promoters had not always waited a long time for more
stakes to be laid on the squared and numbered table before lifting the
box. Each of these had his coolie valet behind him, who alternately held
a cup of tea or the mouthpiece of a long pipe to the lips of his master,
who kept both eyes and fingers on the absorbing business in hand. There
were grooved “cash” measuring-boards—such as our coolie at home used in
washing clothes—to obviate the counting of the money, mainly mere brass,
yet totaling large stakes for Chinese countrymen of the poorest class.
How intent they were on the whims of fate was shown by the astonishing
fact that I stood for several moments packed in with them, without the
least notice being taken of me; which did not hinder a mighty mob of men
and boys gathering at my heels and raising a great cloud of dust close
behind me all over town.

Having won the toss during my absence—so severely honest were my
companions—I found myself installed, when I reached it, in the star room
of Long-te’s best inn. That is, most of my possessions were heaped about
the uneven earth floor, and the thigh-high platform covered with a thin
reed mat which the Chinese call a _k’ang_, of a mud room perhaps eight
by fourteen feet in size. Chang was always busy enough with other
matters to have it understood that we make our own beds. Such inn rooms
are made entirely of mud,—walls, _k’ang_, and all, except for the
soot-blackened beams and thatch above. Sometimes they are so small that
an army cot would not go even lengthwise on the _k’ang_, which was
usually too narrow to take two, either crosswise or side by side. The
Chinese, of course, sleep on the _k’ang_ itself, which is heated, at
least in theory, by a crude flue beneath it; but the foreigner with a
prejudice against stone-hard beds and, in warmer weather, against those
myriad little bedfellows of which the sons of Han seem almost fond, will
find a folding cot easily worth its weight in gold on a trip of any
length into the interior. It may cost him more for lodging, for half a
dozen Chinese could find plenty of room on a _k’ang_ that would barely
hold his cot and leave him space to undress and get into it; but as the
rent of the whole room will probably not exceed ten cents gold, unless
his “boy” lets the innkeeper succumb to his natural inclination to
double or treble it out of respect for “rich” foreigners, he may find
the extravagance worth the privacy. Even in their homes the overwhelming
majority of Chinese sleep packed together on just such a more or less
heated mud platform, so that a cot would be to them not a luxury but a
senseless nuisance.

The procedure night after night hardly varied in the slightest degree.
When we had driven into an inn yard and Chang had found rooms or caves
opening off it which he considered fit to house his “masters,” the carts
were unhitched and all but our heavier belongings unloaded. The mules
had their unfailing roll in the dust, raising mighty clouds of it that
penetrated even the _k’ang_ mats, rose and shook themselves surprisingly
clean—so effective for them is this substitute for a showerbath which
was denied us—and fell to munching their well earned chopped straw and
dried peas in their broad, shallow wicker baskets or in the mud mangers.
The cartmen perhaps dust themselves with a horsetail or some
rooster-feathers mounted on a stick, and take up the important question
of getting their own food. This is indeed important even if it consists
only of a bowl or two of some cheap native cookery, since with the rare
exception of a lump of hot dough or a copper-worth of something else
from peddler or shop along the way, and a scanty mid-morning lunch, they
have not eaten since the night before. Meanwhile shrieks of
“_Gwan-shih-ti!_” rend the air. The _gwan-shih-ti_—if a slightly varied
pronunciation is easier, “John-dirty” will do quite as well, and be so
exactly descriptive as to be no tax whatever on the memory—is the male
maid of all work about a Chinese inn, though his title is somewhat more
honorable than either his duties or his income. Chang needs the
_gwan-shih-ti_ at once to build fires under our _k’angs_, to bring
water, to tell the cook where he can do his cooking, to bring us a pair
of those narrow wooden saw-horses which pass for chairs in rural China
to sit on outdoors if there is still daylight enough to read by, to do a
hundred other errands “quai-quai!” that is, instantly if not sooner,
which is the way Chang learned during his Peking service that foreigners
always expected to be served. Meanwhile there are reëchoing screams of
“_Gwan-shih-ti!_” from the muleteers, who want this or that, shrieks of
“_Gwan-shih-ti!_” from the innkeeper himself, who has a few errands with
which to keep him out of mischief, again perhaps from other newly
arrived travelers, who want to know where in —— in the already crowded
inn they are going to sleep, until one might imagine that the poor
fellow would get flustered, even in spite of being Chinese.

By this time “_Gwan-shih-ti_” has probably succeeded in coaxing the
straw and dung poked into the _k’ang_ flues to burn; and we have begun
bitterly to regret asking to have the _k’ang_ lighted. For any Chinese
inn in winter is an absolute refutation of the old theory that wherever
there is smoke there is fire. How often have we not groped our way into
our mud-built lodgings resolved to make up our beds at last or die in
the attempt, only to come gasping and clawing into the open air a moment
later—and yet have waited in vain for the slightest suggestion of warmth
to mitigate all this suffering. _K’ang_-flues seldom have any vent
except the wide-open mouths for the feeding of fuel inside the room
itself, and the volume of smoke that can pour forth from them is out of
all keeping with either time or combustibles. Yet the Chinese seem
content to go on for centuries more in this time-dishonored way, though
they need go no farther afield than Korea to copy an example of heating
the floor from the kitchen and letting the smoke out of chimneys at the
other end of the house, without loss of fuel and without turning their
homes into soot-dripping smoke-houses.

Eventually we drove out enough smoke to come in and make our beds. To
what had seemed an impenetrable sleeping-bag from Maine I had been
obliged to add a sheepskin lining in Pingliang, and under or over this
went every coat and blanket, and even my odds and ends of clothing, for
barely did the sun set when the mountain cold came down like a blast
direct from the north pole. Long before supper was ready it was often so
bitter, in contrast to an almost hot day, that we were tempted to get
into bed at once; and on the homeward trip we did, eating off our
coverlets. But barely were we settled in such cases than Chang took all
the joy out of life by appearing with the wash-basin forced upon us by
the leader of the “Third Asiatic Expedition”—then in winter quarters in
Peking, where such primitive things are not needed—and the canvas bucket
of hot water, whereupon “face” at least required us to crawl out and
perform ablutions enough to deceive ourselves into thinking that we had
removed all that day’s dust and grime.

Or, perhaps, thanks to our recommendable habit of starting every morning
without fail well before daylight, we arrived while the sun was still
high enough above the horizon to see something of the native life of the
town. We did not need to go out looking for this; it came to us, in all
its impurity. Chinese clad in dirty blue and in every stage of undress
came with trays of disgusting cooked chickens with their heads fast
under one wing and their straddling legs still intact, with boiled sweet
potatoes and steaming white balls of dough, with slabs of roasted pork
and scores of other native favorites, all equally innocent of even the
knowledge that hygiene and cleanliness exist. Not even the Parisians buy
as much of their food already cooked as do the Chinese, and there was
always great wonder shown that we did not fall upon these tempting
delicacies at once, at least to bridge over the vacuum until our own
curious viands should be ready. The varied conditions under which these
were prepared we surmised rather than knew, for we religiously spared
our feelings and our appetites by never unnecessarily intruding upon the
cook’s domain. The natives did, however, whenever it was possible, and
no doubt set down such attempts to approach cleanliness as Chang and the
cook actually observed out of our sight to the incredible
idiosyncrasies, not so much of foreigners—for some of them had seen
Russian refugees eat—as of men of incomputable wealth, which the mere
sight of our belongings, or even of our beds, showed us to be. As a
matter of fact, we lived largely on the country, and might have done so
entirely had we been content with a simpler diet. Chickens, eggs, the
principal vegetables, fruits, sugar, and the like could always be had,
on the out-journey at least, every two or three days, and now and then
there were local specialties in addition. But such delicacies as jam,
butter, cheese, chocolate, coffee, cocoa, and their kindred could only
be had from our steamer-trunks on the tail-end of the carts, while our
bread supply depended on foresight and the kindness of the rare
foreigners along the way.

It is not a bad idea to bring along a few simple picture-books on such a
journey. The boys who drift into the inn-yards are invariably keenly
interested in any hints of the strange “outside-country” from which you
come, and sometimes quite sharp-witted; so that not only will they get
pleasure and instruction out of the pictures, but the traveler will
learn many Chinese words from them, which will be of use perhaps some
day if he ever finds himself stranded without a “boy” in some town that
happens to speak the same dialect. However, all tales as to its narrow
limits notwithstanding, we found Mandarin, or Pekingese, or whatever it
is that one soon picks up a bit of in the capital, as generally
understood on all this journey as could be expected of what was no doubt
our atrocious pronunciation. Peasants and local coolies sometimes shook
their heads, either because they could not understand us or thought we
were speaking some foreign tongue and refused to try; but anything like
a real knowledge of the general language, or that very similar one of
the masses of Peking, would have been quite sufficient in any of the
provinces we visited.

At last supper would be announced, with whosoever’s _k’ang_ that showed
any signs of heat as a dining-table, and six-inch-wide saw-horses as
chairs. By this time the mountain cold would be like ice-packs applied
to the marrow of the bones—if that is anatomically possible—and unless
we watched the door, if there was one, all manner of Chinese odds and
ends, even ladies so consumed by curiosity as sometimes to forget the
stern rules of their sex, would gradually replace it by a bank of gaping
faces, the boldest of which might even find some poor excuse to come
clear inside. Perhaps the police would arrive, though this was rare,
with two or three huge and gaily decorated paper lanterns, to ask for
our visiting-cards and bow their way ceremoniously out again into the
weirdly flickering night. Then one last brief sortie with a toothbrush
and into our luxurious beds, perhaps to read and smoke a bit by the
American lantern that we succeeded in getting and keeping oil enough to
use one night out of three. For however much we paid for oil, it never
seemed to be real kerosene, and the Chinese genius for flimsy
constructions had evolved in place of a can a slightly baked mud jug
that broke at the least lurching of a cart and even seeped through upon
the back of the _mafu_ who was finally sentenced to carry it. Sleep
always came long before the end of a cigar, however, and never have I
enjoyed more sound and satisfying slumber than on most of those Kansu
nights, in spite of legs, accustomed to another form of travel, aching
from ten or twelve hours in the saddle, and though one might hear the
mules just outside munching their hard peas off and on all through the
night. The drivers always got up between two and three o’clock to feed
them, and then one might hear the steady _rump! rump!_ of the chopping
of straw as one man fed it to the big hinged knife everywhere used for
this purpose, and another manipulated the knife itself. Sometimes this
wicked implement has other uses, as in one village along our route where
the peasants captured a bandit and, not caring to make the long journey
to the _hsien_ seat, with the risk of his escape or rescue, had calmly
beheaded him with a straw-knife.

But all supreme pleasures have an untimely end, and before the delicious
night seemed well begun Chang would come to light the lantern, or the
candle, or the string wick floating in the half of a broken mud saucer
of thick native oil which Chinese inns furnish, and to break the bitter
news that it was five o’clock—or four, as the case might be. Stifling
our curses as becomes married men who should at least have reached years
of discretion and self-control, we would crawl from the tropical
luxuriance of our sleeping-bags into the arctic iceberg of early morning
with a pretense of bravery that deceived neither ourselves nor each
other, and lose more breath than time in getting inside our icy daytime
garments. A hot breakfast larger than the full daily consumption of all
but the wealthiest Chinese, however, always brought about a great change
in our spirits. In and about the yard would rise noisy disputes in which
could be heard endless repetitions of the word “_ch’ien_,” which means
money, or, more exactly, brass “cash,” and when at length these had
subsided our expedition would trail away again into the darkness. As
nearly as I made out, we paid between one and two hundred coppers a
night as our share of the inn expenditures, which included our alleged
rooms, heat, and light, _k’ang_ space somewhere for our retinue, and
various and sundry other charges exclusive of food for the mules and
their attendants, which was not our affair. But I defy any Occidental to
make head or tail of the intricacies of paying a bill at a Chinese inn.
There seemed to be a “straw charge” on our merely human part of the
bill, and each kettle of water was so many coppers, and we were expected
to pay for the right to let the carts stand all night in the inn-yard;
or at least Chang informed us that gentlemen always did and seemed on
the verge of tears that might have resulted in loss of “face” for him
and loss of our chief link with the outside world for us when we opened
for discussion the fact that our contract with the muleteers required
them to pay everything having to do with their part of the expedition.
Nor was that all, by any means; for the Chinese seem to like nothing
better than the utmost complications in money matters. Perhaps this is
because so many of them depend for their livelihood on the odd coppers
and “cash” that are chipped off in the process of making impossible
adjustments in the chaos of exchange and incompatible coins and
intricate charges, modified by vociferous bargainings, which are never
alike in two parts of the country. Possibly it is merely because they
love complexities and gratuitous difficulties for their own sake—as
their language, for example, suggests, especially in its written
form—and which have grown up during the hundred centuries of social
intercourse that lie behind them.




                             CHAPTER XXIII
                     WHERE THE FISH WAGGED HIS TAIL


Whatever the dreadful hardships of our journey, they would have been
increased by at least one had the loess country been as dry and arid as
it looked, and thus compelled us to travel by camel-train. For, all
trite humor about the ship-like motion of that worthy animal aside, he
is an objectionable companion because he is an inveterate and
incorrigible night-hawk. Or perhaps that word approaches the slanderous
when applied to him, for the cause of his night-hawking is quite the
opposite of that of his human prototype. The camel prowls about in the
small hours because he can eat only by day and, given that unusual
idiosyncrasy, must work by night. Frequently the beginning of our day’s
journey was broken by a long camel-train looming up out of the first
thin white light of dawn, the dull bells gently booming, each “string”
of six or eight or ten camels led by a bearded man of red-brown,
slightly surly features that often looked more Arabic than Chinese. This
impression was increased by long white sheep- or goatskin cloaks, turned
wool in, surmounted by what seemed to be turbans, though at closer sight
and in the full light of day these last proved to be the dirty-white
skullcaps of felt to which the Chinese Mohammedans are largely addicted,
perhaps wound round with a soiled towel of cheap crash that is often the
traveling coolie’s only concession to the worship of soap and water. One
must take care, however, not to consider white caps and “Hwei-Hwei” as
synonymous. For many a Mohammedan wears black, quite like his
fellow-Chinese, while a wide white band about the cap is a sign, not of
belief in the Prophet of Medina, but of mourning for father or
grandfather. But, to come back to the camels: it would have required no
great strain on the imagination to fancy oneself in Arabia as these
endless lines of silent-footed beasts stalked disdainfully past in the
half-lighted defiles, though one would have been forced to overlook such
minor details as their two humps instead of one. Often we heard the
muffled booming of their bells as they went by in the night; but by day
they were seldom seen, unless it was kneeling in crowded contentment in
an inn-yard or sauntering packless about some hillside thinly dotted
with dead-brown tufts of coarse grass, under the care of a cat-napping
driver or two.

A wide valley we had been following for some time narrowed until it
drove the road high up above the river, whence it came down again into
another fertile vale containing many graves and the city of Tsin-ching.
There was an unusual animation about Tsin-ching. For though it had been
more nearly destroyed by the earthquake than Long-te and other gloomy
collections of ruins that lay behind us, it had many brand-new
buildings, and great gangs of men and boys were rebuilding the city
wall, quite irrespective of the fact that it was what should have been a
quiet Sunday afternoon. Custom, fear of bandits, of another Mohammedan
rebellion, of evil spirits, perhaps of cold winds, and no doubt the
laudable desire of the authorities for an opportunity to make some
“squeeze” that will be understood by many of our own city dwellers, seem
to be the principal causes of this anachronistic repair of city walls;
and the strongest of all these, probably, is custom. This one might have
inferred from the fact that this one was being rebuilt exactly in the
style in vogue centuries ago, with the crenelated top all the several
miles around it pierced by thousands of little loopholes convenient in
medieval warfare. But in China there is still some practical value to a
city wall if it has gates that can be locked and is not so badly ruined
that any one with a little diligence can find a place to climb over it.
For it is a real protection against bandit raids if they are not too
strong, against tough characters in general, and it is not without its
use in those quarrels between towns which sometimes become serious.
Besides, Tsin-ching seemed to be a kind of anti-Mohammedan stronghold,
for there were few Moslems in town—the prevalence of pigs would have
told us that, even if the human inhabitants had not—and who can tell
when the next Islamite rebellion will sweep over Kansu?

The only foreigners in Tsin-ching or for many miles around were two
Swedish ladies, one of them from Minnesota, who had recently established
a mission station. They had not yet made any converts, but they had
brought about a kinder and more tolerant feeling toward themselves, and
toward “outside barbarians” in general, by which they hoped in time to
profit. One of the richest and most significant men in town, who began
as a declared and ruthless enemy, had sneaked over a few weeks before to
let the detested missionaries of the despised sex cure him of an injury
which neither the herbs of the local druggist nor the hocus-pocus of the
local priests had helped, and, though he scarcely showed gratitude in
the Western sense, rumors of the miracle had begun to have their
influence. One of the difficulties these missionary ladies, like the few
others we met on our journey, had to contend with was that the Chinese
women with whom they tried to come in contact, especially in outlying
districts, fled at sight of them because they took them to be men. This
was largely due to their unbound feet and their skirts in place of
ladylike trousers, but, quite aside from these details, there was,
indeed, a wide difference both in appearance and manner between these
big, vigorous Nordics and the tame little Chinese women.

Exchange-shops with their huge wooden “cash” signs out in front were
more than numerous in Tsin-ching, and perhaps they were all needed.
There a Mexican dollar was worth 2500 “cash,” but more or less in
theory, since both the silver dollar and the brass coins with square
holes in them had largely disappeared from circulation. In place of the
former there were _taels_—irregular lumps of silver requiring a pair—or
two—of scales for any transaction in which they were involved—and
“Lanchow coppers.” Between these two extremes, as formerly between the
silver dollar and the “cash,” there was nothing; and if the American,
with his convenient little silver coins of fixed value, his unquestioned
paper money, and his check-book, will pause a moment to visualize just
what this means, he will understand why doing business is a complicated
process, and why the streets seem to swarm with exchange-shops in such
communities. Fortunately prices—and certainly wages—were low in
Tsin-ching. The missionary ladies, who were their own architects,
contractors, and bosses in the construction of their mission, had
formerly paid their workmen 500 “cash” a day; but recently, food prices
having gone up, this had been changed to 310 “cash” and food. It
amounted to about the same thing for the ladies, since the two native
meals furnished the gangs cost approximately two hundred “cash” a day
per man, but they could buy and prepare the food in quantity at
considerably less than the men themselves must otherwise have paid in
native restaurants, where meals were less sanitary and nourishing.
Native bosses got 400 “cash” a day, with food. Skilled carpenters, who
need not have been ashamed of the samples of their work which we saw,
were on a salary rather than a mere wage basis, as befits their higher
caste; that is, they received, besides their food, 10,000 “cash” a
month, in other words, fully two American dollars! Correspondingly, the
ladies could buy chickens for the equivalent of our nickel, a leg of
lamb for little more, and many other things in proportion. On the other
hand, they had the task of counting their “cash,” for every string of a
thousand was almost sure to be short, perhaps to have only ninety-two or
so to the hundred; and even if it was not they had to be sure of that
fact before paying the string to some carpenter who might otherwise
return half an hour later with visible proof that he had been underpaid.
Then recently their troubles had been appreciably increased by the
influx of “Lanchow coppers.”


Though the proper place for airing that scandal might be Lanchow itself,
there were so many evidences of it before we reached there that clarity
requires an earlier mention of it. As in other countries of poor
transportation facilities and sluggish circulation, the back-waters of
China are in many cases chronically short on coins, particularly on
small change, for their interminable transactions. The Tuchun of Kansu,
hoping to remedy this difficulty—and incidentally further to obviate the
possibility of eventually leaving the province a poorer man than he
entered it—hit upon what was to him perhaps a highly original scheme. He
called in the “cash” and the rather scarce coppers in circulation, had
them melted and mixed, and reissued them as new coin. This would not
have been so bad, so atrocious, in fact, if he had actually minted the
stuff into money. But what he did do was to give men all over the
district the right—at 20,000 “cash” royalty a day, gossip whispered—to
resmelt the current coins in their little dung-fire, box-bellows forges,
mix in great quantities of sand, and pour the molten result into crude
molds, from which issued such a caricature of a coin as has scarcely
circulated in the civilized world since the last find of Roman money
disappeared into the museums. They are light as glass, give out the ring
of a hat-check, are barely legible, vary greatly in design and
lettering, with misspelled attempts at English on one side of several
styles of them, and are so hopelessly mixed with dross, according to
experts, that the bit of metal in them can never again be reclaimed. At
first they were made as single coppers, worth ten “cash” each; but when
it was discovered that the cost of making a coin was three “cash,” the
double copper, or twenty-“cash” piece, was substituted, though with but
slight changes either in size or other details.

How a Chinese general, steeped as it were in the intricacies of exchange
and familiar since childhood with the daily fluctuations of the money he
used, could have overlooked the certainty of a swift decline in value of
such alleged coins is hard to understand. Perhaps he realized all this,
but lost no sleep over it so long as he got his own rake-off in real
money. At any rate, whereas a “good” or “red” copper was valued in Kansu
at two hundred or less to the Mexican dollar, and the new ones announce
themselves to be worth the same, the latter had already fallen to about
seven thousand to the dollar in the exchange-shops of Tsin-ching. Even
if this rate had been uniform throughout the province, the situation
might have been endurable. But not only did it wildly fluctuate every
day, almost every hour; it varied greatly between towns only a few miles
apart, with an upward tendency as one approached Lanchow, where the
Tuchun’s power was at its height. Long before the borders of the
province were reached this oozed away entirely, at least in so far as
his experiments in currency and finance went. His autonomous subordinate
in Pingliang had refused point-blank to allow the new coinage to enter
his district; Liangchow and most other large towns had followed suit,
and only within a certain limited area around the provincial capital
itself had the Tuchun succeeded in imposing this substitute for what
elsewhere was still “red” coppers and stringable “cash.” Where he
actually ruled, it meant a heavy fine or a prison sentence to refuse to
accept the miserable stuff; but he had little or no influence over the
value set upon it by the money-changers. Any one with even a bowing
acquaintance with the science of finance need not be told what disasters
this condition of affairs brought upon shopkeepers and business men,
especially upon those whose stocks were more or less imported from the
outside world.

One of the amusing points of the affair was that Liangchow and Pingliang
and many another town and district that would not use the stuff
themselves were manufacturing vast quantities of the spurious coins and
shipping them to Lanchow, without, of course, paying the Tuchun his
“rake-off.” It is hard even for the Chinese to outwit the Chinese, and
no sooner had the daily royalty rate been set than most coineries within
the Tuchun’s influence put on two shifts and worked twenty-four hours a
day. Moreover, it is no great task to counterfeit miserable
counterfeits, and almost any little cave-village in the loess hills
could mold coins to its heart’s content, so long as it could get the bit
of copper and brass needed. Transporting the stuff was in itself a
problem worthy an expert. “Cash” can at least be strung and hung round
the neck, but to carry enough of this new stuff for his immediate wants
would have taxed the endurance of any pedestrian above the coolie class.
In fact it was a serious matter to others than pedestrians. Every little
while we met some traveler, usually a merchant, no doubt, mounted on a
mule and followed by a donkey sagging under the weight and noisy with
the falsetto rattling of “Lanchow coppers”; and it was no uncommon thing
to pass long lines of coolies with big bundles of the new coins
oscillating at the ends of their shoulder-poles, jogging eastward, as if
the false currency were spreading, like a plague. Indeed the towns
toward the end of our outward journey sounded like brass check factories
perpetually in the act of taking stock. The latest rumor, as we neared
the capital of the province, was that the Tuchun had decided to coin
dollars also; “and then,” as a merchant sadly put it, “we will have no
money at all left.” However, the harassed people might have cheered
themselves up with the hope that the day may come when Lanchow’s
despised coppers will be worth their weight in gold among numismatists,
for coins cast in a mold are a rarity in this day and generation.

In a moment of good-hearted thoughtlessness the major sent his card and
our respects to the magistrate of Tsin-ching, who was of course of too
low rank actually to be called upon. The latter acknowledged the high
honor paid him by sending an official to ask whether he could do
anything for us, and though we assured him that there was no way in
which our contentment with the world could possibly be improved, we
found next morning that he had detailed four soldiers to accompany us.
Whether this was out of sheer respect for our rank, from actual fear
that bandits might attack us, or because the soldiers needed the few
coppers which we might, and which he could or would not, give them, was
not clear; but we rather suspected the last-named motive. They were a
cheery and picturesque detail. No two of them had two garments that were
uniform; their rifles bore a resemblance to some harmless substitute for
a weapon, hand-made by some very clumsy youth half a century ago, and
habitually misused ever since. In place of the usual strap, each had a
string by which to hang the gun over his shoulder, and the bore was such
that the cartridges, if there were any, must have been of just about the
right diameter for our shot-gun. One of these merry protectors was so
filled with song, of a strictly Chinese nature, that had he waited a bit
longer to abandon me and give his precious protection to some other part
of our straggling expedition he would certainly have had impressed upon
him the rights and privileges of extraterritoriality. At the noonday
halt we told this escort that, while they were men of whom any army
might be proud, we could not dream of putting them to the task of
tramping through the earthquake country ahead merely to defend our
unworthy selves; moreover, we mentioned, we should be glad to give them
at once the little present that they would get at nightfall if they
continued. This last was evidently a strong argument, for we had the
satisfaction of seeing them accept the suggestion with thanks and
alacrity.

In many parts of Kansu, we learned before we left it, there was much the
same old story of the inert weight of military pressure as elsewhere in
China. The soldiers in many districts were not paid, but were allowed to
shift for themselves upon the population. In theory this escort of ours
received four thousand “cash” a month! But they depended much more upon
such windfalls as ourselves, upon catching their own people gambling or
trafficking in opium and confiscating their belongings, or upon foraging
pure and simple among the helpless country people. Those groups which
had strength and audacity enough called upon chambers of commerce and
similar organizations for “loans” without interest—and of course without
principal, so far as the lenders are concerned; others wandered the
country until they found similar openings to which their strength was
equal.


Even before we reached Tsin-ching there had been many signs of the great
earthquake that had befallen this district; but in a land naturally so
split and gashed and broken beyond repair many of these had passed
almost unnoticed. Beyond that battered town, however, the chaotic world
on every hand impressed upon us all day long that we were in the heart
of the earthquake district, in so far at least as the main route to
Lanchow passes through it. Even worse damage was done, people said, in
districts off the road, but what we saw was enough to make it clear that
the big fish which sits bolt upright and holds the earth between its
fore fins had wagged his tail at the wickedness of mankind to excellent
advantage. This cause of the tragedy and the Chinese cosmogony it
involves were, by the way, firmly and unquestioningly believed not only
by our cart-drivers, who were in every-day matters paragons of common
sense, but by more than one Chinese of much higher caste. Only Chang,
who claimed to be so fervent a Christian as not even to believe in
“squeeze,” laughed at this view of the catastrophe; and he could not
give any other reasonable explanation for it.

Evidently such things had happened before in this part of the world, for
not only does the broken and fissured loess country require some such
interpretation but often pieces of old roof-tile protruded from the
cliff-sides of the sunken roads a hundred feet or more below the
surface. But this was the first quake within the memory of living
inhabitants, and apparently within their traditions, though the region,
and the inhabitants, too, for that matter, have been trembling ever
since. The catastrophe came suddenly, without the slightest warning, at
7:30 in the evening of December 16, 1920, and had taken its appalling
toll and gone almost before the survivors could catch their breath. Six
hundred thousand people at least lost their lives; the official figures
are one million, but the Chinese are prone to exaggerate, just as the
Mohammedans habitually refuse to give accurate information in anything
resembling a census. How many were injured is suggested by the fact that
earthquake victims were still wandering into the hospital at Pingliang
when we were there almost two years later. But cave-dwelling, especially
in so frail a soil as this, is admirably designed to make an earthquake
effective, and there is no computing how many were simply buried alive
without any actual physical injury being done them.

The missionaries as well as the Chinese of Kansu assert that the
earthquake was a blessing in disguise—some of them even recognize in it
a direct interference from heaven with earthly designs; for a General Ma
and three hundred Mohammedan leaders were killed in a mosque in which,
say their antagonists, they were preparing for another great Moslem
rebellion, to begin the very next day. Some went so far as to say that
an army of many thousand men, ready to begin its work at dawn, was
buried hundreds of feet deep in a great ravine in which it was encamped.
These things may not be strictly true, but there seems to be little
doubt that, but for the earthquake, there would have been a Mohammedan
uprising very shortly afterward. Since the great Chinese Moslem
rebellion of 1862, in which eighty thousand non-Moslems are reputed to
have been slaughtered, and in which certainly large cities and great
districts were so devastated that they have not recovered to this day,
there have been three smaller revolts against Chinese rule, so that
although Kansu may not recall her earlier earthquakes she has by no
means forgotten the terrors which this one is credited with having
averted.

The more pietistic of the missionaries make much of the belief that,
while many thousands of the wicked followers of the false prophet were
buried in their caves or dashed to pieces in their ravines, not a
Christian was killed. One by one, it was said, they straggled into the
mission stations with stories of the untold damage that had taken place
all about them, but weeping reverently at the miracle by which they and
theirs had in every case escaped injury and even property loss. Without
a discount for the unconscious exaggerations of overworked and
over-pious apostles, such a fact would not be absolute and final proof
of wrath of God against the Moslems for having picked the wrong faith,
for while there are several million of them in the province, the number
of Christians would not entirely preclude the possibility of their
having been spared by mere chance rather than by divine intercession. In
Pingliang, for instance, after thirty years’ work there are fifty
baptized Christians; in another district two hundred converts are
claimed among two hundred thousand _families_.

In the stiff, short climb through a ruined world an hour or two out of
Tsin-ching, trees that had once shaded the road were hanging so
precariously over great abysses that even this fuel-starved people did
not dare to try to cut them. Here and there great pieces of the road,
big willows, poplars, and all, had been pitched pell-mell over the edge.
Yet villages still lived on lumps of earth half broken off from the rest
of the world and ready to collapse into mighty chasms below. The
mountains had indeed “walked,” as the complicated yet sometimes
childishly simple Chinese language has it. Whole sides of terraced peaks
had slipped off and carried the road intact, trees and all, half a mile
away, had bottled up deep-green unnatural lakes at the bottom of great
holes in the loess earth—to become what; a future menace or mere
salt?—unless released by the hand of man. Sometimes half a dozen
mountains had all danced together and left the brown loess churned up as
if it had been boiled, with a new self-made “road” and the
telegraph-wire on new poles stretching away across it, yet without the
suggestion of an inhabitant, nothing but a deathly stillness for long
distances, rarely broken perhaps by a magpie whose gay manners were
utterly out of keeping with the desolate scene. Farther to the north,
they say, one may still see shocks of harvested grain rotted in the
fields, where the population was entirely killed off and none has come
to take its place. Sometimes only half the terraced mountain-side had
come down to overwhelm the tree-lined highway, or to bury a village as
deeply as beneath the sea, the other half still supporting an uninjured
hamlet below, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb this quiet,
bucolic existence. Ends of the mud walls of former villages protruding
from the yellow chaos were often the only suggestion that human beings
had once lived and bred and died there. Sometimes the wide road bordered
by its venerable willows ended suddenly against a mighty bank of
convulsed earth where the mountain had piled high over it, the new route
clambering away over the débris with that indifference of youth to the
experiences of old age that keeps the world moving onward instead of
crouched at the roadside weeping over its disasters. In several places
hundred-yard pieces of the old haphazard highway, twenty yards wide, had
been gently picked up and set at right angles to its former course,
without so much as a crack in its dozen mule-paths and the narrow strips
of turf between them.

Up over this broken and wrecked world came toward noon twenty coolies
trotting under heavy loads of antlers oscillating from their
pole-burdened shoulders. Wapiti and other deer are still found in the
high mountains of Kansu, but the Chinese demand for their horns,
preferably in the velvet, as medicine, is sure to exterminate them as
completely as wanton destruction has the forests, probably pine and
hemlock, that once covered all these tamed and terraced ranges. There is
something strikingly un-Western, something akin to our own medieval
ancestors, about the Chinese temperament in such matters, when they will
continue century after century to pay fabulous prices—a good pair of
elk-horns in the velvet will bring as much as fifty dollars gold in the
large cities—for something of entirely imaginary value, without ever
thinking of attempting to find out whether it is really good for
anything or not. Their forebears thought so, and that settles the
question. If once a custom can get a place with the Chinese, it need
have little worry about holding its position, no matter how inefficient,
useless, or even harmful it may become.


Well on in the afternoon we came upon a beautiful blue-green lake
imprisoned in a ravine, miles long and with a side arm of unknown
length, all in a barren brown world without any other form of water. One
might have fancied that the people roundabout would have been delighted
to have it, and thank the earthquake for blocking the tiny stream that
had formed it; but what do the people of Kansu know of the beauty of
water, or of its usefulness, beyond what is required for their own and
their animals’ gullets? So, with the help of American relief funds, they
had cut a great gap through the fallen hill at the head of the lake—how
queer that Kansu had to be paid by people on the other side of the earth
for repairing their own land!—to assure themselves against being flooded
out by such unnatural lakes when they rise above their barriers or seep
away through the loose loess soil.

We spent that night at the upper end of this lake in Tsing-kiang-yi, the
town worst treated by the earthquake of any along the way. It was split
into many fantastic forms, and threshing-floors had grown up in what
were merely mighty earthquake cracks. This did not keep the inhabitants,
however, from enjoying life in the orthodox Chinese fashion. A
theatrical troupe had come to set up a makeshift stage of poles and
matting on six-foot legs in a corner of a filthy open lot overhanging
the mighty gorge into which much of the town had disappeared two years
before, and most of Tsing-kiang-yi and the surrounding country stood
crowded together in front of it. There is a difference only in degree
between the theatrical performances given on such outdoor contrivances
at country fairs and on village market-days and those in the most
imposing theaters in Peking. The same nerve-racking “music” is torn off
in hundred-yard strips by men at one side of the stage, who conduct
themselves as freely all through the performance as if they were
peanut-sellers in the market-place. There are the same more or less
mythological beings in astonishing costumes, somewhat more soiled,
surmounted by masked or painted faces, and these in turn by strange
creations in wigs and head-dresses poorly joined to the wearers, who
saunter out at intervals from the partly concealing mat dressing-room
behind the stage proper and screech for long periods in the selfsame
distressing falsetto with which Chinese theater-goers everywhere allow
themselves to be tortured. The same property-man wanders incessantly
about the stage, setting it to rights or bringing anything needed, like
a nonchalant coolie at work in a coal-yard; the same unwashed
ragamuffins, carelessly stuffed into absurd and multicolored garments
which make them generals, gods, court attendants, or anything else the
play may call for, are herded on and off in the wooden manner of
“supers” the world over. Small boys—not to mention full-grown
ones—clamber about the hasty structure in their eagerness to make the
most of one of the rare treats of a dismal lifetime, even sitting in the
edges of the stage itself, to the annoyance apparently only of a stray
foreigner with his own queer notions of stage propriety. Down below, the
standing audience may not behave with what the Western world would call
rapt attention, but it has its own restless, free-for-all way of showing
its delight.

In Chinese villages theatrical performances are usually a community
undertaking, a way of spending the accumulated funds of this or that
communal scheme, which it would of course be foolish to squander in
building schools or cleaning the streets. Sometimes it is a treat
offered by or forced from some prominent citizen, sometimes a sort of
fine exacted from a neighboring village with which there has been a
quarrel. That Chinese “actors” wandering through the provinces do not
live in steam-heated hotels or ride in Pullman cars need scarcely be
emphasized; indeed there is a strong suspicion from as far away as the
outer edge of the audience that time and opportunity and inclination to
remove the evidences of long cart-road travel very, very seldom
coincide. But then, back in the interior players are still rated almost
in the coolie class, however much they may suggest the romance of life
to gaping yokels.


We actually saw a man mending the road next day; that is, he was
chopping out pieces of sandstone from between deep ruts in a very narrow
gully, though he may merely have been gathering them for his own use. It
had been a crisp, brilliant morning, more pleasant to walk than to ride,
white smoke rising from a mud town across a great gorge ahead that would
otherwise probably never have been distinguished from the brown-yellow
hillside on which it hung. Perhaps a distant mule-bell faintly reached
the ear, a pair of coolies on the sky-line caught the eye, and that
might be all for long distances except the tumbled verdureless
immensity. That day we clambered over a two-thousand-meter pass, then
caught a great crack in the earth, along the high edge of which the road
went until mid-afternoon, prosperous hills on either hand, and tilted
farm-yards surrounded by high mud walls, into which we could look down
as from an airplane. The earth had grown harder, a bit less friable than
pure loess, though still without a suggestion of stone, and casting
itself if anything in still more fantastic formations. Boys herding
sheep or goats, and muleteers plodding behind their animals, sang on
far-away mountain-sides snatches of song that sounded more Western than
Chinese. Always a chaotic world of impossibly sculptured cliffs and
incredible hollows unrolled itself before us. Now and again the road
crawled across some great earth bridge, in constructing which the hand
of man had taken no part, over a vast chasm but an insignificant stream;
in some places it had fallen away into another of those breathless
abysses, to skirt along the sheer edge of which seemed foolhardy even on
foot. Yet all manner of Chinese travel, our own carts included, toiled
serenely over these spots, apparently quite oblivious of the fact that
the outer wheels more than once dropped to the hub down the side of the
mighty precipice. Now and again surely some one must have gone over it
with a piece of the crumbling road; perhaps the others burned a little
joss at the nearest ruined mud temple and dropped a few “cash” into the
big bronze kettle-gong the old beggar priest so constantly beats out in
front of it, but certainly they did nothing else to be spared a similar
fate on their next journey.

However, it is not true that the Chinese are utterly incapable of
learning by experience. In this earthquake country, where living in
caves proved so disastrous, they had certainly come out of them. But
they were conservative in architecture as in other things, and the new
mud huts, set as far out from the dreaded mountain-sides as possible,
wherever inhabitants remained, were built in exactly the same shape as
the caves, with an arched mud roof and the general appearance of having
been dug out of the mountain and carried to the new setting. Such
innovations will no doubt continue to be erected in this region until a
new generation has forgotten and prefers to tempt fate again rather than
go to the extra labor of building houses where it is so much easier to
dig them.

Speaking of building, a very false impression prevails in the Western
world as to Chinese structures. Because of their scores of centuries of
existence and their tendency to cling to old things, many of us have
assumed that the Chinese people build for posterity. Quite the contrary
is the case. The Chinese, one is constantly being impressed, have their
chief interest in their ancestors, or themselves, not in their
descendants. Their coffins are made of mighty slabs of wood that have
much to do with the crime of deforestation; they may not only spend all
they have for the funeral of a father but often bankrupt themselves for
a generation. But their houses are the cheapest possible structures,
almost wholly made of the earth of the fields—the only material left, to
be sure, in many regions. Mud bricks, mud and straw walls, mud _k’angs_
in place of bed, chair, divan, and table—even the roof-tiles are merely
a better baked form of mud. Nor is it only the humble homes that are
reduced to this material. The dwellings of men of wealth, the palaces of
the bygone dynasties, the very Temple of Heaven in Peking, the Great
Wall itself, are impermanent structures largely put together with wet
earth which is a sad substitute indeed for cement. It is as if, having
an unlimited supply of dirt-cheap labor and a great paucity of good
materials, the Chinese find something reprehensible in building too
solidly, a waste of valuable substance as against inexpensive toil,
perhaps a feeling that to build too well to-day will be unjust to those
who will want work to-morrow. This point of view pervades everything,
from imperial palaces to the tiniest of children’s toys, from temples
and pagodas to water-jars and mud jugs; almost all of them are flimsy or
easily destructible, whether by use, time, or the elements. The result
is that the country from beginning to end is in a constant state of
half-ruin or dismal disrepair, for the average life of most structures
is so short that while one is being built up again another is sure to
have fallen down.

In contrast to the endless processions of wheat-wagons and the like of a
few days before, we met only two carts from dawn to sunset, and not many
foot-travelers. Back in the crowded loess cañons it had been a pleasure
to watch the expertness with which our chief cartman manipulated his
loosely joined mules and awkward conveyance, taking advantage of every
little break in the line of traffic, of every hesitation on the part of
others to forge ahead, and keeping almost at our heels when such a feat
seemed impossible. Here where travel was light his expertness was still
needed to escape the many pitfalls of the road, and still the carts came
close to keeping the pace we set. This was not breathless, to be sure;
ninety _li_ a day almost as regularly as the days dawned—and walled
cities or at least large villages seemed to have been exactly spaced to
accommodate travel at that rate. Our cartmen might have done their best,
anyway, but the promise of a dollar _cumshaw_ each for every day gained
on the regular schedule assured it. This obviated arguments, worry, and
a dozen other possible difficulties, and if our drivers insisted that it
was better to spend the night at such a town rather than attempt to push
on to the next we could take their word for it, which of itself was
quite worth the extra money. In striking contrast to one of the serious
drawbacks to cross-country travel in South America one could depend upon
most road information. Ask almost any one how many _li_ it was to such a
place, and the answer usually was not only quick but fairly accurate.
The finest thing about the Chinese _li_ is that you need not worry about
crossing a mountain or any other piece of unusually bad going; the _li_
are shortened accordingly, and so many hours of steady plodding will
bring you to your destination irrespective of conditions along the way.

Our road at length went down into the great cañon-bed of a little
meandering stream that spent its days, and its nights, too, no doubt, in
carrying away the cliffs which towered high above it, as they fell in
clouds of dust and dissolved into silt. A few hours along this brought
us to the rather striking town of Houei-ning, in a wide spot of the
river valley with hills piling high above it close on every side. These
and two distinct city walls enclosed what were virtually two towns, one
somewhat more open and seeming to harbor an unusual number of religious
edifices, the other crowded, with very narrow streets, still further
darkened by many fantastic old wooden _p’ai-lous_. There were
suggestions that the first was the Mohammedan quarter. Houei-ning was
also repairing its walls, had indeed built a big new gate, and was now
topping off the inner and principal defense with cream-colored brick
parapets, loopholes and all. Pure mud was the only mortar, except
between the topmost bricks, and the “masons” were small boys and old
men. Boys barely eight years old were carrying great loads of bricks;
those of ten or twelve had already been graduated into bricklayers.
Almost all of them had glowing red cheeks, but their faces and hands
were worse chapped than any one has ever seen, perhaps, outside China,
where long sleeves are the poor substitutes for gloves or mittens, and
hands toughened, not to say split and blackened, by exposure not only
endure greater cold but water several degrees hotter than can our own.

[Illustration:

  This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest
]

[Illustration:

  A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to escort us through
    the earthquake district, though whether for fear of bandits, out of
    mere respect for our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a
    few coppers which he could not give them himself, was not clear
]

[Illustration:

  Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old tree-lined
    highway. In places this was covered hundreds of feet deep for miles;
    in others it had been carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile
    or more away
]

[Illustration:

  In the earthquake district of western China whole terraced
    mountain-sides came down and covered whole villages. In the
    foreground is a typical Kansu farm
]

Badly hit by the earthquake, Houei-ning was still full of cracks and
chasms and ruins, and the “roads” leading down into or out of it seemed
in many cases to drop into pitfalls and sometimes entirely to lose
themselves, or at least their sense of direction. There were many times
as many dead as living inhabitants. The almost golden-yellow landscape
of the verdureless mountain slopes about the town were more thickly
covered with graves than I could remember ever having seen before,
either in China or Korea; the myriads of little conical mounds suggested
spatters of raindrops on a rolling, golden sea. High in the hills close
above were what seemed to be a plethora of temples and monasteries,
while all the landscape bristled with stone monuments, most of them on
the backs of turtles, the rest handsome old ornamental arches of carved
stone, all more or less cracked and ruined. Houei-ning must have had
something of a history in bygone centuries, like so many now sleepy old
towns of China.

Now it seemed to be the big market for those crude forked sticks which
do duty as pitchforks among the Chinese. All this region made a
four-tined one, with a wooden crosspiece let into and tied to the tines
and the end of the handle with tough grass, but Houei-ning evidently had
a monopoly on those grown in the form of a two-pronged implement. In
Honan perfect three-tined ones were grown in abundance, as rose-bushes
and the like are trained into fantastic shapes in Japan. The flimsiness
of construction which everywhere impresses itself upon the traveler in
China is nowhere more noticeable than in such peasants’ tools,—rakes a
mere bamboo pole with one end split, spread, and bent over in the form
of teeth; woven-wicker buckets for use at open holes in the fields that
do service as wells; little bent-willow shovels for the countless
thousands of boys and men, and not a few women and girls, who wander the
roads with their baskets—for gathering the droppings of animals seems to
be the favorite outdoor sport of China; it is a lonely trail and a
depopulated region indeed where these are left to mingle with the soil.
It was in Houei-ning, too, that we saw offered for sale guns that must
have been old when the Manchu dynasty began, guns slender as a lance,
eight feet or more long, with tiny butts apparently meant to be used
against the thumb instead of the shoulder, and some contraption for
firing that probably antedated the flint-lock by many decades. A
fetching touch of color that increased as the weather grew more bitingly
cold were the earlaps worn by nearly every one. In Kansu these are
almost always home-made and hand-embroidered in gaily colored designs of
birds, flowers, and the like, with much less violation of artistic
standards than one would expect.

All through this region a custom wide-spread in China was very generally
practised. That is, almost all boys from perhaps four to twelve years of
age wore round their necks an iron chain big enough to restrain an
enraged bulldog, and usually fastened together with a large
native-forged padlock, though there would have been no difficulty in
lifting off the whole contraption. The object of this adornment is to
protect the precious male offspring from ill luck—here, perhaps, to keep
the big fish from wagging his tail again. If parents have any reason to
suspect that evil spirits are on the trail of a son, they hasten to a
temple and put him in pawn to an idol, as it were; that is, they have a
priest hang a chain, with much hocus-pocus, about his neck, thereby
deceiving the powers of evil into believing that he is not their son at
all but that he belongs to the temple. In a way this is true, for before
he can be “redeemed” again by the parents the priest, who keeps the key
of the padlock, must be generously rewarded. Let a boy fall ill, and no
time is lost in evoking this sure protection; especially if one dies,
his surviving or later-born brother is chained at once. The constant
efforts of evil spirits to do injury to a family through the still
unmarried sons, of whom ancestor-worship requires posterity, is one of
the greatest banes of Chinese existence. Not the least uncommon of the
tricks resorted to for the discomfiture of these unseen enemies is to
give the boy a girl’s name, for naturally no evil spirit is going to
waste his time in trying to injure a mere female.


The city gates of Houei-ning do not open until six, after which we went
down again into labyrinthian loess gullies, across a broad fertile
valley, and finally into a river cañon. Nothing could have been more
dull than the long morning through this dreary chasm, in utter silence
except for our own noises, and a rare donkey-boy singing his way along
the top of the cliff far above. But, as if to make up for this dismal
stretch, the road clambered early in the afternoon to the summit of a
high ridge, with perhaps the most marvelous series of vistas of all our
journey. There were crazy-shaped fields at every possible height, ragged
little hollows that looked exactly like shell-holes, even their tiny
bottoms carefully cultivated, threshing-floors throwing up grain like
bursts of shrapnel, clusters of farm buildings of the identical color of
all the landscape, and always surrounded by high mud walls, a wildly
chaotic yet completely tamed land, utterly bare brown, turned golden by
the brightest of suns and the clearest of air, with only the faintest
purple haze on the far edges of the horizon. The trail had taken again
to one of the pell-mell slopes of a mighty stream-worn crack in the
earth and worked its way in and out along the haphazard face of this,
across natural earth bridges, over jutting spurs and perpendicular
ridges, into pockets where, cut off from the breeze but still in the
brilliant sunshine, it was almost uncomfortably warm, and gradually
carried us higher and higher on a ridge that swung more and more to the
south. The miserable half-ruined mud village in which we found lodging
was so high that to step out into the night was like diving into
ice-water. Yet we kept to the ridge for hours more next morning before
the road abandoned it at last and plunged headlong down into a big
valley supporting the ancient town of Ngan-ting. An unusually huge wall
of irregular shape, with very fancy high gates, surrounded the same
crowds of staring, dirty people, of filthy-nosed, half-naked children
and crippled women, all huddled together in the cold shadows instead of
spreading out in the sunshine of the open world all about them.
Ngan-ting seemed to be an important garrison town, through which we
passed just in time to become entangled in some manœver resembling
formal guard-mount, amid the barbaric blaring of many Chinese bugles.
Our carts meanwhile had scorned the town and were on their way down the
widest river valley yet. Along this the avenue of trees, some of their
trunks scarred with pictorial obscenities, kept up in a half-hearted
way; but scrub-poplar and sometimes almost branchless trunks were poor
substitutes for the magnificent old willows farther east. Many of these
had been cut down in this region, as huge stumps on a level with the
earth showed. Apparently there is nothing that so exasperates the
Chinese as the sight of a live tree; it would look so much better shaped
as a coffin or turned into temple doors.

Suddenly, just beyond Ngan-ting, both sexes and all ages took to making
yarn, in the Andean style of twirling a bobbin as they wandered about,
and to knitting, not merely caps and stockings, but whole suits. We had
once or twice been shocked some days earlier at the sight of a
camel-driver calmly twiddling his knitting-needles as he strode or rode
along, a pastime bad enough in talkative old ladies and tea-party guests
who decline to waste their time, and certainly far beneath the dignity
of the great male sex! But some missionary, it seemed, had started the
craze—for a generation or so ago knitting was as unknown in China as
real peanuts or the weaving of woolen clothing—and had neglected to
explain its proper segregation. There had been no rain in all this
region for a whole year, they said, and we had been advised to buy
rain-water only of the Mohammedans, even if they forced us to pay high
for it, since that to be had from the mere Chinese might be rank poison
even after boiling. Somewhere along the way I had seen a blind youth
marching round and round one of those two-stone grist-mills to be found
all over China, and most often operated by a blindfolded donkey. His
short hair where cues were still the fashion, and a not unattractive
young woman watching him from a near-by doorway with an expression that
might easily have been taken for a satisfied leer, naturally called up
the memory of Samson and Delilah. Indeed, the fellow swung his head from
side to side and lifted his feet unnecessarily high at every step in a
way to prove that the late Caruso had learned at least one stage trick
from real life. But the Philistines in this case were only the filth and
lack of care which leave so many Chinese children sightless. There was a
little blind boy of five that morning, for instance, carrying a baby
brother of two, each wearing a single rag; and the baby was telling the
boy where to step, though he afterward ran a bit alone and made the
threshing-floor without mishap through many pitfalls.


In the account of his travels in China a decade ago Professor Ross has a
chapter entitled, “Unbinding the Women of China.” One of the professor’s
finest traits, however, is over-optimism. Foot-binding most certainly
showed no signs of dying out in any of the territory through which we
passed in our two months’ journey out into the northwest. A group of
little girls from six to eight years old toddling along the road on
crippled feet, yet carrying heavy baskets and driven, like calves to
market, by a sour-faced old woman whose own feet still seemed to pain
her at every step, was no unusual sight. One might easily have fancied
they were to be offered for sale—girls can be bought for a mere song in
this region. How often we passed a child in her early teens astride a
donkey urged on by a man on foot, her little tapering legs ending in
mere knots, her face so whitened and rouged that she looked like some
inanimate and over-decorated doll! Only another bride, or concubine, on
her way to the home of a husband or a master she had never seen. Girls
certainly not yet ten years old were already shuffling about house- and
threshing-floors in their football knee-pads; little girls dismally
crying in some mud pen to which they had been banished because they
could not suppress such signs of pain from their newly bound feet, or
hobbling a few yards along the road with set lips, emphasized the fact
that there are far worse fates even than being born a boy in China.

Crippled feet would be bad enough in comfort and warmth and with plenty
of servants to save steps, as probably most Westerners fancy Chinese
women have who are thus “beautified.” But if there is any decrease in
foot-binding at all, it is among the well-to-do, the wealthy in large
cities who might sit perpetually in cushions and spare their little
feet. Your peasant and countryman is most insistent that the old custom
be kept up; he would sneer with scorn at the thought of taking a wife
with natural feet; he sternly insists that his daughters’ feet be bound.
Stumping about their filthy huts, shivering with mountain cold, probably
never washing all over once in a lifetime, it is astonishing that these
country women do not all die of gangrene or something of the sort. How
they keep such feet warm, when they cannot move rapidly, when they ride
sometimes all day in a cold so bitter that even we were forced to get
off and walk at frequent intervals, is a question I have never yet heard
answered. Perhaps the foot becomes a kind of hoof, devoid of feeling and
incapable of freezing.

At first thought one might fancy that at least a few mothers who had
suffered all their lives would spare their daughters similar misery.
For, they have told missionary women, their bound feet hurt whenever
they walk, and generally they have pains also in the legs and the back
as long as they live. Knowing how serious a mere broken arch may be, it
is not hard for us to imagine what it must mean to have the arch doubled
back upon itself by turning the toes under and squeezing the heel up to
meet them, and then insisting that the victim walk. But even if the
mothers were devoid of that wide-spread human cussedness which makes
misery love company, even if the father did not absolutely insist, there
is the economic question. Girls must have husbands—“or they will
starve,” as even experienced Peking _amas_ put it. There is no provision
in the Chinese scheme of family for old maids. But granting that all
these insuperable difficulties have been overcome, there is the girl
herself with whom to reckon. If she has reached the age—six to
seven—when the binding should begin, and it has not begun, she is likely
to commence by insisting, and to advance to weeping and tearing her hair
unless the oversight is corrected. In other words, girls cry if their
feet are not bound; and they certainly cry if they are, so that there is
apparently no escape from tears. You would hardly expect a modest
American school-girl willingly to consent to mingle with her companions
if she were obliged to wear trousers, or to cut her hair boy fashion;
and in China “face,” the fear of ridicule and public opinion, is much
stronger than in the United States, and customs and precedents are far
more solidly intrenched. Naturally the Chinese girl would rather face a
little suffering—for at her age she probably has only a hazy idea of the
length of the ordeal and the severity of the pain involved—than to be
made fun of all her life for her “boy’s feet,” and, worse still, to lose
all chance of getting a husband, which she has been taught to think is
the most dreadful, in fact the most unsurvivable, fate that can befall
her. Once in a while some poor orphan girl is so “neglected” that no one
takes the trouble to bind her feet; and she becomes the village slattern
and a horrible example to all “decent” girls. For of course she cannot
get a husband; she will be unusually fortunate if some one gives her a
job as a barn-yard drudge.

Our hostess at one of the mission stations knew a girl whose feet had
not been bound but who turned out to be very pretty. One day an
important official happened to see her as he was passing through the
district. “What a pity,” he said, “that her feet are not bound, for if
they were I would take her as a concubine.”

“Oh, do not let that stand in the way of your desire, your Excellency,”
cried the enchanted mother; “give me a year and I will have her ready
for you.”

“But you cannot bind her feet in a year,” replied the official.

“Only leave it to me, your Excellency, and I shall not fail you,”
persisted the mother.

A year later the girl took the proud position that had been offered her,
as concubine to what, to the simple country people, was a very great
man; but to this day, though she still keeps her precarious place, she
cannot walk a step. For instead of starting gradually, by bending the
toes under and wrapping them in wet cloths that shrink, then tying them
down more tightly and beginning to draw up the heel the following year,
and so on, this mother was working against time. So she literally cut
much of the flesh off the girl’s feet, broke nearly every bone in them,
and by the time the year was up she had made her as helpless a cripple
as any mandarin could have wanted for a plaything.

The best style of bound feet, it seems, have the bones broken. Exacting
men ask if this has been done, and show worth-while approval at an
affirmative answer. Feet seem to vary in size and style by localities.
In some places on our western trip they were so small that no real foot
remained; the leg tapered down without a break to the end, almost as if
it had been cut off at the ankle. In fact we often wondered if it would
not have been much simpler and far less painful to amputate the feet
entirely. In other places the big toe was left, and with it something of
the shape of a foot. But under this the tiny shoe was generally fitted
with a miniature heel, often red in better-to-do cases, which made
walking next to impossible. With no give and take of the leg-muscles,
these of course soon dry up, so that the leg resembles a tapering wooden
stump and the gait bears out the likeness. Foot-binding is certainly a
wonderful scheme to keep the women from gadding about; and in a land
where they are seldom expected to leave the compound in which they are
delivered to the husband—or mother-in-law—this no doubt is considered a
great asset. Earlier writers have told of districts in which the feet
are no longer bound because of the sad experiences of fleeing women who
could not keep up with their men-folks at the time of the great
Mohammedan rebellion. But we never saw any such districts. Probably the
experiences have been forgotten, and custom has reasserted itself. The
Mohammedans, by the way, are just as bad as the mere Chinese in this
matter of foot-binding; if I remember rightly, the Koran has nothing to
say against it.

As far as we noticed, the missionaries in the northwest did not seem to
be making any great effort to reduce this most atrocious of Chinese
customs. Some of them appeared to be more eager to save souls than
soles, though in general they were men and women of sound common sense,
with their own feet on the ground rather than with their heads lost in
the clouds. Suffering and misery, immorality and wicked superstitions
are so general in China that the mere crippling of the feet soon becomes
but one of many possible points of attack. Christian converts are not
allowed to bind their feet; if they are already bound, they are
expected, in theory at least, to unbind them, though this in the case of
older women is not always possible. Girls with bound feet are refused
admission to most, if not all, Christian schools; and a few of the best
government institutions are commencing to follow suit. The best argument
of all against the practice is the plain economic one. If you bind your
daughter’s feet she cannot marry within the church, the missionaries
tell a convert, for Christian boys will not have her. As available
husbands of that point of view increase, the girls are of course more
and more willing to run the risk of not having themselves adorned with
lily feet. But, to be frank, Christianity is not rapidly increasing, and
bound feet seem to be as prevalent, at least in northern China, as ever,
except in Peking and a few coast cities, where it is against the law, in
Manchuria, where it is contrary to custom, in the rather small and
scattered Christian communities, and among a few of the more progressive
families in the larger cities.

Custom is not only a curiously tenacious weed but often a quick-growing
one. I was impressed with the latter thought one morning when, in riding
into a town of some size, I caught sight of a woman with natural feet,
such as I had not seen perhaps for a week; and the first flash to cross
my mind might have been expressed in some such exclamation as, “My, but
isn’t she ugly!” The abnormal type is always ugly, and if, in a mere
week, a foreigner can become so accustomed to the normal Chinese woman,
who tapers down like a sharpened stake, that an uncrippled one strikes
him, even momentarily, as a kind of monstrosity, it is easy to
understand why the Chinese have come in many centuries to consider this
alteration of the human form both an improvement and a necessity. Nor is
the custom so universally injurious to the health as the rest of the
world naturally supposes. Women with cheeks bright red without the aid
of rouge, yet with the tiniest of feet, were no more unusual in Kansu
than the filthy, old, and totally unattractive ones who scuttled away
into their holes as if they were in imminent danger when two harmless
foreigners rode by on travel-weary pack-mules.


Beyond “Dry Straw Hotel”—most Chinese place names are quaint and simple
if you translate them—where we made the noonday halt on the next to the
last day of the journey, the hills were no longer terraced, perhaps
because they were too steep, but lay piled up in a thousand folds and
wrinkles that made them even more beautiful. Wheat was flowing the other
way now, toward Lanchow, mainly on donkeys. There was much stone in the
soil of the great plain across which we jogged with a growing sensation
of eagerness that afternoon, and to the left, hazy under the low sun,
the beginning of the high ranges bordering Tibet. Large towns were
frequent, though there was no decrease in dirt and poverty.

[Illustration:

  Kansu earlaps are very gaily embroidered in colored designs of birds,
    flowers, and the like. Pipes are smaller than their “ivory”
    mouthpieces
]

[Illustration:

  It is a common sight in some parts of Kansu to see men knitting, and
    still more so to meet little girls whose feet are already beginning
    to be bound
]

[Illustration:

  The village scholar displays his wisdom by reading where all can see
    him—through spectacles of pure plate-glass
]

[Illustration:

  A Kirghiz in the streets of Lanchow, where many races of central Asia
    meet
]

Toward sunset we were accosted at the beginning of a defile by two
Chinese on sleigh-bell-jingling horses, one of whom handed us a letter.
It was from the chief Protestant missionary of Lanchow, a friend of the
major’s, to whom he had written from Sian-fu announcing our coming.
Rapidly as we had traveled, the coolie-borne fast mail had so far
outstripped us that here was the reply, welcoming us to the city and
regretting that, since we were to arrive on a Sunday, services made it
impossible for the writer to come out and meet us in person. To be met
thirty miles out by a host, even by proxy, struck us as real
hospitality; and the fact that the messengers had no difficulty in
identifying us is all that need be said as to the scarcity of Caucasian
travelers in Kansu. Even had they missed us among the labyrinthian paths
and gullies, they would not have gone far before some one would have
told them that the two foreigners had already passed. In all the sixteen
days we saw on the road two pairs of Russian Jews and two Dutch Catholic
priests, and had spent the night with two sets of missionaries and dined
with a third. One of the messengers was to return to Lanchow post-haste
with news of our arrival, and the other was to serve us as guide. They
do some things in a regal fashion in the far interior of China.

The last town in which we were forced to pass a night was a miserable
collection of filth and half-baked mud, though rich in grain, stacks
covering the flat roofs and surrounding the hard-earth floors on which
it was still being threshed; though two brand-new temples gleamed forth
from the general ugliness. All next morning a half-witted road,
evidently bent on outdoing itself as a fitting climax of the journey,
wandered along a wide river valley cut up everywhere not only by the
meandering stream itself but by hundreds of irrigation ditches. All
these were frozen over more or less solidly, with the result that
progress was a constant struggle with our mules, already jaded with
fatigue and fright and covered with icicles when we climbed at last to
the bank and made our way through almost continuous villages by a narrow
road. Even here irrigation ditches still made trouble, and strings of
carts and camels reduced progress materially, though this did not
greatly matter, since there was no difficulty in keeping up with our
carts that had been obliged to continue along the river bottom. Pure
loess had disappeared some days before, but the soil was merely a bit
more solid along the road that had been deliberately cut through a hill
beyond which I came out sooner than I had expected upon the Yellow
River, here racing swiftly through a deep rocky gorge and rather gray
than yellow in color. Extraordinary activity had broken out in the large
town forty _li_ from the end of our journey, for hundreds of men were
building a real embankment, hauling stone from far up the river-bed, and
preparing to throw a bridge across the tributary down which we had come.
But the enterprise, it turned out, was not the complete nullification of
the opinion we had formed of the Chinese inability to accomplish public
works, for it was being done with American relief funds under the
supervision of the host who was awaiting us.

Tobacco grew all along the last fertile miles of the journey, and the
increasing population busied itself in stripping leaves instead of
winnowing grain. These were carried home in two-man litters made of
matting, while the stripped stalks evidently served as fuel. For some
reason, which no one could explain to us, many of the fields were still
covered with the grown plants, shriveled and brown from the early winter
frosts, and in many cases covered with a kind of straw cap. Then the
road thought better of the short respite it had given us and plunged
uphill through another genuine loess cañon, where cliffs seemed ready to
fall in clouds of dust and camel-trains crowded. Out of this we broke an
hour or more later upon a far-reaching view of the wide, open plain
walled by mountains, across which, still twenty _li_ distant, lay the
capital of China’s westernmost province.




                              CHAPTER XXIV
                          IN MOHAMMEDAN CHINA


High up above the plain of Lanchow, on the topmost hillock of the partly
terraced mountains that bound it on the south, stands a new pagoda. It
was built by the wife of the former Tuchun, but as neither he nor she,
nor her particular brand of Buddhism, were popular favorites, the people
say that their prosperity departed on the day it was completed.
Conspicuous as it is from many _li_ away, no one seems to visit it. At
least there was not another footstep in the snow that had fallen some
days before when I climbed to it one morning, and its three stories,
open to all the world, showed not a single recent human trace. The mere
fact that it took three hours of steady and not easy climbing, first by
a mountain trail to some distant village, then at random up and across
terraces where the feet floundered in snow and loose earth, could hardly
have accounted for this abandonment; for no holy place in the Orient is
too difficult of access for an occasional zealot. No, the pagoda of the
Tuchun’s wife was plainly not a welcome addition to the landscape.

It was unsurpassed, however, for its bird’s-eye view of Lanchow and its
environs; though, to be sure, a steam-heated lounging-room would have
improved it at this season. While the capital of China’s most western
province is on the thirty-sixth parallel, like Memphis, Tennessee, it is
five thousand feet above sea-level, and the wind-swept pagoda was much
more so. The snow had now laid the dust that swirled so easily when we
rode into the city, but it had not fallen deep enough to hide any
important features of the great oval plain stretching from the foot of
this southern barrier to the Yellow River, beyond which the world piled
itself up again in what would have been the familiar brown, utterly
barren tumbled hills of northwestern China but for its light mantle of
winter white. The plain was not a mighty checker-board, for the myriad
divisions into which the little low mud barriers between its fields
marked it were altogether too numerous and fantastic in shape. But as a
whole it gave that impression, or, still more exactly, it resembled a
mammoth pane of glass that had been shattered into many more than a
thousand pieces, and then laid together again on a flat surface by some
artist in Chinese puzzles.

When we had first ridden across this oasis many slender, misformed trees
caught the eye, but from this height these barely relieved the vast
expanse of an appearance of total treelessness. On that day we had
noticed many fields of gray, a color so out of keeping with an autumn
Kansu landscape that we were eager with curiosity until we found that
acres after acres had been carefully covered, apparently by hand, with
small stones. This was a method of keeping the precious moisture in the
ground, which, our host explained, was common to all this region; when
the fields are tilled or planted the stones are merely raked away from a
small space at a time and then quickly replaced. We resolved to tell the
next group of New England farmers we met that there are people who
purposely cover their fields with stones.

The snow of course had obliterated these mere variations in color,
though it had not disguised the fact that by far the greater part of
this fertile flat-land was wasted in graves. Under the thin white layer
thousands upon thousands of the little cones of earth that serve as
tombstones to the garden variety of Chinese looked like peas, or, let us
say, mustard-seeds under a sheet, while the _p’ai-lous_ and stone
monuments scattered among these would of themselves have filled a very
large graveyard. The huge barracks which had oozed and absorbed soldiers
incessantly when we passed it lay half-way or more toward the eastern
end of the plain, where we had descended upon it out of the last loess
cañon. In the other direction, the eye, sweeping hastily across Lanchow
itself, hurdling several clusters of temples and many nondescript heaps
of mud buildings, fell at length upon the four big round forts erected
on the crests of the ridge shutting in the valley on the southwest,
against the next Mohammedan rebellion. During the several uprisings of
the Moslem Chinese Lanchow itself has never been taken, but it was at
least once so long and closely besieged that cannibalism is said to have
flourished within its walls. After the last revolt the defenders saw the
wisdom of fortifying this high ridge, from which the city had been so
easily bombarded, and which is the last barrier between it and Hochow,
the “Mohammedan capital,” only two hundred _li_ away.

[Illustration:

  An _ahong_, or Chinese Mohammedan mullah of Lanchow
]

[Illustration:

  Mohammedan school-girls, whose garments were a riot of color
]

[Illustration:

  A glimpse of Lanchow, capital of China’s westernmost province, from
    across the Yellow River
]

[Illustration:

  Looking down the valley of Lanchow, across several groups of temples
    at the base of the hills, to the four forts built against another
    Mohammedan rebellion
]

From the height of the despised pagoda the several walls of Lanchow,
enclosing even its extensive suburbs, look like the graphic design on
some large scale of relief-map of an over-ambitious draftsman; for not
even those of Peking have as many sections and certainly no such angular
afterthoughts. But the city lies well out on the further edge of the
valley, as close as possible to the Yellow River, and to get anything
more than a general view of it one must come down again from the pagoda.
The south gate, nearest this, is the one by which all luck comes into
the city, so that no coffin or corpse is ever allowed to pass through
it. High up over the portal itself, in the most conspicuous place, is
one of those huge wooden placards with a few large characters, bringing
to any one who can read them the astonishing information, “Ten thousand
_li_ of Golden Soup.” This has no reference, as the first dozen
incredibly naked and gaunt yellow beggars to accost the stranger will
show, to any unusual abundance of nourishment; it is merely a poetic
reference to the river close under the north wall, which one with a
poet’s license might find golden, and which easily covers the distance
mentioned in its vagrancy from the highlands of Tibet to the gulf of
Chihli. Nor is it any great stretch of the imagination to call it soup,
here in Lanchow, where every one, rich or poor, native or foreign,
drinks it every day of his life.

Within the gate one plunges into the chaos of any large Chinese city.
Outside the brilliant sunshine floods everything; within is mud and ice
and gloom, and only rarely, in the narrow streets, the briefest glimpse
of the low winter sun. The Yellow River is incessantly being carried to
its consumers in two-bucket lots over the shoulders of tireless coolies,
and these perpetually slop street, alley, and noisome lanes with
delightful impartiality. The chief north gate of Lanchow, paved at a
slight slope with big slabs of stone rounded off by the centuries, is
impassable for animals and carts, and almost for pedestrians, during
midwinter; for the water-carriers find it their easiest entrance and
keep the pavement constantly sheeted with new ice. With Peking in mind
the almost total absence of rickshaws would be astounding, had they not
already been half forgotten in the long journey across the province in
which they are virtually unknown. Bright red “Peking carts” hooded with
the omnipresent blue denim and drawn by big sleek mules jolt the
well-to-do about town. Officials still use the gaily colored
sedan-chairs of viceregal days; some inhabitants bestride native ponies
or occasionally a donkey; but the great rank and file, of course, ride
shanks’ mare. The streets offer myriad Chinese sights, sounds, and
smells, yet little that may not be seen, heard, and smelled in other
Chinese cities, so alike have the centuries left this wide-spread race,
so different is the land of Confucius from its neighbor, India, where
districts a hundred miles apart are often quite diverse. The Chinese
themselves assert that “every ten _li_ has new customs,” but they refer
to minor inconspicuous things which easily escape the attention of the
most leisurely traveler.

Lanchow already boasted the rudiments of electric light and telephone
systems which may in time improve beyond the exclusive, embryonic stage.
Far more prominent were walking corpses who crawled into garbage-barrels
by night and begged by day—before the winter was over Lanchow was
throwing these into open trenches in the outskirts as they starved to
death—precious padlocked boys, and the dull _thump-thump_ of
_feng-hsiang_, “wind-boxes” serving as bellows for cooks and craftsmen
along every important street. The better-class women wore their feet
only half bound, which was at least the beginning of an improvement.
Manchu girls, we were informed, could be bought for eight ounces of
silver each, which would be less than six American dollars; but there
were no outward signs whatever of the profligacy which this appalling
depreciation in human flesh must surely have abetted, for superficial
decorum in some matters is the most outstanding of Chinese traits.

Many shops had closed, residents told us, because of the dreadful
condition of the local currency. To our Western eyes there seemed plenty
of them left, and the rattling of the “coppers” which had been forced
upon the district made the narrow soggy streets sound like endless
chain-lockers overwhelmed by an unprecedented run of business. The
former Tuchun had printed paper notes and compelled the people to accept
them at par, but the moment he left these had dropped to eight cents on
the dollar and were gone now to the limbo of such things. The silver
dollar was so rare as almost to be out of circulation, and besides the
miserable molded brass and sand impositions of the present lord of the
province—or of as much of it as he could reach with his own
soldiers—there was nothing whatever but the _tael_, so that every one
handling money must have scales in which to weigh out the irregular
chunks of silver, throwing in bits of it resembling buck-shot to make
the balance exact. Even then, of course, there were innumerable
opportunities for disputes, for it would not be Chinese to have one
system of weights, or scales which agreed, or which there was no easy
way of manipulating according to whether the owner was buying or
selling; and silver of course varies greatly in purity. Thus the people
of Lanchow were able to indulge to their hearts’ content in the beloved
Chinese pastime of squabbling over money matters, but it was a mystery
how merchants could carry on at all.

Truly the money problem is fantastic in this western country. Our host
had to send two hundred _taels_ (about $143 in U. S. currency) to pay a
week’s wages to the workmen who were building, with the remnant of
American earthquake-relief funds, the bridge forty _li_ to the eastward,
and as the money had to be in “Lanchow coppers” it required eight
pack-mules to get it there. When the great ditch for draining the
largest lake we had seen in the earthquake district was being dug, seven
tons of “cash” were required on every pay-day for the three thousand
workmen.


However, what did all this matter to a mere visitor who could spend
his time idly strolling the town? As in Sian-fu, access to its great
wall was forbidden; but unlike my experience there, where a
lieutenant-colonel and a large military escort was furnished me with
the Tuchun’s permission to make the circuit of it, which “face”
therefore obliged me to do on horseback, Lanchow’s entire “foreign
office,” in the person of a gentleman of delightfully uncertain
English, made the stroll with me on a brilliant Sunday morning. Half a
dozen temples rose in artistic little open-work structures above the
general level, two or three of them the minarets of mosques from which
at certain hours sounded the voice of the muezzin, hardly to be
distinguished from those of street-hawkers. Dyers had enlivened the
scene with great strips of drying cloth, overwhelmingly coolie blue in
color; on some of the roofs sat huge jars filled with some local
delicacy made of pickled vegetables. We were high enough to look
across the crest of the ridge on which stand the round forts against
revolting Moslems, and to see these apparently unoccupied, though
surrounded by a wilderness of cone-topped graves as far as the eye
could be certain of what it saw. At regular intervals we passed the
little stone and mud houses to be found on any important Chinese city
wall, each with two or three soldiers napping or amusing themselves
within. Whistling pigeons, familiar even to the residents of Peking,
filled the transparent air with a wailing sound, ebbing or increasing
as the flocks behind the whistlers circled back and forth over the
city, now flashing white and almost invisible, now suddenly changing
again to the blue of shimmering silk as the whole swirl of birds
turned their backs upon us. The whistle is a feather-weight one of
cylindrical shape, and is fastened to the pigeon in such a way that
the wind, rushing through it as he flies, makes him and his few
whistle-bearing companions a perpetual orchestra. The Chinese purpose
in all this seems to be partly musical and partly to gather other
pigeons, which flock about the whistlers like children about the _Pied
Piper_. Perhaps the birds are eventually used as food, but this seems
rather to be an example of that Chinese love for feathered pets which
so often sends staid old gentlemen out for a stroll, cage in hand, in
order to give birdie an airing.

A score or more of big gates tower above the general level of the
several-walled city. In the northern and more Mohammedan section we
looked down upon a great sheet of blood-pink ice, covering a pond where
the Moslems are for ever washing newly slaughtered sheep. The circuit
brought us at length to the northern wall, which falls sheer into the
Yellow River. The American bridge thrown across this a decade ago, the
only one in the west, or, I believe, with the exception of the two on
the railways south from Peking, throughout the whole rambling course of
“China’s Sorrow,” still looks incongruous against the background of the
old walled city or of the heaped-up suburb terminating in a golden-brown
pagoda on the further bank. Now and then a train of camels or a herd of
wild half-yak come streaming across it, increasing the incongruity.
Huddled together in that little perpendicular outskirt at the northern
end of the bridge are several mosques and a Moslem school, temples
dedicated to Confucius, Lao-tze, and Buddha, nearly a dozen of them
piled up the hill at regular intervals as stations on the pilgrimage to
the pagoda; and not far beyond these is a memorial hospital bearing the
family name of the best known brand of American condensed milk! Not that
this is all, of course, for there are also gambling-dens and assorted
shops, inn-yards dusty with rolling mules, craftsmen busily engaged in
the din of their trades, peddlers of everything shrieking their wares,
water-carriers slopping the steep streets with ice, and higher up among
the beautiful bare hills that vary with every mood of the unclouded sun
one can trace the ruined walls of what was once a Tartar city, long
before Lanchow itself was founded many centuries ago. To-day three
thousand soldiers were escorting a bright new sedan-chair out along this
further bank to meet an emissary of Wu Pei-fu who had journeyed to
Lanchow by the northern route, and banners of many colors waved in the
breeze that brought the snorting of many bugles to our ears.

Rafts made of blown-up goatskins and a wooden framework come floating
down the Yellow River to Lanchow, bringing wheat from the borders of
Tibet and travelers from Sining; often a whole stack of hay or straw,
which seems to be sitting serenely on the surface of the water itself,
glides past. Vegetable oils from hundreds of miles up the stream are
landed at the low spot near Lanchow’s picturesque camel-back bridge in
big bullock- or half-yak hides, still covered with their long hair,
which on land quiver at a touch, like living animals. Down in the
perpetual shadow of the north wall one of the goatskin rafts on which
Kansu does much of its down-stream traveling in warmer seasons was being
tied together for a belated trip, and a cluster or two of logs from the
Tibetan slopes was being readjusted before continuing its long cold
journey, which would not end until the winter was over, to the
coffin-shops of eastern China. A great wooden water-wheel at the edge of
the river added another medieval touch to the scene; and at length our
stroll was brought to a temporary halt at the locked and soldier-guarded
gate beyond which the city wall belongs to the Tuchun’s private grounds.
I had already seen these, with their rows of barracks, their gardens and
artificial-stone grottos, the two pet Kansu wapiti that bugled so
fiercely when a foreigner paused to look at them, and the score of
buildings that eventually gave way to the main entrance, with its huge
devil-screen and gaudy painted demons, opening on the swarming
second-hand market.


In the long open space before the Tuchun’s “yamen”—as they still call it
in Lanchow, for all China’s conversion to republicanism—there stand to
this day the four high poles, daubed with red and each bearing a kind of
seaman’s “crow’s-nest,” which were the symbols of the Manchu viceroy who
ruled northwestern China in the old imperial days. From these the
military governor still flies four great banners, and it would not be
difficult to forget that any change of régime has come over this distant
province. The rectangle of public domain between the entrance to the
yamen and its farthest devil-screen outpost is the busiest market-place
of Lanchow, and swarms from dawn to sunset with as dense a throng of
ragamuffins as can be found in one collection anywhere in northern
China. For it is made up of the buyers and sellers of all manner of
second-hand junk, stuff which in America would be entirely thrown away,
of the owners and the clients of outdoor portable restaurants in which
the whole menu does not cost more than two or three real cents, of all
the odds and ends of Chinese society, among whom Lanchow’s incredibly
starved and ragged beggars and her rafts of thieves probably
predominate.

Both these latter callings are banded together into gilds, as in most of
China. Our host had known well the former head of the thieves’ gild, not
because he made a practice of keeping such company, or had any hope of
bringing him into the Christian fold, but because all owners of
important property found it essential to their peace and prosperity to
come to some understanding with him. Though he was strictly Chinese,
this clever old rascal had been the accepted ruler even of the
Mohammedan “three-hand men,” who flourish in great numbers, and who now
obeyed the not yet widely advertised chieftain who had recently
inherited his power and unfailing emoluments. Among the Moslem Chinese
in particular there is as much pride in belonging to this adventurous
calling as to any which the country has to offer, though in the nature
of the case this pride may not be as freely shouted from the housetops.
Mohammedan children are given long and careful training for it, and the
fathers in whose footsteps they usually follow show a justifiable
delight in any extraordinary professional feat accomplished by their
offspring. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why persons of
property find it better to make an agreement with the thieves through
their chief than to depend for protection upon officials and police not
very distantly related to them. I need scarcely go into details as to
how the members of this romantic gild are not only induced to let
certain properties alone but to protect them against any outsider, any
“scab” thief who does not belong to the union. A single example will be
quite sufficient. The innkeeper who held the contract for carrying the
government mails in and out of Lanchow paid fifteen dollars a month to
the head of the thieves’ gild—through the police at their main
station!—and these mails were never molested even in the most desolate
parts of the country.

One little tale, too, will suffice to show how expert thieves belonging
to the union must become before they can look for praise within their
own ranks. If at any instant during the telling the suspicion of
exaggeration should raise its head, let it be borne in mind that the
host from whom I have it is both a Britisher and a missionary of the
highest standing, and the son of a highly respected gentleman to whom
the same statements may be equally applied.

A thief who was approaching old age decided to mend his ways before the
time came to meet Allah face to face. He opened a mutton-shop on one of
the less frequented streets. Next door to him was the large compound of
a very wealthy Chinese merchant. One day, as he was separating the
carcass of a fat-tailed sheep into its component parts, the ex-thief
noticed several young Mohammedans grouped closely together across the
way and furtively eying the rich man’s gateway. He recognized these
fellows at once as belonging to the organization from which he had
recently resigned, and their movements were a plain indication to a man
of his experience that they were planning to rob his wealthy neighbor
that very night. When he closed shop, therefore, he asked permission of
the gate-keeper to speak with the prospective victim, whom he told all
he knew, even of his own experience in his former profession.

“But what shall I do?” demanded the man of wealth, as one suddenly
stricken might ask for expert advice from a gray-haired lawyer or a
septuagenarian physician.

“That is easy,” replied the ex-thief. “The simplest way of breaking into
your compound is for a small and supple man to crawl under your gate,
where you have not recently taken the trouble to do any repairing. Hide
yourself in the darkness beside this, and when the man’s head appears
inside put a brick under his chin and go away.”

The merchant conducted himself exactly as his expert neighbor had
advised. When the thieves outside found it impossible to rescue their
bricked comrade, and dared wait no longer, they severed his body at the
neck and carried it away. In the morning the rich man came to the
mutton-shop early and in great agitation.

“See what a pretty plight you have got me into!” he cried. “When I came
out to the gate before daylight to see if there was anything the gateman
should not see, what did I find but the head of a man, and the blood
that had flowed from him when he lost it! Now the police——”

“Do not distress yourself, sir,” replied the mutton-seller. “I will take
care of the head, and when your _k’an-men-ti_ speaks to me about the
blood, as he is sure to do, I will tell him a newly killed sheep was
left there by mistake. As to the gang starting any inquiries about their
lost companion, that is the last thing they would dare or wish to do.”

All went as the ex-thief had outlined it, but that afternoon, as he was
drumming on his chopping-block with a cleaver in the hope of attracting
customers for the last morsels of mutton, whom should he see across the
way but the same band of ruffians, minus, of course, one of those who
had gathered the day before. Their heads were together again, but this
time their furtive glances seemed to be turned not so much toward the
rich man’s gate as upon the mutton-seller.

“Aha!” thought the latter, for he was inordinately clever in reading the
gestures and glances of his former brethren-in-arms, “they suspect me of
thwarting their plans and have decided to kill me.”

Therefore that night, when it was time for him to stretch out on his
_k’ang_, he placed upon it, instead, a sheepskin that he had blown full
of air and covered it over with some old clothes. Then he hid himself in
the darkness outside.

It was exactly as he had suspected. Hardly had he begun to long for a
cigarette when several forms slunk past him and entered his hovel. There
came the dull sounds of as many blows as each thrust his knife into the
sheepskin, followed by an escape of air resembling the pouring forth of
blood; then the assassins disappeared again into the night.

Next day, after the briskness of trade had been succeeded by the apathy
of the first Chinese meal-hour—for no profession which works by night
can be expected to get up early—the former thief saw the same group
huddled together across the way, staring at him as at a ghost. At length
they straggled over to him, with a contrite and respectful, not to say
admiring, air, and a spokesman addressed him with the highest honorifics
of which such unschooled fellows are capable.

“Oh, Great Teacher,” he said, “we recognize in you, our revered Elder
Brother, a very clever man, a man much more clever than ourselves. Will
you not, therefore, become our leader, for with your cleverness and our
agility how could we fail in any undertaking?”

“Your agility!” sneered the mutton-seller, meanwhile insultingly
continuing his work. “Where have you picked up that false impression? I
don’t believe you know the first rudiments of your profession, that you
can even climb through the open window of a foreign devil and escape
with his watch and wallet without being heard. I, forsooth, become the
leader of a gang of clumsy, untrained louts who cannot so much as move a
brick with their Adam’s apple! Away with you!”


Lanchow has been called the meeting-place of central Asia. This seemed
to us something of an exaggeration, for to be worthy of such a title
surely a city must have something more to show than sporadic examples of
Oriental tribes and customs all but lost in a great sea of Chinese. But,
for one thing, they told us, this was not the season of great markets,
to which even princes of Tibet were attracted, and which brought samples
of almost everything in the human line that the elder brother among
continents has to offer. As it was, I ran across Tibetans, Mongols,
Buriats, Kirghiz, and several other individuals who plainly belonged to
none of these divisions, merely in strolling the streets. Then there
were of course Russian refugees, and Cossacks, and single chance
visitors from far-off countries not often represented, such as we
Americans, for instance. Two or three Russian officers of the old régime
were in the employ of the Tuchun, who had fished them from the stream
that had been spasmodically flowing down through Kansu for the past four
years, and who strutted the soft streets of Lanchow in all the glory of
their pre-war uniforms and their disdainful, rather childlike demeanor.
Our host and his fellow-missionaries, the active little Belgian who had
grown more than gray in superintending the salt monopoly in two
provinces, the densely bearded Catholic priest of similar origin, the
over-conscientious, English-speaking postal commissioner from Canton,
the Tuchun himself, and all the higher officials were constantly being
appealed to in behalf of poverty-stricken aristocrats or of pitiful
cases of suffering among mere ordinary human beings who had drifted down
from the northwest and hoped to better their lot by pushing on to Peking
or Shanghai. Just what impression such cases made on the Tuchun, who
probably distinguished almost as little between different kinds of
Caucasians as do the rank and file of Chinese, the handful of foreign
residents were never quite sure; but they did know that he often gave
money to Russian refugees—though their real benefactor was the Belgian
salt official—and that the provincial Government furnished
transportation to the next province for those incapable of making their
own way. In fact, almost the only important duty of the “foreign
office,” who had discoursed to me more or less in my own tongue on the
unworthiness of Lanchow from its wall, was to adjust matters between
muleteers and cartmen who did not feel that the Government should force
them to carry penniless foreign devils—though of course they did not
openly speak of them as such—for the mere pittance it offered.

One morning while we were still at breakfast, a little hollow-eyed
foreigner in a strange uniform was brought in by the gate-keeper. He was
a Polish captain who had once before escaped capture in some brush with
the Soviet troops by making his way overland through Asia and back to
Poland, only to be forced to repeat the experience. At least, that was
what we gathered from a long conversation, in which we could not muster
among us more than scattered single words that were mutually understood,
and during which both sides were forced to resort mainly to gestures and
intuitions. The captain and his wife, he said, were living in a Chinese
inn, without money and with no other clothes than those they were
wearing. That same day word drifted to our ears of a Russian lady who
was offering for sale the carriage and horses in which she had reached
Lanchow, and which might possibly do for our return journey. I found her
a frail, visibly suffering woman probably still really in the thirties,
speaking perfect French, and by no means stripped of that air of
distinction which generations of well supplied leisure give. She was
living in the mud room of an ordinary Chinese inn, facing upon the usual
barnyard-and-worse courtyard, and evidently found it difficult even to
pay for these accommodations, for the Chinese about the place had a
surliness which could scarcely have been due to anything but
disappointments in the matter of money. Her husband, a general once high
in the czar’s armies, had, during the journey, died of typhus in the
very coach that she was offering for sale. There was still with her an
adult son in a shock of pale yellow hair, whose manner suggested more
haughtiness than ordinary horse sense; and half a dozen Cossacks—at
least she called them that—were left from the retinue with which the
general had begun his flight. It was not uninteresting to see how these
sturdy, peasant-faced fellows in worn and badly assorted civilian
clothing snapped to attention when the general’s widow addressed them,
and fell over one another in carrying out her order to show me carriage,
harness, and horses. But the horses were not visibly different from the
Chinese ponies for sale in the gully below the “thieves’ market”; the
harness was more massive and intricately Russian than in good
preservation; and the carriage would have taken first prize at any
American fair as an example of the impossible contrivances which
“furriners” inexplicably build for themselves. It was four-wheeled,
which alone would have barred it from continuing any further eastward
and aroused astonishment that it had been dragged this far; it had all
those Russian conveniences which to any other race seem quite the
opposite, such as a great yoke over the off horse and a roof which, if
it had been repainted some brighter color, would not have looked greatly
out of place on a Chinese temple; while the seats had been taken out by
the roots, so that the interior of the coach was nothing but a bare
wooden floor some six feet long and four wide. Two of us could stretch
out on this, with our bedding under us, very comfortably, the lady said,
as she and the general had done. The local Government was furnishing
“Peking carts” for her party, but she was too ill to travel in those and
was holding out for a mule-litter, hoping meanwhile to get together a
little money for the long journey still ahead by selling her personal
rolling-stock. I regretted that by no stretch of the imagination could
we see ourselves making our way back to civilization spread out on the
floor of what looked painfully like a hearse and which most certainly
could not have been operated on the hundreds of miles of no roads that
lay before us without a plentiful supply of Russian profanity.

Fully a thousand such cases a year, said our host, pass through Lanchow;
but, like the scattered samples of central Asia to be seen in the
streets, they are as nothing in the old familiar thronging Chinese
crowd, in filthy quilted garments, hands thrust in sleeves in lieu of
mittens, and cold, bluish running noses. It was hard to realize the
fact, when some reddish-bearded Moslem, wholly free from Chinese
features yet wearing Chinese uniform, came down from those distant
regions and directed attention to it, that, far west as Lanchow is,
China stretches for many weeks’ travel still farther westward, in a
great tongue of land which at length opens out into the broad reaches of
Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan, even though her assertion of total
suzerainty of Mongolia and Tibet be disallowed.

The people of Lanchow struck me as less courteous than those of Peking,
but still by no means deliberately unkind to foreigners. They seemed to
be but slightly informed on anything more than their own immediate
problems, at which of course there was no reason to wonder. For the
whole vast province has no newspaper except one flimsy sheet of
“official lies” spasmodically published in Lanchow; no students are sent
abroad from this province, “because,” to quote a Chinese, “officials are
more interested in filling their pockets”; and the “heathen” schools
even in the provincial capital are so bad, in spite of some recent
improvements, that missionaries feel they must have Christian schools
for their converts, quite aside from any question of mere religious
faith. There is no discipline left in Chinese schools since the
revolution, they assert, and every one, from Tuchun to servants, is more
avid for “squeeze” than before the republic was established. On the
other hand, the overwhelming majority of the population knows nothing
more of the word “republic” than its pronunciation, and “voting” is so
frankly a farce that ballot-boxes are calmly filled by order of the
authorities days before and brought to “polling-places” from which
soldiers exclude all citizens on “election day”; or the boxes are
stuffed then and there by the soldiers, under orders from headquarters.
Though the respect for foreigners or the fear of them is still so great
among the rank and file that the little Belgian chief of the Salt
Gabelle had more than once confiscated whole camel-caravans of smuggled
salt which he came upon in his travels, it was not so easy to make
officials honor either foreign rights or treaties. The Belgian, for
instance, had deposited in the official bank six hundred thousand
dollars income from the salt monopoly, which is designated by treaty for
use in paying off China’s foreign indebtedness—and the next thing he
knew it had been replaced with promissory notes of the provincial
Government; in other words, with worthless paper. Peking has no real
power in these back provinces, and even if provincial officials cannot
connive with bank employees to their hearts’ content, all the Tuchun, or
some Mohammedan general, or any official with audacity enough, has to do
is to ask Peking to instruct the “salt man” to give them money, and
neither he nor Peking can refuse. In a way China is more militaristic
to-day than ever Germany was, but the Chinese are not a fighting race,
depending rather upon the subtleties of graft and “squeeze” than upon
force. Were they not so docile and passive and so lacking in community
spirit, it would not be so easy for military governors, almost always
coming from other provinces than the one they rule, to get rich quickly
by all manner of tricks and then go home, or, if their peculations have
been too notorious, to some foreign concession in the coast cities,
where even a strong Central Government could not touch them.


There are few outward signs of disagreement between the two divisions of
Lanchow’s population, but old residents say that the feeling is far
deeper than appears to the casual observer. The Mohammedans also have
much of the Chinese temperament, or at least of the Chinese outward
attitude, and are inclined to temporize longer before they will fight
than do their brethren farther west. They are particularly gentle when
they are in a minority, as they are in many towns even of Kansu. But
they are more progressive, more interested in outside news, than the
mere Chinese, and they stick together, like most minorities. I heard of
only one Christian convert from among them, and even the missionaries
were not at all sure of him. After a long period of repression the
Chinese Mohammedans have to a large extent shaken off the Chinese yoke
in Kansu and, being better fighters, there is little doubt that they
will win still more from their former oppressors, who are hopelessly
divided. Already not only the orthodox headquarters of Hochow but other
districts are virtually self-governing, and certain Mohammedan generals
rule their sections much as they see fit. The “Hwei-Hwei” have long felt
that the province of Kansu is their special domain and that they should
be allowed to govern it, either as a part of China with a Tuchun of
their own faith, as an independent state, or by joining hands with
Sinkiang, its congenial neighbor on the west. During one of their
rebellions Yakub Beg ruled the Chinese Mohammedans for ten years, until
he was put down by troops sent from Peking. In the opinion, at least, of
most foreign residents, the Chinese have been stupid in their handling
of the Kansu problem, so that whereas, by just and generous treatment
when they were powerful, they might have had a strong Moslem province as
a more or less autonomous buffer-state on the west, yet still loyal to
the rest of the country, now that they are weak they may easily lose a
large part of the Mohammedan region.

Yet though one listens one is not so easily convinced. There comes to
mind the unfailing suppression of “Hwei-Hwei” rebellions in the past,
lighted up by the knowledge, sure to be picked up by any inquiring
traveler, that there is much internal friction, not to say combustion,
among the Moslems of Kansu themselves. Were they as strictly united as
they pretend to be, they could probably now throw off the Chinese yoke
entirely. But there are “Turk,” Arab, and Mongol “Hwei-Hwei,” not to
mention the still greater number perhaps of purely Chinese Mohammedans,
many of whom were “converted” during the rebellions of the last sixty
years; some still adhere strictly to the Koran, while new sects hold
later traditions or have incorporated elements of Buddhism and
Christianity. In fact, all the big Mohammedan rebellions have been due
to Chinese interference in “Hwei-Hwei” sect quarrels; that of 1895–96
began over the dispute as to whether or not a man under forty should be
allowed to grow a beard! It is the old story of the champion of a beaten
wife being fallen upon by both husband and consort. The day may not be
far distant, whatever the casual traveler may conclude, when the world
will wake up to find on its breakfast-table the news of the founding of
a new Moslem nation, in which Chinese features will be in the majority.
Meanwhile the “Hwei-Hwei” keep in form by fighting each other and by
drubbing the Tibetan tribes along the Kansu border, from whom much of
the metal was taken that has reappeared in the miserable “money” which
the people have had forced upon them.

Turks and Arabs can talk with many of the Chinese Moslems without
difficulty; which is the chief reason that our host was asked in 1914 by
his home Government to sit where he was and keep his eyes and ears open
instead of hotfooting it for Flanders. Mysterious delegations of Germans
and Ottomans were constantly passing through Kansu while the war was on,
and there are certain indications that their aborted plans were bold and
carefully laid. But all that is over now, and such interesting
similarities of tongue have become again merely of philological
interest.

Up to the time of the republic even Mohammedans high in the government
service could only live in the suburbs of Lanchow—whence its many walls.
But to-day there is a more tolerant spirit on both sides, at least in
every-day, peace-time intercourse. Some of the more reasonable and
educated “Hwei-Hwei” make friendships irrespective of faith. There was
“Mr. Donkey,” for instance, who was one of our host’s most frequent
visitors, though he never sat down at his table. Like so many of his
coreligionists, he bore the family name of “Ma,” which is derived from
Mohammed, but which also is the Chinese word for “horse”; and, there
being a distinct stratum of humor in our host’s make-up in spite of his
calling, he had taken a slight liberty with natural history when his
Moslem friend asked for the English version of his name. The joke had
long since been shared with the victim, but he was still likely to
startle foreigners to whom he was being introduced by displaying his
entire knowledge of the English language at one fell swoop with, “Sir, I
am Mr. Donkey.”

“Mr. Donkey” and a certain Taoist priest were bosom friends and were
given to periodic sprees, in which they were now and then joined by a
“Living Buddha.” Occasionally this convivial trio had irrupted into the
mission compound during the small hours, in the hope that their good
friend of still another faith might for once forget his little
idiosyncrasies of doctrine and join them. Once news had come to the ears
of our host that a “Britisher” had been confined in the Chinese jail;
and, being the chief example, if not the official representative, of the
British nation in Kansu, he could not of course permit this violation of
extraterritoriality to continue. He demanded the immediate release of
the prisoner, which his good friend the provincial governor granted at
once—and turned over to him an Afghan. What was more natural than that
he should have sent this fellow-national, for whom he had made himself
responsible, to stay with “Mr. Donkey,” a fellow-Moslem? Being a good
host, Mr. Ma promptly brought out a bottle of whisky, whereupon the
Afghan, being a good Mohammedan who still took his Koran literally,
walloped him severely on the jaw. The Chinese Moslems are more
easy-going in these little matters. Many of them drink, and smoke not
only tobacco but opium. The one rule to which they cling most
fiercely—though even that, it is said, many of them will break if there
are no coreligionists to tell on them—is the prohibition against eating
pork. They never speak of a pig by its real name unless they are volubly
cursing or shriveling up an enemy with an impromptu description of his
family tree. If there is no avoiding mention of the unclean creature in
polite intercourse, it is referred to as a “black sheep.” When the
Moslem population of a Kansu town is in the majority, no one in it is
allowed to keep or bring in pigs, which naturally tends to a further
decrease of the minority. Chinese may eat in a Mohammedan’s house, but
the latter cannot accept a return invitation, for fear not so much of
being purposely insulted by being offered pork, as of being fed in
dishes which have at some time or other been contaminated with pork or
lard. The Chinese, when things come to the point where it is worth the
risk, tell the “Hwei-Hwei” that their dislike of pork is merely a dread
of eating their ancestors; and then the knives come out.

“Mr. Donkey” took me to an important mosque in which posters, depicting
the Kaaba and similar scenes, and covered with Arabic text, had been
pasted in and about the prayer niche. Pilgrims had brought them from
Mecca, and the last little “Hwei-Hwei” in the group about me knew what
these symbols represented. Yet in all our journey through the northwest
I never saw a man bowing down in prayer toward Mecca, though others tell
me that this was mere accident. Certainly no such accident would
continue throughout a two months’ trip among the Moslems of the Near
East. Only once, too, did I see a woman veiled; her face was completely
covered with a thin black cloth, a curiously embroidered old-fashioned
skirt hid what were no doubt her bound feet; and a small boy was seated
close behind her on the donkey she rode, which a man on foot was urging
across the country at unusual speed. There are Mohammedan as well as
Christian schools in Lanchow, and they seem to rival each other in some
of their superiorities to those of the Chinese, though the Moslem ones
copy these in hours and uproar. I have seen Moslem children gathering
before the sun was above the horizon, and have come upon roomfuls of
boys loudly chanting in Chinese, though there was no evidence of a
teacher still in attendance, when darkness was creeping over the mosque
that raised its flare-roofed minaret above them. A certain amount of
“Alabi” is taught in “Hwei-Hwei” schools, and any man who can read the
Koran—which it is forbidden to have translated—is highly honored as an
_ahong_, though many know only the sounds of the words they are reading
and not their meaning.

“Hwei-Hwei” and Chinese customs are particularly at variance in the
matter of burials. The former believe in a decent interment for all,
while the Chinese see no reason why the bodies of mere girls and
unmarried women should not simply be thrown out on a garbage-heap or
into some convenient gully. Among the non-Moslems actual difficulties
are often placed in the way of the proper burial of a still-born child
or of a mother dying in childbirth, even if the family is willing to go
to the expense and trouble. Yet the Chinese consider the “Hwei-Hwei”
custom of disposing of their dead the height of barbarism, particularly
in the case of male parents. In each mosque is kept one elaborately
decorated coffin—without a bottom. When a “Hwei-Hwei” dies the body is
bathed at the home, swathed in white cloth on which are written Arabic
characters, carried to the grave in the coffin—and buried without it.
Naturally such a custom is shocking to a people who are addicted to
ancestor-worship and whose massive coffins are the chief cause of an
advance of deforestation that is already well beyond the Tibetan
frontier. In fact, though wolf, dog, otter, lynx, squirrel, fox, bear,
leopard and snow-leopard, deer, and several other skins come down in
considerable quantities from Tibet into Kansu and flow on into the rest
of China, probably the Chinese resentment at England for abetting the
Tibetans in throwing off the rule of Peking is due as much as anything
to the fear of the rank and file that their forests will cease to
furnish the coffins without which no genuine Chinese can either live or
die. During the fighting in Shensi Province in 1911, it was a very
common thing to see strings of pack-mules each carrying a frozen
“Hwei-Hwei” corpse on either side, wending their way back to Hochow, the
Chinese Mecca; but once the corpse has been taken home for burial there
seems to be none of the Chinese desire to preserve it as long as
possible.

At a genuine “Hwei-Hwei” wedding every one comes on horseback to the
bride’s home for the ceremony by an _ahong_, and then the whole
cavalcade gallops back to the house of the groom. There is said to be
less infant mortality among the Mohammedans than among their neighbors,
not only because girls are perhaps a little less unwelcome, but because
of the greater consumption of mutton and milk. “Hwei-Hwei” boys of
fifteen often turn muleteers and tramp twenty to thirty miles a day over
the mountains and spend much of the night feeding their animals, months
on end, while they steadily grow into sturdy men to whom almost any
hardship is not even recognized as such.


[Illustration:

  A Kansu vista near Lanchow, where the hills are no longer terraced,
    but where towns are numerous and much alike
]

[Illustration:

  This method of grinding up red peppers and the like is wide-spread in
    China. Both through and wheel are of solid iron
]

[Illustration:

  Oil is floated down the Yellow River to Lanchow in whole ox-hides that
    quiver at a touch as if they were alive
]

[Illustration:

  The Yellow River at Lanchow, with a water-wheel and the American
    bridge which is the only one that crosses it in the west
]

The dinner given in our honor by the “copper”-making Tuchun of Kansu was
in most points a repetition of that in Sian-fu. This time, in addition
to the invitations on red cards, there was sent around a list of the
guests, written in Chinese, of course, on a long sheet of similar color,
which we were expected to sign in Chinese after our names. If one is not
able to come—or perhaps if he finds some of the other guests not to his
liking—he makes an appropriate mark in lieu of signing. When the hour
for the dinner approached, messengers came to remind us to come; perhaps
I should say to _warn_ us not to be late or absent, for this was plainly
a custom of viceregal days which still survived out here in the far
west. In those days a visit to this same yamen was an event to cable
home about, quite different from dropping in to see a military governor
who from the Chinese point of view was extremely “democratic.” The man
who hoped to live to boast of having been received by a viceroy got into
his best dress about the middle of the night and appeared at the yamen
toward four in the morning, when he might possibly be admitted to the
semi-imperial presence within an hour or two, since viceroys more or
less followed the custom in audiences of the court at Peking; or he
might have the pleasure of waiting most of the day, and perhaps of
coming back again next morning to see another sunrise. If, when at last
he was received, he was of high enough rank to be asked to take a chair
or its viceregal equivalent, he sat gingerly on the extreme edge of it,
like one who knows how reprehensible it is to dare to draw breath in so
sacred a presence. But those same old viceroys knew how to rule the
Chinese, and their modern successors seem to come most nearly succeeding
at the same task when they adopt viceregal methods, for all their
up-to-date uniforms in place of flowing Ch’ing dynasty costumes. Then,
there was an exact unbroken line of responsibility all the way from the
viceroy clear down to the village elder, and things that were ordered
done usually occurred, and vice versa. But we all know what a long row
there is to hoe between autocracy and anything approaching real
democracy.

Long lines of soldiers presented arms as we passed through the various
compounds of the yamen in the wake of our visiting-cards, held high
aloft as usual. At length there came the period of innumerable
waist-hinged bows, attended by the difficulty, now so familiar in China,
as to whether hats or caps should be lifted or left undisturbed. For by
Chinese custom it is bad form to uncover the head before guests or
hosts, even indoors, while the European style is not only quite the
opposite but is here and there followed by Chinese who consider
themselves progressive, though one can never be sure when or where such
alien manners, perhaps including the unsanitary hand-shake, will break
out. After the preliminary formalities in the every-day guest-room, we
streamed away through the compound of the bugling wapiti and across the
now barren garden to a huge room on the edge of the city wall and
overlooking the Yellow River. Not only was this open and cold but its
walls were mainly of glass, which did not improve the temperature. It
was not easy to find our places by the red place-cards bearing merely
our Chinese names, but when we did we found that America had been
signally honored. For on the Tuchun’s left, which is nearest the heart
in Chinese custom, sat the major, while a Mongol prince who ruled a
tribe in the Kokonor region of Tibet had been relegated to his less
important right hand. However, the prince, who was also a lama, and
according to some uncertain authorities a “Living Buddha,” cast far into
the shade not only the major, but the Tuchun himself, this time in a
black gown instead of uniform, to say nothing of the civil governor—in
practice merely an underling of the military ruler of any Chinese
province and as pale a moon as a vice-president in the shadow of the
White House. For his Highness, or whatever familiar title he answered
to, wore a brilliant saffron jacket embroidered with dragons, a cap of
similar color with a large pink tourmaline—perhaps, for I am no expert
in colored stones—a purple skirt, and dull-red Mongol boots! With him
had come a princely suite, one member of which, swarthy as a mulatto and
with a curiously eagle-like eye, stood between his master and the Tuchun
and acted as interpreter. But the prince was anything but talkative,
possibly because he was not garrulous by temperament, perhaps because he
shared the common dislike of hearing his remarks relayed in a foreign
tongue, but most likely for the reason that his attention was fully
taken up with the intricacies of what purported to be a foreign meal.
The strange eating-tools were evidently quite new to him; but he had the
wisdom of common sense as well as the unexcitability of Mongol princes,
and by watching the Tuchun at one end of the table and the civil
governor at the other he came off very well indeed. How deep was his
wisdom is shown by the fact that whenever he was in doubt he merely
“passed.” Perhaps he really did not smoke or drink, as he stated with a
word and a gesture, but there could hardly have been any religious
motives for refusing half the countless courses, beginning with sharks’
fins—no simple luxury this far from the coast—and ending with macaroons,
which he plainly avoided as another unknown, and therefore possibly
dangerous, form of food.

How the soldier servants, to whom a boy picked up from the dump-heap
brought things from the kitchen, handled not only slices of bread but
the eating end of forks and spoons without any apparent consciousness of
the absence of manicurists in Lanchow need not of course be mentioned.
Besides the lama-prince there were Protestant missionaries, a Catholic
or two, ordinary Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucianists, probably
fetishists pure and simple as well as mere pagans, and certainly there
were Mohammedans among the soldiers swarming within and about the room,
though not, of course, among the guests. Conversation never rose above
the gossip plane, and glancing along the table I realized that one
possible reason for this, besides custom at semi-public Tuchuns’
dinners, was the fact that there were eight different mother-tongues
among the bare score of men about the festive board.

Night had fallen before the servants had cut up the fruit and
distributed it piecemeal, and had snatched away from any unwary guest
the cigar laid before him a moment before, slipping it deftly up their
sleeves, and we were at length in a position to bid Lanchow an official
farewell. The final scene was not without its picturesqueness. When the
last polite controversy on precedent at the many yamen gateways and the
final bows had subsided, the blue embroidered night turned to a
whirlpool of big oval Chinese lanterns, as the chair-bearers gathered in
the outer courtyard prepared to take up their masters and trot. Each
chair was tilted forward until its owner had doubled himself into it,
his cushions were adjusted by ostensibly loving hands, and the curtain
which formed the front wall closed upon him. The chief of his carriers
shouted out orders that were repeated as well as executed by the others,
and each group shouldered its burden in turn and jogged away into the
night, its big paper lanterns swinging gently to and fro. Even the
Belgian representative of the salt administration was attended by
soldiers as well as his four chair-bearers, for high officials cannot
overlook the matter of “face” in China merely because they chance to be
foreigners. The Mongol lama-prince, like one who deeply scorned any such
effeminate form of locomotion, mounted the red-saddled horse led up by
one of his rather poorly mounted escort, which clattered away over the
flagstones behind him, bugles blowing and scattered groups of soldiers
presenting arms, while we simple Americans wandered out and away on
foot.




                              CHAPTER XXV
                   TRAILING THE YELLOW RIVER HOMEWARD


The saddest part of seeing Lanchow was not that we had taken
twenty-seven days to reach it, but that it would require fully that
amount of time to undo again what we had done. The usual way of
returning from the Kansu capital to Peking is simply to float down the
Hoang Ho on goatskin rafts to where one can easily reach the advancing
Suiyuan railway. We had hoped to do this, but we were prepared for the
news that it was impossible so late in the season. November was nearing
its last lap, and while the river at Lanchow was still open, big chunks
of ice already drifting down it from the Tibetan highlands helped to
confirm the general opinion that it would be frozen solid in its broader
and more sluggish reaches farther north, where we would be left
virtually stranded.

We each bought a stout Kansu pony, therefore, and a less lively one for
the alleged _mafu_ who was willing to leave the employ of our host and
return to his family graves near Tientsin—if we would pay him to do so.
_Mafus_ usually walk by day and tend their masters’ horses by night, but
we concluded to be generous, and as a result we acquired a troublesome
companion rather than a useful servant; for the one thing which the
Chinese coolie cannot stand is prosperity. Then we hired two carts,
quite like those that had brought our belongings from Sian-fu, which
agreed for a consideration of one hundred _taels_ to set us down in
Paotouchen in time, with good luck in trains, for us to spend Christmas
with our families in Peking. We again set our plans to outspeed the
usual schedule if possible, by dangling before the drivers a gratuity of
a whole round dollar each for every day they made up.

This did not spare us from getting a late start, however, though that
did not worry us so much as it would have before we had learned from
experience that a delay in the first get-away is no proof that the
days that follow will be similarly blighted. The unavoidable
formalities of the last moment, such as the cartmen’s vociferous
leave-taking of the inn that had housed them, made up mainly of
shrieks of “_Ch’ien!_”—which, as I have said before, is the Chinese
notion of how the word “money” should be pronounced—were further
complicated by the task of getting rid of a man of unknown antecedents
whom our experienced host caught surreptitiously slipping his baggage
into one of the carts. He merely wished the pleasure of our company,
he wailed, kneeling before us in the by no means carpeted street, and
he would walk every step of the whole journey. Perhaps he would, but
we should have been foolish to harbor in our midst a man who might be
in league with the bandits, particularly after the Tuchun had taken
the trouble to wire the Mohammedan generals along the way asking for
guarantees of our safety. Besides, our expedition was quite unwieldy
enough as it was. Thus it was almost nine o’clock when we streamed out
across the incongruous American bridge and, striking northward along
the edge of the river and that of the suburb which piles into the air
behind it, were soon lost among an endless series of bare brown hills.

The homeward trip by the northern route was quite different from that by
which we had come. Instead of passing several walled cities almost every
day, there were often only two or three dreary little hamlets from dawn
till dark, and for days at a time nothing whatever but the single mud
compound or two where travelers stopped at noon and at night. There was
almost no loess, but instead desolate desert hills or broad plateaus
with few suggestions of even summer-time vegetation either on them or on
the more or less distant ranges that shut them in. Without loess, there
were of course few sunken roads—none worthy the name to any one who had
seen the other route—and no cave-dwellings, but in place of them
wind-swept mud hovels, sometimes enclosed within high walled compounds.

The hovels were particularly numerous on the first afternoon in the
almost rich grain district that succeeded the first stretch of
semi-desert—endless mud-walled compounds that looked like the ramparts
of small cities, yet housing only a single family, though in China
this may include as many as two score individuals of four, and even of
five, generations. Most of the fields were covered with the
moisture-protecting layer of stones. These are changed once in a
generation, we heard, and the custom becomes more prevalent farther
west, where the land grows ever drier until it merges into the Gobi
Desert. Groups of peasants were still winnowing grain in the breeze on
their threshing-floors, and everywhere sparrows enough to eat it all
as fast as it was separated from the chaff made the air vociferous
with their twittering. We plodded all day and well on into the
moonlight across what finally became almost an uninhabited waste; and
next day we climbed to an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet
through stony, dreary mountains without people, except for one little
surface coal-mine, and a rare shepherd, without vegetation except for
little bunches of brown tuft-grass. Always there was a new wrinkled
mountain range growing up ahead and another slipping away behind,
though these usually flanked the broad river valley instead of
crossing our trail.

We were always well on our way by sunrise, with two hours or more of
walking behind us, for it was too bitter cold then to ride; and sunset
often found us still in the saddle. On Thanksgiving day, for instance,
we were up at four and off at five, for there was a stretch of ninety
_li_ without a single human habitation to be crossed before we could
even make our noonday halt. A high wind and heavy clouds made riding for
long distances impossible, and there was little indeed to keep us in a
cheerful mood. A crumpled range of mountains lightly topped with newly
fallen snow beautified the left-hand horizon; now and again a group of
Gobi antelopes sped away like winged creatures through the kind of
sage-brush that recalled Arizona or Nevada, their white flags seeming a
saucy defiance to us; and in mid-morning we passed through the Great
Wall. It was fortunate that our map showed this, for we might easily
have mistaken it for the mud enclosure of rather an extensive field and
never have given it a second glance. Instead of the mammoth stone
barrier to be seen near Peking, it was a mere ridge of packed earth,
perhaps eight feet high and as many wide at the base, with broad gaps in
it here and there, through which wander the modern trails. The
contractors evidently had something of a sinecure out here in the west
where the emperor could not keep an eye upon them.

For miles before we reached the wall the sage-brush plain was piled
everywhere with Chinese graves of all sizes, some of them completely
covered over with drifted sand; but beyond it there was not a single
artificial mound of earth, as if there were no use in being buried at
all unless one could find a resting-place within the Great Wall. The
vastness of the brown uninhabited world was particularly impressive in
the absolutely dead silence which lasted for long periods, unbroken even
by the chirping of a stray bird. One might have been in some “death
valley,” yet only water seemed to be wanting in what might otherwise
have been excellent farming country.

Evidently this lack was increasing, for there were only abandoned ruins
left of what had once been a town, big temple and all, at the end of the
ninety _li_. There was one hole in the sandy earth, at which all trails
converged, and shepherds, cartmen, and miscellaneous travelers were
constantly using the cloth bucket on a stick with which crude troughs
about it were filled, and where great flocks of sheep disputed with
horses, cattle, mules, and donkeys; but this only water for many miles
in any direction was evidently growing insufficient for the demands made
upon it. We had a frozen luncheon in the lee of a ruin, from which we
could look across a vast section of the plain, dotted in the foreground
with the grazing camels of a great caravan that had pitched its tents
and piled its cargo within easy distance of the well, to where the
yellowish brown turned to purple and rolled up into the wrinkled,
snow-topped range that shut off the world on the west. All that
afternoon there was the same silent, rolling landscape, which ended at
last, just in time, as bitter cold night was settling down, at a single
mud compound in a little hollow of the great solitude.

The next day, in contrast, was absolutely cloudless, and so were nearly
all those of December. We rambled for more than twelve hours across a
lifeless wilderness where a human being was a sight to remember and in
which two rabbits were the only visible representatives of the rest of
the animal kingdom. Deep sand, here and there alternating with a sort of
sage-brush, made the progress of our carts exasperatingly slow—until I
suddenly discovered the ease and pleasure of reading on horseback, with
the result that I devoured every book we had with us and memorized a
primer of the Chinese language before the journey ended. Yet two inns
just rightly spaced greeted our eyes at noon and at nightfall, as two
others did on several similarly unpeopled days. It hardly seemed
possible that these had grown up so accurately by mere chance,
especially as there was no natural feature to attract and sustain them,
and sometimes water had to be brought thirty _li_ or more on
donkey-back, so that it cost us twelve coppers each to wash our faces
and hands. In every case in which we asked, the proprietor was the son
or grandson, born right here in the wilderness, of malefactors or
political prisoners who had been sentenced by the Manchu dynasty to keep
these inns at certain specified points along this old imperial highway.


On the sixth day north of Lanchow we reached the great sand-dunes which
make what might almost be a possible automobile trail impossible even
for Chinese carts. Great ridges of pure sand, everywhere given a
corrugated surface by the winds that had piled them up during the
centuries, stretch from some unknown distance back in the country,
perhaps clear from the foot-hills of the western ranges, down to the
very edge of the Yellow River. We might easily have fancied ourselves in
the midst of the Sahara as we waded for three hours, much more on foot
than on horseback, across this effective barrier to wheeled traffic, had
it not been for the sight of the Hoang Ho sweeping around it in a
half-circle so far below as to look like a mere brook, and the tumbled
masses of mountains beyond, culminating in a cone that has smoked
uninterruptedly, we were assured, for more then seven centuries. Boats
that seemed from this height mere boys’ rafts rather than cumbersome
barges capable of carrying two loaded carts glided up and down the
stream amid myriad floating chunks of ice; but we strained our eyes in
vain to make out, even through this brilliant, moistureless air,
anything resembling our own outfit. Beyond the dunes we came down upon a
cluster of mud compounds, most of them prepared to pose as inns if the
opportunity offered, and just then unusually crowded with west-bound
travelers. These were almost all soldiers, Mohammedan in faith and in
many cases so Turkish of features that with their big reddish beards
they seemed to be actors wearing masks above their cotton-padded Chinese
uniforms. They were the escort of a new governor on his way to Eastern
Turkestan, and the expedition was so large that though we came upon the
vanguard, accompanying some veritable houses on wheels, early in the
morning, we passed the last straggling carts and horsemen toward sunset.

This extraordinary demand upon the ferrying facilities brought upon us
the dreadful experience of being separated from our commissary and
forced to shift for ourselves. The rights of extraterritoriality are one
thing, and the joy which Chinese soldiers sometimes take in putting a
foreigner to annoyance and delay even without reason when so good an
opportunity offers is quite another. The major had known of a colleague
who, traveling in Manchuria, had been deliberately held on a river-bank
for forty-eight hours because soldiers crossing to his side insisted on
sending the boats back empty rather than delay one or two of them long
enough for the “outside barbarian” to get his carts on board. With
neither of us in evidence, and without even one of the major’s cards in
his pocket, no doubt Chang was finding it impossible to prove that ours
was an expedition of foreigners and therefore in a hurry, whatever might
otherwise have been the attitude of these more western Moslems in
Chinese uniforms.

When our usual lunch-hour was long past, and still no word came from the
rest of our party, we mustered Chinese enough to get chopped straw and
peas put before our horses, and eventually to obtain for ourselves a
bowl of plain rice boiled and served under conditions and amid
surroundings that had best not be specifically described, lest the
major’s still unsullied reputation be seriously injured. Then we
suddenly realized that it was already three o’clock, that the only place
where we could possibly spend a night without our cots and our cook was
still forty _li_ away, and that this was a walled city where the gates
probably closed at sunset. The result was the most speed we had attained
since the spasmodic truck had dropped us in Sian-fu more than a month
before. In fact, even the several goatskin rafts plying from town to
town along an open stretch of the river could hardly keep up with us.

It was a curiously sudden change to a rich wide valley from the barren
unpeopled wastes that lay behind us; yet the only real difference was
irrigation. This had been brought to the western Hoang Ho centuries ago
by the Jesuits, who had introduced a complete system, still functioning,
with great sluices—ornamented in Chinese fashion with fancy water-gates
and bridges showing the heads and tails of great fish in stone. What the
good fathers probably did not introduce was the custom of turning all
the roads into irrigation ditches and making travel virtually impossible
whenever the peasants along the way chose to do so; for that one may see
just outside the walls of Peking, and listen in vain for any law or even
effectual protest against it. Clusters of trees that were almost
numerous rose from in and about farm compounds, which grew so frequent
before the day was done as to form nearly a continuous town, and every
little while we passed a new, or a very well preserved, temple, high
above each of which stood two slender and magnificent poplars that
recalled the “pencil minarets” of Cairo.

But we had no time to spare for mere sight-seeing, nor even for debating
the social effects of Jesuit foresight. For fast as we urged our horses
on, the sun seemed to outdistance us without effort, like some runner of
unlimited speed and endurance and a weakness for practical joking
sauntering easily along just in front of his breathless competitors. The
so-called roads, too, abetted this red-faced humorist; for they would of
course instantly have lost their certificates of Chinese nationality if
they had marched straight forward even when the goal was plainly in
sight, so that they wound and twisted incessantly here on the flat
valley just as they had in their random wandering across the uninhabited
rolling plains behind us, just as a Chinese road will always and
everywhere, though there is no more reason for it than for putting
mustard on apple-pie. Even the accuracy in distances that had hitherto
been almost praiseworthy had suddenly disappeared, as if still further
to worry us. For it seemed at least a dozen times that the same answer
was given to our question as to how far we still had to go, though we
spaced this at considerable intervals; and the very best we could do,
even at the risk of having to give our animals a day’s rest, was to hold
our own.

We arrived at length, however, just as dusk was spreading, to find the
gates of Chungwei still open and the sense of direction among its
inhabitants so much better than outside the walls that we brought up
before the home of the only foreigners in town without mishap and
without delay. Fortunately this couple were Americans, in fact, the most
American of all the missionaries we met on our western trip, so that
there was no more embarrassment on our side than hesitation on the other
when we walked in upon them to say, “Here we are, with nothing but the
clothes we stand in; please take care of us.” It is a long cry, of
course, from auxiliary work among American soldiers in Europe to the
establishing of a mission in a town of far western China where
foreigners had never lived before, so that we rather flattered ourselves
that we, the first visitors this new station had ever known, were almost
as welcome as we were made.

Chungwei is an ancient and more or less honorable town which claims
eight thousand _families_ within its walls, among whom only three
merchants, without families, were Mohammedans. The city has no north
gate because there is no more China north of it, the so-called Great
Wall being almost within rifle-shot, and beyond that lies Mongolia. The
broad plain on which it flourishes is shut in by mountains and
sand-dunes, but is divided by the Yellow River, from which all the
prosperity of the region comes. For in the autumn, after the harvest,
the top layer of soil is cut up everywhere into big mud bricks, held
together by the roots of the crops, and of these all buildings, even
walls, fences, and most furniture, are made, and still there are always
great piles of them left over. Then the river is let in upon the land
and covers it once more with a rich silt that produces splendid
rice—certainly there was no suggestion of a rice country on a cloudy
December day with a high wind blowing—wheat and linseed in abundance,
millet, _kaoliang_, buckwheat, potatoes as large as if they had come
from America, cabbage enough to keep the population from starving if
there were nothing else, magnificent grapes and peaches, and what our
host assured us were the finest walnuts in China. In other words, all
Chungwei needed to be a land of plenty and comfort, and possibly even of
cleanliness, was to be somehow broken of the apparently unbreakable
Chinese habit of bringing into the world, in the madness for male
offspring, every possible mouth which the land can feed, with an instant
increase to take up the slack offered by such improvements as the
irrigation projects of the Jesuits.


We were luxuriating in the extraordinary experience of lying abed after
daylight when there came a scratching on one of the paper windows of the
dining-room where we had been accommodated, and we heard with
astonishment Chang’s mellifluous voice murmuring, “Masters, what time
like start this morning?” Our missing caravan had finally overcome the
difficulties of the river passage and had reached Chungwei about two in
the morning. Perhaps it was not so entirely out of sympathy for our
weary employees as we fancied that we set ten o’clock as the hour of
departure and turned over for another nap.

Our host very seriously doubted whether we could keep to our schedule
and make Ningsia in four days, particularly with so late a start. But we
had little difficulty in doing so, thanks mainly to the fact that the
weather had turned bitter cold. For the peasants all along the
cultivated part of the river valley had recently opened the irrigation
sluices for the customary autumn flooding, and had it not chanced that
thick ice formed a day or two ahead of us on all the streams thus
created, we should have been at least a week in covering the four
hundred and fifty _li_, as carts coming in from the northeast reported
they had been. Even where the alleged road itself had not been frankly
used as an irrigation ditch, it wandered and dodged and side-stepped in
a sincere but more or less vain effort to keep out of the diked bare
fields which in summer cover with green all this rich brown valley from
sand-dunes to river. Now there were vast skating-rinks everywhere,
doubly troublesome when they were half thawed in the early afternoons.
By picking a roundabout way we could have skated much of the way home.
But the crowded population of the valley took no advantage of the
recreation offered them. Probably there was not a pair of skates in the
province, certainly not unless they had been brought by a foreigner or
some student returned from abroad; and Kansu sends no students overseas.
Once in a while we saw a group of children timidly sliding on the ice,
with the awkwardness and limited range of _Mr. Pickwick_, the boys often
barefoot, the little girls in their bound feet usually only looking
wistfully on. Now and again such road as remained jumped by an arched
earth bridgelet over a larger irrigation ditch with an axle-cracking
jolt, only to wallow on again through ice and half-frozen mud.

As if all this were not bad enough, the peasants here and there were
felling big trees squarely across the road, and letting travel drag its
way around them as best they could, or wait until the trunk had been
sawed up. The traveler in rural China is constantly being reminded that
he is an unwelcome trespasser on private domain.

Before we left Lanchow we had been warned that the road would “change
gage” at Chungwei, and a day or two before we reached it our cartmen
came to ask whether they should fit their carts with other axles there.
That of course we recognized as a gentle hint for added _cumshaw_, which
we met with innocent faces and the information that they might reduce
their carts to one wheel, or increase them to six, with one under each
animal, so far as we were concerned, as long as they made the hundred
and some _li_ a day which our schedule demanded. One of them, I believe,
did change axles, for I recall that it was only the old opium-smoker
with the three ill fed animals whose cart could never reach the two ruts
at once. These were made by ox-carts peculiar to this region, their two
wheels seven feet high and out of all proportion to the little load of
chunk coal or bundles of straw which they carried in the small box
between them. In places these cumbersome vehicles monopolized the road,
but they were always quick to give us the right of way, even to the
extent of climbing high banks or backing into ditches from which it
could not always have been easy to extricate themselves. This seemed to
be as much due to the natural good nature of the rustic drivers as to a
certain fear, not so much of foreigners, since in this part of the
journey we were usually so muffled as not to be easily recognized as
such, as of an expedition whose equipment showed that it was not of
local origin. One is constantly getting little hints that the Chinese
feeling toward “outside-country” people may almost as easily exist
toward those from another province, even another village, as toward
those from foreign lands. Sometimes there were whole trains of these
ostrich-legged carts crawling together across the uneven
country—twenty-two of them in the caravan I counted one morning soon
after sunrise, and they were carrying, among them all, about what an
American farmer would consider one good load of straw. For some reason
these contrivances do not shriek their ignorance of axle-grease anything
like so loudly as they should, but instead are almost musical. For
beneath the axle of each cart hangs a long bell, of scalloped bottom
much like those in Chinese temples, with a clapper in the form of a
baseball-bat hanging so far down that only its extreme upper edge
strikes the bell, while the lower end gathers some of its impetus by
bouncing off every hummock in the middle of the “road.”

Remnants of the Great Wall frequently appeared, and once the road passed
through a half-ruined arch of it, one side still covered with the yellow
bricks that had formerly made this gateway at least rather an imposing
structure. Walnut and Chinese date-trees, willows and pencil-like
poplars, all leafless now and showing their big stick nests of crows and
magpies like some sort of tumor, clustered by the dozen about the
farm-houses and were scattered here and there across the broad valley;
but there were by no means enough of them, and the mountains above were
totally bare. Many of the high-walled farm-yards looked at some little
distance like great feudal castles, but on closer view the walls always
proved to be merely of dried mud, with nothing but the usual dreary
misery inside. Sometimes two or three score of these family dwellings
were in sight at once, their flat roofs invariably piled high with
bundles of wheat or straw, with corn and _kaoliang_ stalks; but there
was never any suggestion of comfortable prosperity about the interior or
the inmates. Children in a single quilted rag, chapped and begrimed
beyond belief on faces and hands and from the waist down, still huddled
in sunny corners or ran halfheartedly about at some unimaginative game
or other. When the weather is quite too bitter to be borne, they squat
or lie upon the more or less heated _k’angs_ indoors, to the injury of
their growth and health. The American memorial hospital in Lanchow, by
the way, treats many cases of cancer of the hips caused by burns from
sleeping on these Chinese mud-brick beds.

The Chinese persistence in maintaining the highest possible birthrate in
proportion to the available nourishment, and the constant subdivisions
of agricultural holdings among the multiplying sons of succeeding
generations, makes comfortable prosperity out of the question, whatever
the fertility of the soil, the industry of the cultivators, or even such
improvements as those introduced by the sixteenth-century Jesuits. There
is much prattle of education as a cure. If by education is understood,
among other things, the teaching that it is unwise, not to say criminal,
for even the most poverty-stricken, the lame, the halt, and the blind,
the mentally defective and the morally perverted, to marry as early and
as often as possible, that there shall be no lack of sons to worship at
the family mud-heaps, then it is sadly needed. But is it possible to
educate, even to the point required for a republican form of government
to function at all, a people whose entire time, strength, and energy are
constantly required to keep it from slipping over the brink of
starvation, even though that education come from some outside source and
be widely adjusted to the problem in hand?

At this season there was no work to be done in the fields, and little
anywhere else except the gathering of twigs and dried grass for fuel, or
roadway droppings for use in the spring. Hence it was naturally the time
for the dedicating of temples and worshiping within them. The attitude
of the Chinese toward their gods has been excellently summed up as
“respectful neglect”; but the treatment accorded them varies greatly in
different regions. There is no means of computing how many religious
edifices we passed on our way to Lanchow that were falling or had fallen
into decay, that had been abandoned entirely except for a beggar or two
posing as priests, or had become noisome dens in which thieves divide
their booty and vagrants scatter their filth; that the traveler may see
in almost any part of China. But the people in this far western valley
of the Yellow River were above the average in piety, treating their gods
with much more respect than neglect, perhaps because their good offices
are so constantly needed to keep back from one side or the other the
sand or the water that would mean quick ruin. At any rate, temples,
field-shrines, monasteries, and numerous lesser signs of superstitions
were so plentiful that the valley might have been mistaken for holy
ground; and not only were those in a state of repair by no means common
in China, but new ones were growing up. Early one afternoon we began to
meet, first men and women, the latter all astride donkeys or packed into
carts, in their gayest raiment and an unusually frolicsome mood, and
then dozens of youths carrying furled banners; and at length the
auditory tortures of Chinese “music” were wafted more and more painfully
to our ears as our animals brought us nearer the focal uproar. A bright
little temple, newly built back near the foot-hills, across which a
sanddune seemed to be creeping, was being dedicated; and every village,
every cluster of farm compounds for many _li_ roundabout had come in
person to bring their respects and to share in whatever benefits might
accrue. It was a Taoist temple, according to Chang, but as he said
something later about a statue of Buddha, and as a Confucian scroll was
plainly in evidence, no doubt the new building conformed to the general
Chinese rule of seating the three spiritual leaders of the race
harmoniously side by side, with Buddha, the foreigner, courteously
granted the central place of honor. The banners, it seemed, gay with
colors and Chinese characters, were brought either to bless or to be
blessed, after which they were carried back to their respective villages
oozing a kind of deputy godliness. Inside, energetic young men were
beating drums and shooting firecrackers to scare off devils—the timid
Chinese are always exorcising evil spirits, but never tackle the real
ones of graft, banditry, filth, the over-production of children, and all
their other real ailments. Long after we had turned the ridge that shut
off this corner of the valley, the charivari of droning priests and
misused instruments drifted to our hearing.


The days had grown so short that we were forced to use both ends of the
nights to piece them out. But for a week or more this was no great
hardship, as a brilliant moon lighted both morning and evening and gave
the landscape touches that were unknown to it by day. Under the rising
or the setting sun the wrinkled ranges of rich-brown mountains wrapped
the horizon in velvets of constantly varying shades. I recall
particularly the heaped-up mass just across the river from an unusually
picturesque walled town which we came upon just as the day was fading
out, and the tint of old red wine, blending momentarily until it became
the purple of the grape itself, seemed a masterpiece which even nature
seldom attains. But the town, though it awakened again that hope of the
romantic within its walls, was so miserable a den of broken stone
“lions” and ruined former grandeur, of comfortless people staring like
monkeys at merely strolling strangers, that we were only too glad to
accept the hospitality of an inn outside the walls.

Beyond this there lay forty _li_ of rolling half sand, utterly
uninhabited, then another broad fertile valley with the same oversupply
of big mud bricks and Jesuit irrigation works, or more modern but less
effective imitations of them. Here there were even more skating-rinks,
and incredible clouds of blue pigeons, from which the major easily
gathered all the fowl we needed to vary our diet to the end of the trip,
though much to the dismay of Chang, who whispered in my ear the horrible
information that “they home-side pigeon.” The _li_ suddenly grew longer,
as they have a habit of doing unexpectedly, so that it was well after
dark when we reached Yeh-shih-pu, a “Hwei-Hwei” town where we could not
even have our own bacon for breakfast, because the innkeeper would not
admit our cook to his kitchen until he had promised to bear in mind his
religious scruples. Such mishaps, added to the fact that every article
of food containing the slightest moisture was habitually frozen solid,
made our repasts less Cleopatran than they might have been. Cold chicken
or pigeon with little sheets of ice dropping from between the muscles as
the famished traveler tears them apart may not be so bad, but the big
Lanchow pears gained nothing by coming to the table as hard as stones,
and certainly there is no call to praise the taste of frozen hard-boiled
eggs, if they have any. Yet most such dainties, the pears in particular,
were far worse if they were thawed out before serving.

It seemed almost summer again on the brilliant afternoon without wind
when an almost good road picked us up and staggered erratically toward
Ningsia. Perhaps there was some slight excuse for its vagaries, for much
of the plain was covered with ice-fields thickly grown with tall reeds,
which were being gathered and carried to town on every type of
conveyance from coolie shoulders to giant-wheeled ox-carts. Among the
constant processions of travelers in both directions Mohammedans
appeared to be in the majority, with white felt skullcaps, or dirty
“Turkish” towels worn like turbans, greatly predominating over any other
form of head-gear. From a distance the city wall seemed merely a
glorified example of those about farm compounds; and high above it, high
in fact above the city gates, towered two pagodas against the distant
horizon of the inevitable crumpled range of low mountains or high hills,
hazy with shade along the base, bright with a slight fall of snow along
the top, where the low winter sun could still strike them.

[Illustration:

  The Chinese protect their boys from evil spirits (the girls do not
    matter) by having a chain and padlock put about their necks at some
    religious ceremony, which deceives the spirits into believing that
    they belong to the temple. Earlaps embroidered in gay colors are
    widely used in Kansu in winter
]

[Illustration:

  Many of the faces seen in western China hardly seem Chinese
]

[Illustration:

  A dead man on the way to his ancestral home for burial, a trip that
    may last for weeks. Over the heavy unpainted wooden coffin were
    brown bags of fodder for the animals, surmounted by the inevitable
    rooster
]

[Illustration:

  Our party on the return from Lanchow—the major and myself flanked by
    our “boys” and cook respectively, these in turn by the two
    cart-drivers, with our alleged _mafu_, or groom for our riding
    animals, at the right
]

There was nothing really unusual about Ningsia, except perhaps its
distance from any other city. The only foreigners we found there—a
Scandinavian lady and a Belgian priest who maintained one of the
mightiest beards in captivity, bitterly rival propagandists of
Christianity—both assured us that the people of Ningsia were a “bad
lot,” but we had no personal experiences to bear out the statement. Of
the forty-five thousand reputed to dwell within the walls, a generous
third were Moslems, as in Kansu as a whole, but as usual they were
credited with a more industrious, aggressive character than the others,
and a more united front in spite of internal disagreements. The
Mohammedan general, who ruled the place, nephew of the powerful Moslem
Ma Fu-hsiang, looked and acted quite like any other Chinese official,
perhaps because the percentage of Moslem blood that runs in his veins is
the same as the proportion of people of that faith in the city and the
province. His yamen and his extensive barracks were noticeably spick and
span for China, and his soldiers seemed to be well drilled and
disciplined, thanks perhaps to the Russian officer or two who were
giving the general the benefit of their training. But there was much
recent building all about the town; even two elaborate wooden
_p’ai-lous_ were in course of construction. These fantastic memorial
street arches are without number in China, but it is a rare experience
to see new ones under construction, or to find old ones undergoing
repairs, for that matter.

Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, “and all the thieves and rascals from four
directions,” to quote the hirsute Belgian, make up the rest of the
population. Mutton-shops and sheepskins were naturally in considerable
evidence, though there was no lack of black pigs to be seen from the
wall. A slight yet conspicuous detail that we had not seen elsewhere was
slats or small poles set upright at close intervals in front of many
business houses, evidently as a protection against thieves, which would
bear out, I suppose, the assertion as to the make-up of the population.
“Lanchow coppers” had quickly died out and were virtually forgotten by
the time we reached Ningsia, though in theory its ruler was subordinate
to the provincial Tuchun; and “cash” was again everywhere in evidence. A
half-circuit of the city wall showed much vacant space, and even some
farming, within it. Of the two pagodas standing like lighthouses above
the surrounding country, one proved to be far outside the city, toward
the wrinkled mountain range beyond which lies the ancient capital of
Ala-shan. Many-sided but plain-faced, certainly of no great age, they
seemed as high as the Washington Monument, though this may have been an
exaggeration of the imagination, and beneath each of them stood a temple
covering a great reclining Buddha.


We spent a whole day in Ningsia, the only one without travel between
Lanchow and Peking, and could not see how we should have gained much by
staying longer—unless perhaps for years, so that to our superficial
impression would be added the detailed experience of the “old-timer.”
Nor was our attention entirely given to mere sight-seeing and calls of
respect. There were our three horses to be shod—though the timid Chinese
blacksmiths who wander the streets, shop in hand, refuse to risk their
precious lives at the rear end of the most harmless of such animals,
even though they are tied hand and foot to stout stanchions. Any
American worth his salt at the same trade would shoe any quadruped in
China single-handed, behind as well as before, and he certainly would
not leave the long, all but untrimmed hoofs which help to make the
Chinese pony famous for stumbling, though he would of course throw the
first hammer within reach at the man who proposed to pay him only twice
as much for one shoe as his Chinese colleague gets for four. Then there
was the task of getting rid of our opium-smoking driver without either
violently breaking our contract with him or showing undue harshness.
For, after all, he had kept up with the other cartman, who was as
faultless a driver as one could ask for; and there had been times when
his silly grin of doped contentment with life made up somewhat for the
sogginess of his intellect during most of the journey. But we were tired
of seeing his shaft-horse do all the work, while the two starved mules
out in front only now and then staggered taut their rope traces; we were
tired of furnishing opium pills for eating and smoking with money that
should have been spent in food for beast and man; and we were
particularly weary of wondering every time we got out of sight of our
caravan whether the “old man” and his miserable animals had at last
failed us.

When it came to a showdown his elimination proved simple and easy.
Perhaps the pace of the past ten days had cured him of any desire to
keep it up for twelve or thirteen more, over worse going. He had told
Chang one night that he might shoot him if he wished, but that he could
not go a step farther, though this had proved to be a mere figure of
speech. Perhaps there were other arguments, of a monetary nature, such
as a commission for selling his part of the contract to some one else;
for even jobs are bought and sold in China. But of this we knew nothing,
and cared less. For he agreed without argument to resign in favor of the
new cartman whom his companion brought in, and thanked us profusely for
the _cumshaw_ which no doubt quickly went up in fumes.

The new driver, like the one that was left, called our destination home,
and had been waiting for sixteen days for a paying chance to return
there. Except for a slightly less cheery temperament, he was no less
excellent a cartman than the other, though only a hired driver; while
his companion owned not merely his outfit but an inn at the end of our
trail. In the company of such fellows as these, one is struck with the
sturdiness of the Chinese character. All about them were moral pitfalls,
of which their opium-aged colleague was a striking example. They, too,
and millions more like them, could easily get the poppy’s deadly juice
and smoke themselves away from their at best dismal reality into the
land of beautiful dreams; in fact, most of those whose duty it should be
to remove this particular temptation do all they can, short of reducing
their own “squeeze” from it, to make the wicked stuff available; yet
they had never succumbed to it. Nor is the sturdiness of the Chinese
coolie confined to the negative virtues. There was Chang, for instance,
born a tiller of the soil in cruelly crowded Shantung, with a bare three
years’ elementary schooling, who had taught himself to read, and to
write a goodly number of characters, who in a few years as a foreign
servant had acquired powers that to his simple parents probably seemed
supernatural, who in his two months with us had so improved in poise and
the ability to command the respect of his fellow-men that a trained
scholar of many generations of similar experiences could scarcely have
outdone him, either in deportment or the actual business in hand, when
he was called upon to act as interpreter between us and the Mohammedan
general, the very thought of meeting whom face to face would probably
have set him trembling a few years before. Best of all, he had not let
his rise in the world make him ashamed to do the most menial task that
came to hand, on the ground that he was no longer a coolie, which is the
stumbling-block over which rising young China is so apt to come a
cropper. Chang and our cart-drivers were, of course, only individual
instances; but I like to think of them—believe, in fact, that I can
rightly think of them—as typical of millions of their class, as proofs
that, given anything like a decent opportunity, the Chinese coolie can
rise to a genuinely higher plane just as well as the American farmer
can. If such is the case, it is not too much to hope that China may in
time, even though it be centuries distant, advance to real democracy,
that the name “republic” by which she now styles herself may some day
become a reality and not merely a mockery and a catchword.


But to come back to Ningsia, which is still a long way from democracy of
even the present imperfect type. Yet more important than matters of
horseshoeing and the moral repair of our caravan was the question of a
bath, which was eventually settled more or less in our favor by the
placing of two large tin cans of warm water in our respective rooms.
These were in Ningsia’s best hotel; in fact, the best hotel we graced
during all our western journey, though that still does not bring it to
the forefront of the world’s hostelries. Probably the main reason for
its preëminence was the simple fact that it was quite new, and hence had
never had an opportunity to grow filthy and unrepaired. Perhaps the
Mohammedan proprietor—or should I call him “manager,” since it was
several times confided to us that the real owner was Ningsia’s Moslem
general?—had something to do with it, for he was so incessantly on the
job that we could not push aside the cloth door across the street portal
without finding him bowing us his respects behind it, though always
without any violation of his Islamite dignity and certainly with no
acknowledgment of inferiority. We might have taken only one of the
identical rooms at either end of the unoccupied hall backing the long
narrow courtyard, but one of the advantages of roughing it is that
whenever the least possible excuse offers one can be extravagant without
a twinge of conscience.

The most remarkable feature, perhaps, about the establishment was that
it had no earth floors, but that courtyard, hall, and even our rooms
were paved in brick. The _k’angs_ were so new that their straw mats were
almost inviting; the flue was of some modern improved type which
actually gave out more heat than smoke and there was a little baked-mud
coal-stove in addition. This detail was important, for the almost summer
weather in which we had reached the city had modified the instant we
passed through its gate and had disappeared entirely by sunset. I trust
it will not unduly shock Western readers to be told that an ox-cart-load
of the splendid anthracite coal in huge lumps which is so plentiful in
northwestern China sold in this region for about an American dollar, for
in that case I should not even dare to mention another kind of coal,
evidently of an unusually oily composition, which may be lighted with a
match and burns anywhere—on the brick or earth floor, in shallow pans
built for that purpose, in an old wash-basin—without smoke enough to be
worth mentioning and with a sturdy heat that makes a little of it highly
effective. But mankind is never satisfied with his blessings; even
missionaries complained that in the good old days a cart-load of coal
cost less than half what the wicked profiteers owning ox-carts were now
demanding.




                              CHAPTER XXVI
                         COMPLETING THE CIRCLE


We might as well have indulged in an extra nap next morning instead of
being as exacting as usual on the hour of departure, for the city gate
was still closed when we reached it. The rooster that all Chinese inns
maintain for the benefit of their watchless clients had already “sung”;
but on those moonlight mornings such a timepiece could easily be
regarded as out of order, which is no doubt the reason we not only had
to waken the soldiers in the little guard-house but that there was a
further delay of nearly half an hour while one of them wandered away
into the city to get the key, evidently ensconced under the pillow of
some other guardian of Ningsia’s safety. All we lacked to make the third
act of “La Bohème” complete was a light fall of snow and a more Parisian
atmosphere, for not only was there a brazier over which the soldiers
warmed their hands, and a collection of countrymen with produce waiting
to enter as soon as the gate was opened, but we had, though we did not
then suspect it, our _Mimi_ with us.

Our new cartman, it seemed, had come from Paotou accompanied by another
cart, and its driver had already found a fare for the return trip when
this expedition and ours were thrown together in the back yard of the
Moslem inn. In fact, the other might have started a week before had his
client not been afraid to travel alone through a region with a bad
reputation for bandits and thieves. Wholly unknown to us, therefore, we
were to constitute the escort of this timid person, of whose existence
we were still completely ignorant. We did notice that a third cart left
the inn close behind us, and that it trailed us all the way to the gate,
but there was nothing suspicious in some other traveler’s happening to
pick the same ill chosen hour of departure as we, nor in his setting out
in the same direction. Our first hint that something might be suspected
was the sight of the third cart still following on our heels through the
gate, as if it belonged to our party and was therefore free from paying
the twenty coppers required of every native conveyance.

All that morning it stuck to us across a great plain with much ice, here
and there covered with tall reeds. There was no doubt that it had
invited itself to join us; the only questions remaining were its
destination and who it was that lay ensconced behind its heavy blue
cloth front door. These mysteries were solved at the noonday halt. A
well dressed boy had already appeared on the front platform beside the
driver, and the instant the cart drew up in the yard of the inn we had
chosen out stepped a Chinese lady still well short of the age when
scandal ceases to wag its tongues about members of the attractive sex.
She was the wife of a silk merchant of Paotou, we gathered in a
roundabout way; the youth was her nephew or something of the sort; and
she had evidently joined us for the whole fortnight that remained of our
journey.

We both admit that we are not utterly devoid of sympathy or chivalry,
but somehow it did strike us that the lady might have gone to the
formality of letting us know, at least indirectly, that she was going to
grace our expedition. But they do things differently in China; and
perhaps this was a less scandalous way than frankly to make the
acquaintance of unrelated male traveling companions.

The three carts never once broke ranks that afternoon as we plodded on
across the plain, with another great lighthouse pagoda and more ox-cart
caravans with seven-foot wheels. The whole Yellow River valley seemed to
have been flooded a bare week ahead of us, and while this no doubt would
be repaid many fold in the spring, it would have made traveling a sad
experience if everything had not been frozen over. As it was, our
cartmen did much wandering in the rather vain hope of avoiding icy
roads, for, old as she is, China apparently has never learned to put
calks on her horseshoes. We had a hundred _li_ to make that day, which
did not seem difficult in the light of the fact that we had once covered
a hundred and forty on this leg of the journey, but the _li_ were
stretching perceptibly, and what with the zigzagging and the delay at
the city gate we were still well short of our goal when night fell. The
moon was rising later now, so that we had to feel our way across the
plain in utter darkness, for even by day the “road” was often only
faintly marked. The stillness of this great valley at night was
impressive—and fortunate, for the only thing to guide us was the sound
of our carts ahead, silent underfoot but with a constant thumping of the
heavy wheels on the loosely fitting axles.

At that the carts got out of our hearing, and for a long time we rode on
at random, keeping as straightforward a course as possible, until
finally we were lucky enough to see rising close before us out of the
night an imposing gateway of the walled town of Ping-lo. Our chief
impression of this is that if it had as much paving as it has ornamental
street arches there would be fewer streets to wade and stumble through,
hence less temptation to curse the stupidity of such inhabitants as were
faintly visible for not being able to put us on the track of our carts.
We found our way at last, however, to the inn-yard where they were
already unhitched—to discover that the trousered lady had followed us
even there. It had not mattered so much at the midday halt, but with
several inns to choose from we were tempted to protest when she clung to
us even by night, taking indeed the very next room to us, with a thin
mud wall between. We did protest, in fact, though for other reasons than
any real fear of being “compromised,” of hearing Peking whisper over its
bridge-tables and its cocktails at the club, “What’s this about the
major and that fellow bringing a Chinese girl along with them, eh?”
While we never got a monosyllable out of her ourselves, the lady had in
a high degree that fault more or less unjustly charged against all her
sex; and as she slept most of the day, after the fashion of Chinese
travelers, to whom the horrors of a “Peking cart” seem to be like the
rocking of a cradle, it was natural that she needed to relieve herself
by chattering all night, with the youth or innkeepers’ wives as the not
unwilling listeners. Now, the Chinese language is anything but musical,
and the voices of Chinese women are evidently trained to sound as much
as possible like the tightening brakes of a freight-train on a swift
down grade, so that even in our most charitable moods we could scarcely
have lain silently bewailing the departure of our hitherto splendid
slumber for more than the two or three hours we did without attempting
to do something about it. The vigorous application of a boot-heel to the
mud partition, and a few terse remarks that were probably none the less
clear for being only partly couched in Chinese, had a desirable effect,
which was made more or less permanent by having Chang explain next day
to the third driver, who passed the information on through the youth to
the feminine part of our aggregation, certain rules of conduct that were
essential to a continued membership in it.

In the middle of the next afternoon irrigation suddenly ended, and a
stony, barren plain, rising into foot-hills on the left, grew up ahead.
Some time during the following day we crossed the unmarked boundary
between Kansu and Inner Mongolia and left the Mohammedan province
behind. From the town where we spent one of those nights there is a
short cut through the Ordos that takes but half the time required to
follow clear around the right-angled bend of the Yellow River, but even
if one is sure of being able to cross the river at both ends of that
trail there is nothing but an uninhabited desert wilderness between,
where a single well is worthy a name on the map, and which is
practicable only to camel-caravans. Thus there was nothing to do but let
the Hoang Ho force us farther and farther westward, though our goal lay
to the east, now by stony roads, now through half-days of the drifted
sand of genuine deserts, or by river bars spreading out in great masses
of ice which it was not always possible to pass without making a great
detour. There was a very good reason why we could not float down the
Yellow River, or skate or ice-boat either, for not only was it often
frozen over completely for long distances but the ice lay in broken
chunks a foot or two thick and so packed together that they sometimes
were piled high up on the shore. There were days during which we never
sighted the river, though we were always following it; at other times we
spent midday or night right on its banks, with it the only water
available.

Such a place was the one we reached unusually early one afternoon. In
spite of its three-barrel name of Hou-gway-tze it consisted of a single
cluster of mud buildings, which took all prizes for their filthy
condition. Moreover, every room was packed with more coolies than could
crowd together on the _k’angs_, and several of them were suffering from
what might easily have been malignant diseases or dangerous illnesses.
It looked as if we would have to commandeer one room by driving the
coolies out of it—and then take our lady in with us. But General Ma, the
uncle, Mohammedan ruler of all this western district, had very recently
built a new inn, with high crenelated walls of bright yellow mud and a
generally inviting appearance, a furlong or two beyond the unspeakable
hovels that had evidently for centuries been the only housing for
travelers at this point. Our cartmen seemed to take it for granted that
we would not be admitted to the new compound, for it was not only
strictly Mohammedan but had really been built to house soldiers. It took
Chang less than five minutes, however, to assure the man in charge that
we would not cook or eat pork on the premises, and to talk a soldier out
of the only one of the rooms that did not have its _k’ang_ crowded.
Evidently the hope of being given a few coppers in the morning, in which
he was, of course, not disappointed, or the privilege, unless he was
Mohammedan, of disposing of some of the scraps left over from our meals
and perhaps of getting an empty tin can or two was reward enough for
him. Where our feminine companion spent the night is still a mystery,
for though she promptly followed us to the new inn we saw nothing of her
after her descent from the cart until she crawled out of it again the
next noon fifty _li_ farther on.

There was time for a stroll before the sun withdrew its genial
companionship. Great masses of crumpled mountains, treeless and
velvet-brown, lay just across the river, which here was partly open,
with a current of perhaps five miles an hour. No wonder it had to turn
out for so mighty a barrier, and double the journey that was left us. On
our side of the stream stretches of tall, light-yellow bunchgrass and a
kind of sage, of slightly purplish tinge under the sinking sun, were
broken by long rows of sand-dunes. In the morning the north sides of
these were white with hoar-frost and helped a bit to light the way for
us before daylight. Files of coolies who might easily have been
bandits—we wondered if many of them were not brigands who had turned in
their weapons and disbanded for the winter—were constantly appearing out
of the brush and hillocks of this and the other uninhabited deserts
beyond. Many of them wore a kind of makeshift turban of pure unspun
wool, and all were dressed for cold weather, often in combinations of
skin coats and cotton-padded garments that made them picturesque
figures. How many hundreds of these we passed on our journey northward
there is no way of computing, nor of knowing whether they were followers
of some bandit chieftain who would take to the road again in the region
ahead, which had been so harassed of late, as soon as the weather made
banditry pleasant and travelers plentiful once more. Perhaps they were
all what the few we spoke with claimed to be,—men who had taken rafts
down the river, or coolies who had worked in Mongolia or Manchuria
during the summer and were now walking a thousand miles or more back to
their homes, as men do by the millions in overcrowded China.

We were constantly meeting these hardy fellows far from any other
evidences of human existence. Long lines of them, bundled up in all they
possessed, emerged from the darkness of early morning, one or two
perhaps singing in a mixture of minors and falsettos that recalled the
songs of the country people of Venezuela. Occasionally a straggler
limped past far out on the dreary plain; but with few exceptions they
kept the pace, and the cheerful countenances of perfect contentment. We
always came upon a group of them at the single lonely huts that were
often the only possible stopping-places during the whole day, sitting in
a sunny corner sheltered from the wind at noon, perhaps stripped to the
waist and diligently searching the seams of their thick padded garments,
or already stretched out on the crowded _k’angs_ where we halted for the
night; for they seemed to prefer to travel in the darkness of morning
rather than of evening. Probably, too, they had in mind the sharp
competition for _k’ang_ space, if not also for food and fuel, and the
necessity of arriving early if they would be sure of accommodations at
these only shelters for forty or fifty _li_ in either direction.

The fixed price of lodging for a coolie in these inns seemed to be five
coppers; then there was five “cash” or a copper for hot water for their
tea, and not more, probably, for each of their two meals than for
lodging; so that the innkeeper got about the equivalent of one to three
American cents from each guest, depending on whether he stopped at noon
or overnight, and the total expenditure of each coolie perhaps averaged
four cents a day, besides the bit of food some carried with them. Now
and again they no doubt cut down this extravagant figure by skipping a
meal or, like the several score we saw streaming away from a temple
early one morning, finding shelter at a lower price. Many of these
coolies hardly looked Chinese at all, though it might be difficult to
decide what other blood had modified their features. In fact, the
northern Chinese, especially outside the larger cities, with their
strong bodies and sturdy faces, bear little resemblance to the common
Western conception of the sly, slender, pigtailed Celestial; I doubt
very much whether the American boy whose only acquaintance with the race
has been through the “movies” or a rare laundryman from Kwangtung in the
far south would have recognized as Chinese our chief driver, with his
strong, almost Roman nose, his leather-dark complexion, and his
attributes of a real man even in the Occidental sense.

Though one seldom finds the doubtful joys of chewing tobacco appreciated
outside the confines of the Western hemisphere north of the Rio Grande,
it was something of a surprise to discover how many Chinese do not even
smoke it. Probably the chief reason is that they cannot afford it,
though ten cigarettes in gaily decorated packages can be bought for the
equivalent of two cents. This would have accounted for the fact that so
many of these coolie groups were abstainers. Those who did smoke used
the little pipes with long stems, of about the capacity of half a
hazelnut shell, familiar to Korea and Japan as well as to China; and
their pale tobacco of the texture of fine hay was so mild as hardly to
seem to Western taste derived from the dreadful weed at all. Whenever I
distributed a few pinches of a brand widely known in the United States
the result was a series of sudden coughing spells and the laughing
admission that _Mei-guo yen_ is painfully strong. Our cartmen, however,
who alternately smoked a larger pipe with a porcelain stem of the size
of a policeman’s club, either came to prefer the taste of American
tobacco or found it more economical to ask for an occasional pinch from
my can than to untie their own strings of “cash.” Several large
corporations, all, I believe, British or American, are expending great
efforts and vast sums to teach the Chinese the highest possible
consumption of cigarettes; and their wares and their “advertising
vandalism,” as a more serious-minded traveler has justly called it, are
to be found even in the villages and along the main roads of the far
interior. But they are hampered by the problem of how to produce a
cigarette that can be sold at prices the consumer can afford to pay,
even though the wages in their Chinese factories are in keeping with
those elsewhere in the country. The fact that the revenue-stamp, which
represents so large a proportion of the American’s smoking expenditures,
is missing still does not solve the difficulty. Like opium, tobacco was
brought to—not to say imposed upon—the Chinese from outside, and not
many centuries ago. The weed has not been known in China as long as it
has in Europe, to say nothing of America. Long after Sir Walter Raleigh
frightened his admirers by causing smoke to issue from his nostrils
tobacco was brought to Japan by the Portuguese or the Dutch; from there
it crossed to Korea, drifting naturally into Manchuria, and the Manchus
introduced it into China along with the cue in 1644.


Scrub trees rose above the tall light-yellow clumps of tough grass
during most of the day beyond the general’s inn. Pheasants flew up here
and there in large flocks. Once we passed a Mongol rounding up a herd of
shaggy, half-wild ponies. We should have known him by his bent-knee yet
cowboy-perfect riding in spite of his Chinese sheepskin dress, by his
full-blooded, red face, “like a brewer’s drayman in—England,” as some
one has put it, even if he had not been unable to understand Chang when
we found the road suddenly missing where the river had licked away the
side of a hill to which it formerly clung. Now and then we met a Mongol
riding a camel at a trot across the bushy country, and a large scattered
group or two of these animals were browsing on the tough yellow grass as
if it were delicious. Our horses invariably showed fright at a close
view of a camel, perhaps because they could not bear the sight of such
ungainly ugliness, for certainly the two-humped beasts never gave the
least indication either of the desire or of the ability to harm their
more graceful rivals in the business of transportation.

Tungkou on the further side of a large bay formed by the Hoang Ho was a
town of some importance, evidently a principal port during the season of
river traffic, for huge boats built of hand-hewn planks and divided into
several partitioned compartments were drawn up in considerable number on
the shore. There were half a dozen new fortresses, some of two stories,
or with a kind of cupola from which the coming of enemies, such as a
force of bandits, could be seen some distance off; and many of the large
compounds of the town were also freshly built of the same straw and
yellow mud, though there was nothing new or clean about the old
familiar, staring, easily laughing inhabitants. In certain moods, such
as come at the ends of many long days of hard travel, there is a feeling
of loneliness, of indescribable depression, in being long gazed at by
multitudes, as if one were a wild beast, or a circus clown. The
telegraph line of two wires which serves this region jumped the river at
Tungkou in one mighty leap between double and reinforced poles on the
two banks and plunged on into a Sahara of high drifted sand-ridges, over
which we found our way with difficulty during the first hours of the
next morning.

Then for several days irrigation took the place of desert again, and we
passed towns that claimed to be entirely Catholic. After the Mohammedan
rebellion a certain order of that faith began work in the almost
unpeopled region along this northwesternmost elbow of the Yellow River,
copying the irrigation systems of their Jesuit forerunners of centuries
before a bit farther south and building up town after town in which none
but Catholic converts are really welcomed. As the broad river valley was
barely used at all before the priests came, except for grazing, and was
but lightly populated, there can scarcely be any criticism of them on
that score. San-shun-gung and Poronor were perhaps the most important of
the dozen or more of these towns through which we passed, and which
appeared with great regularity every forty _li_, sometimes every twenty.
The first named was walled, rather recently and with mud bricks, perhaps
because it was the seat of the bishop, whose residence close to the
large church, with a belfry building distinct from it, might have looked
less imposing in other surroundings than the usual low, mud-built
Chinese village. Services were in full swing, with most of the
inhabitants audibly in attendance and the streets deserted, when we
passed through this place early one morning; but Poronor of the Mongol
name was a noonday halt and we had opportunity there for a chat with the
local ruler. He was a Belgian priest, as in the other larger towns, and
_bourgmestre_, too, as he called it; for the priest is always the town
mayor and chief authority, though there may also be a Chinese or Mongol
“mandarin.” While we were being entertained with wine and cigars in his
laboratory-office—for he took account of the bodily as well as the
political and spiritual ailments of his converts—a large group of
Mohammedan soldiers left a procession of them that was straggling down
from the northeast and gathered in the yard, to peer in at us through
the glass windows. They were pestering him to death, the priest said,
new groups coming every day to ask him to furnish them carts and
animals, and naturally drivers, in which to continue their journey. He
had done so several times, but was now refusing the request; and nothing
could be better proof of the real authority of the foreign priests of
that distant Yellow River valley than the fact that the soldiers did not
take transportation facilities by force when he declined to furnish
them.

On the other hand, any criminal whom the _bourgmestre_ wished to be rid
of was turned over to the Mohammedan commanders. The converts were
almost exclusively Chinese; for there were naturally no converted
Moslems, and only a few Mongol Catholics, who lived in two small
villages back toward the hills. In one town where we spent the night the
priest was for the moment absent, but this did not hinder us from
getting a fairly clear view of his establishment. The large windows of
glass—so unusual in western China—along the inner side of the church and
the priest’s study disclosed rather bare rooms, the former with a few
lithographed saints and benches or kneeling-boards some six inches high
and wide, the latter with a rough Chinese-made easy-chair and table and
the indispensable paraphernalia of the priestly calling, including a
score of rather dog-eared books. Barely had we entered the compound than
a flock of boys swooped noisily down upon us. They were “orphans” of the
little mud school in a corner of the enclosure, or sons of the
townspeople; and they were rather poor witnesses to the advantages of
Catholic training, at least in deportment. For not only were they
undisciplined but very decidedly “fresh,” and certainly there had been
no improvement over “heathen” Chinese children in the matter of wiping
their noses and using soap and water. While they were crowded about us
the priest’s native assistant appeared and put us through the usual
autobiographical catechism required of any lone foreigner surrounded by
Chinese, then reciprocated with shreds of information expressed in
scattered words of Chinese, French, and Latin. Finally he led the way
toward, but not into, the schoolroom, for the flock of unwiped noses
surged pell-mell ahead of us and when we entered they were all kneeling
in their places on tiny benches similar to those in the church, with
their forearms on their home-made desks, chanting at the tops of their
voices and at express speed some Latin invocation which probably had
about as little meaning to them as it had to us. The assistant proudly
announced himself the teacher and displayed his few treasures of
learning, among which a religious book printed in Latin and Chinese on
opposite pages was plainly the most revered. When at length he was moved
to silence the chanted uproar, and we pronounced a few of the Latin
words at his request, he gave extravagant signs of delight, much as a
great scientist might if a colleague unexpectedly confirmed some fine
point on which his own experiments had focused themselves.

Bound and unbound feet were about equally in evidence in these Catholic
towns, as if in such minor matters as this and the use of handkerchiefs
converts might do as they saw fit. Nor could we see any appreciable
advance in living conditions, though the school-girls of Poronor, in
their bright red trousers and jackets, were a picturesque touch which
made up somewhat for the annoyance of eating in the presence of as
mighty a mob audience as in regions never blessed with Christianity.
Chang reported, too, that people along the way told him that the
Catholic Chinese were heartily disliked, because they were not only
unusually dishonest and rather haughty, but because they might do any
mean trick that suggested itself, and the priests invariably upheld
them, even to using their influence in resultant lawsuits.


The broad valley between hazy and even invisible mountain ranges on one
side and, on the other, a river which we hardly saw during the last week
of the journey was sometimes a sea of yellow grass high as a horseman’s
head and sometimes a big bare plain deliberately cut up by irrigation
ditches so wide that there was often no crossing them without many miles
of detour. There were times when a compass seemed necessary, so
uncertain was the course of the meandering “road,” which even the
experienced carters now and again lost completely. Travel was slight,
and every few miles a herdsmen’s hut all but hidden in the tall grass
was the only sign of population. Thousands of acres of these
uncultivated plains had been dug up and burned over, probably by men who
make their living by gathering marmot skins, though there were no
visible evidences of these gopher-like animals, which retire to their
holes for the winter. Snow fell during the night that we spent in
Hoang-yang-muto—“Antelope Woods,” so named, no doubt, because there is
not a tree and certainly not a “yellow sheep” to be seen for many miles
roundabout, and all the next morning our horses were hampered by great
balls of snow and earth that formed beneath their hoofs, and which we
were forced to remove ourselves, for our brave _mafu_ avoided any
unnecessary familiarity with his charges. But by the middle of the
afternoon the landscape had resumed its brown-yellow coloring and never
lost it again during the journey.

Not long after the Catholics disappeared, big Mongol lamaseries began to
rise every few hours above the horizon. These were much more pretentious
than anything else between Ningsia and Paotou, the big main building
always two and sometimes three stories high and constructed of good
modern brick. From a distance they looked like ugly summer hotels that
had been foisted upon the simple country, but a nearer view always
showed the dozen or more big windows in each wall to be mere bricked-up
pretenses of the openings they resembled. Evidently the “Living Buddhas”
who graced these establishments had attempted to copy what they
considered to be the glories of Shanghai or Tientsin, but could not rid
themselves of the notion that a proper dwelling must be as stuffy as a
Mongol felt tent. Even the clusters of white houses about these poor
imitations of modern Italian villas bore false windows, and only the
turnip-shaped dagobas had anything suggestive of the picturesque about
them. Swarms of dirty lamas in yellow, red, and purple robes, big stout
fellows of every age from boy novices to those whose already almost
visible skulls would soon be the playthings of dogs, poured forth from
these places if we rode in among the buildings, from which sometimes
came ritual noises that were a mixture of the terrifying and the
childishly ridiculous. Nor was there any lack of women about these
monasteries, in quantities of gaudy jewelry and with real feet.

The plain had been unbroken for days as far as the eye could see, giving
the impression that the country was tilted and that we were for ever
riding uphill, when a low mountain rose above the horizon at dawn on
Friday which we barely reached by sunset on Saturday. All Sunday we
plodded close along the foot of this, here and there passing a cluster
of huts within a compound more often than not in ruins, but with the
assertion in big characters whitewashed on their mud walls that they
were “hotels.” Once or twice we stopped at Mongol or Chinese inns, but
most of them were still “Hwei-Hwei,” which did not matter so much after
the cook hit upon the happy expedient of telling the proprietors that
the bacon he served us for breakfast was “American salt beef.”

Though we had expected it almost any day on this journey northward, it
was not until this last Sunday night of the trip that we could not get a
room to ourselves. The isolated inn at which darkness overtook us
consisted of one huge room surely a hundred feet long, with an alleyway
from door to “kitchen” and a narrow lateral passage to the end walls,
otherwise completely taken up by the four _k’angs_ thus divided. These
were already crowded with scores of coolies, ox-cart drivers, and
similar travelers much more interesting to look upon than as bedfellows.
Luckily there was one paper window in a far corner, and there we gave
orders to have the last ten feet of the _k’ang_ swept, the walls dusted,
and a blanket and the reed mat we did not need hung up as curtains. If
there were drawbacks to this improvised chamber, such as listening to
the eating, sleeping, and drinking noises of our fellow-guests, the
place at least was warm, thanks not only to the bodily heat of the
several scores of men but to as roaring a fire as poor fuel could
produce in the mud cook-stove that passed its surplus warmth into the
flues beneath the general beds. For the last few days inn “kitchens” had
been fitted with an immense shallow iron kettle set permanently into the
adobe stove, and from this any one who wanted boiled water dipped it.
About such inconveniences our cook competed with the flocking coolies
who prepared their own humble fare, but it rarely needed even the
commanding word of Chang to impress them with the fact that such great
personages as ourselves naturally should have precedence over the mere
garden variety of mankind.

Possibly the anxious reader is wondering how our lady companion met the
trying situation of the total lack of privacy on that Sunday night. But
there was no such problem. For when we had stepped forth into the
darkness at the usual hour on the eighth morning out of Ningsia, the
“tai-tai’s” cart was still sitting on its tail, thills in air, with a
care-free something about it that should have made our own battered and
road-weary wains envious. To our inquiry came the response, with more
than a hint at our having been so unjust, that our pace was too swift
for the lady, that rather than continue to get up every day long before
daylight and ride often until after dark, with never a chance of getting
out of her cart except at the noonday halt, she preferred to run the
risk of being robbed or ill treated, even killed, by bandits, for she
could endure it no longer. We refrained from making the obvious reply
that, as far as our moderately tenacious memories informed us, we had
never even suggested that she try to keep a foreigner’s pace; and thus
we had parted, without an embrace, or even a kind word. Indeed, she had
never spoken to us during all that intimate week, though I had caught
her once or twice exchanging smiles with the major.

[Illustration:

  A typical farm hamlet of the Yellow River valley in the far west where
    some of the
  farm-yards are surrounded by mud walls so mighty that they look like
    great armories
]

[Illustration:

  The usual kitchen and heating-plant of a Chinese inn, and the kind on
    which our cook competed with hungry coolies in preparing our dinners
]

[Illustration:

  The midwinter third-class coach in which I returned to Peking
]

[Illustration:

  No wonder I was mistaken for a Bolshevik and caused family tears when
    I turned up in Peking from the west
]

Hers was not the only complaint at our speed. The cook, who always sat
huddled, nose in collar and hands in sleeves, on the front platform of
one of the carts, a striking contrast to the cheery, well washed, and
often-shaved driver beside him, confided to Chang one morning that he
would not make this trip again, not even if we offered him a hundred
dollars a month. As that is from five to twenty times the pay of a
Chinese cook, even though he was speaking only in “Mex,” it may be
surmised how bitterly he must have suffered during the journey. It never
seemed to occur to him, however, that he would suffer less from cold, at
least, if he would now and then get off and walk, like all the rest of
us. Chang, on the other hand, prided himself on being a “coolie” able to
endure anything, as well as having no “face” to lose, and though he
visibly showed wear from his constant two months’ service under all
conditions, he very seldom failed to produce not only whatever we asked
for but a smiling countenance and a cheerful disposition in addition. It
is considered bad form in China to show any human interest in one’s
servants; in fact, it is usually unwise, as in much of the Orient, and
likely to result in deterioration both of deportment and service. With
Chang it was fairly safe, however, and I frequently indulged myself to
the extent of inquiring whether he and the cook had a comfortable place
to sleep. His unvarying reply was the smiling assertion, “Oh, I can
sleep anywhere, master”; and the only night on the journey that I
actually saw his quarters was this one in the crowded coolie inn. This
he spent on a corner of the _k’ang_ opposite our improvised chamber,
where he could keep one eye on our belongings and the other on any of
our fellow-guests overcome by curiosity to see how these wealthy and
exclusive persons from some other world slept on the folding platforms
they carried with them—as if the _k’ang_ itself were not good enough for
any one.


We covered a hundred and twenty _li_ on Monday, across a stony
half-desert, never far from the base of the crumpled range that stuck
persistently beside us on the left. White Mongol lamaseries clustered
here and there well off the road in less accessible places, such as
half-way up the face of the mountain wall. Now and again a Mongol high
lama and his followers, all in brilliant yellow or a slightly dulled
red, rode by with the motionless motion of good horsemen, on sturdy,
sweating ponies. Ox-cart-wheels were again small and were usually solid
disks of wood, and numbers of them were leisurely bringing in from the
rail-head boxes and bales, marked with such names as Hamburg and
Shanghai. Once we passed one of the crudest of these conveyances, drawn
by two small, gaunt red oxen and driven by a man and a boy, with no
other cargo than a dead man on his way to his ancestral home for burial.
Over the massive coffin, which left room for nothing else beside it, was
thrown a big brown bag or two of fodder, and beside this stood the
inevitable rooster, in a willow-withe cage. It was not the pure white
cock required by Chinese custom, however, but one almost as red as the
big brilliant paper label, daubed with black characters, on the front of
the coffin. Probably this was the best color available, for we could not
recall having seen white fowls for many days, and no doubt the gods in
charge of the souls thus kept united with every Chinese corpse take the
difficulties of such a situation duly into consideration. Besides, there
were evidences that the journey before the dead man was a long one;
perhaps his ancestral home was away down in Shantung, in which case, at
this rate of travel, the cock might be bleached to an approximate white
by the time the expedition reached its destination.

We finished the last seventy-five _li_ on the run, and reached Paotou in
time for a late lunch. Towns grew more and more frequent as we neared
the city; the mountains closed in and began to push the Hoang Ho
southward; a constant stream of traffic, of camels, cattle, donkeys,
mules, horsemen, and pedestrians, grew up and increased in volume; our
_mafu_ climbed the steps of a little shrine in the wide dusty hollow
that passed for a road to offer his thanks for his safe arrival—or for
aid in avoiding work and gathering “squeeze” along the way; and at last
the first suggestion of a city since Ningsia, twelve days behind, grew
up out of the dust-haze ahead. Across the utterly treeless plain a poor
makeshift wall climbed away up a barren hill colored with great patches
of dyed cotton cloth drying in the sun. Some of this, which here and
there brightened the town itself, was lama cloth, of saffron or maroon,
contrasting with the blue so universally favored by the Chinese coolie.
Perfect weather continued, but dust was thick as a London fog when we
passed through the simple gate that separated an extensive suburb from
the city proper, a gate on which hung the dried head of a bandit and
inside which soldiers politely demanded some proof of our identity, such
as a visiting-card, perhaps in order to be sure that we were real
foreigners and not mere Russians, whom they might bully to their hearts’
content. For the last week of our journey there had been much talk of
bandits. Earlier in the autumn many trips out from Paotou had been
abandoned for fear of them; two or three times nervous innkeepers
announced that _tu-fei_ had been in their very courtyards a night or two
ahead of us; several rumors that they were operating in the immediate
vicinity reached our ears as we made our way placidly homeward; but that
dried head on the gate was the only visible proof we ever had of their
existence.

Paotouchen proved to be mainly a new town, built up by a constantly
increasing population as the advance of the Suiyuan railway improves its
importance as a trading-center. It is hilly enough so that we could see
only portions of it at a time, and even those had nothing particularly
new to offer. Moslems were here and there in evidence; Mongols rode
silently through the soft earth streets; furs and sheepskins were a bit
more numerous than the other wares, comprising everything sold in
northern China, with which the principal thoroughfare was lined. Big
shops, women with the tiniest of feet, extensive courtyards, some gaudy
architecture, singsong-girls and the noisy hotel parties that go with
them, and all the other attributes of a Chinese city, as distinguished
from a village, even though the village be walled and populous, were to
be seen in Paotouchen.

But the automobile that used to carry passengers from there to the
rail-head was not, so that we had to make a new arrangement with our
cartmen to finish the journey. We were off again quite as usual,
therefore, at five in the morning for a twenty-third day of travel;
though, including stops, we had been less than twenty-one full days on
the road from Lanchow, which is seldom bettered. The eastern city gate,
unimposing as the opposite one by which we had entered, and not even
similarly decorated, opened without great delay at sight of the major’s
card, and we struck away across another great plain, fertile, no doubt,
but dismally bare except for the few clumps of leafless trees about the
mud farm-houses. It was inevitable that a fantastic range should appear
close on the left as the darkness faded, and follow us all the rest of
the day. A few miles out of Paotou, before daylight, in fact, we found
ourselves riding parallel to a railway embankment. This was some ten
feet high, but quite new and made only of the soft local soil without a
suggestion of stone in it, and struck in company with a lone
telegraph-wire due eastward across the flat country, quite unaccustomed
to such directness. It was easy to imagine what would happen to the
embankment when the rains came, to say nothing of the temporary track
down on the floor of the plain, which we came upon only seven or eight
miles out, with a work-train already using it. For there was the usual
refrain of anything or any one connected with the Chinese Government:
money was not available to build bridges across the gaps in the
embankment and finish the line properly, and it was only in this
imperfect form that the Suiyuan railway reached Paotou barely a month
behind us.

The first station was still sixty _li_ east of it, however, when we
returned to civilization, by a bad road full of stones, now between mud
field-walls that tried in vain to confine it, now zigzagging across the
bare fields. We passed through one large dilapidated town, high above
which a striking peak stood out from the range, with a lama temple that
looked like some elaborate tourist-resort part-way up it. Then the road
became more and more crowded with travel, with sometimes ten or a dozen
“Peking carts” in a row taking passengers to the train; but it still
skated occasionally across a patch of ice before we came at last, soon
after noon, to a lone station congested with travelers, goods, and
halted caravans. Acres covered with huge chunks of coal were the most
conspicuous of the exports awaiting transportation at that season, but
it was easy to see how badly a railway out of Paotou was needed.

There was, of course, a free-for-all mêlée about the ticket-window, with
no attempt by the several men strutting around in new police uniforms to
bring a suggestion of order; but we were duly installed in the daily
freight and third-class train when it rambled away an hour or so after
our arrival. All the expedition was still with us except the two carts
and their drivers. For the least reward we could give the
pleasant-mannered Kansu ponies that had carried us, except when we
walked beside them, 770 miles in three weeks, was a journey to Peking,
even though we found when it was too late that their transportation
would be higher than the fare charged a mere human passenger in the
highest class available, and their accommodations an open car in which
boulders of coal might at any moment come down and do them serious
injury. Taking the horses meant, of course, that we had to be
accessories before the fact in inflicting upon Chihli Province our
putative _mafu_; and naturally the cook and Chang must be returned to
the place where we had picked them up.

We had covered, we found, when a train seat gave a chance for figuring,
4400 _li_ between the two railways, in other words 1320 miles, all in
the saddle except the scant hundred by mule-litter. The hardy Chinese
passengers on all sides of us were so warmly dressed in their
cotton-padded and sheepskin garments that they kept the windows wide
open, even though the car was innocent of so much as the makings of a
fire. Our feet in particular suffered, as those of foreigners usually do
in North China in winter, and called our attention more closely to the
contrivances which the Chinese use to keep theirs warm. Leather there
was none, except in a rare pair of Mongol boots, large enough for a
dozen woolen socks inside. Felt, often in four thicknesses, sometimes in
six, was the material of most shoes; one old man at a cold wayside
station had on a pair of Greek tragedy buskins that looked like two hams
cut open to admit the feet.

That evening we reached Kweihwa, otherwise known as Suiyuan, just in
time to transfer to the newly scheduled express to Peking. The major
considered it suitable to the dignity of his calling to travel second
class—there being no first on this line—and therefore had the pleasure
of sitting up all night between two hard wooden bench-backs. Having
myself no “face” to lose, I found the third-class coaches big and
box-car-like, with plenty of room between the narrow benches along the
walls to spread my cot and make my bed as usual. The car was full of men
stretched out on the floor, the benches, or their saddlebag beds, but
the small iron stove in the center of it did little to change it from a
foreign to a Chinese bedroom—for night is the one part of the
twenty-four hours when artificial heat is in great demand in wintertime
China.

In the cold morning hours I found Mongols, Chinese who had turned
Mongols and lamas, women of that race ugly with dirt and jewelry,
surly-looking Mohammedans with long red-tinged chin-whiskers and
features that seemed almost of exaggerated Jewish type, and every
variety of the ordinary Chinese of both sexes, all among my
traveling-companions or those who got on or off during the day.
Sometimes the distinction was not certain, for in their many raids upon
the ancient empire the Mongols carried off so many Chinese women that
the northern Chinese and the Mongols often look much alike. We were
struck with the fact that there was much less pleasing simplicity here
than among the timid country people far from such modern things as
railroads. The Great Wall, now quite imposing, stretched for hour after
hour along the base of the mountain range still on our left; but the
Hoang Ho was gone, having turned abruptly southward not far from where
we had taken the train, to keep that course to Tungkwan, hundreds of
miles away, where we had entered the province of Shensi. Kalgan, already
familiar, appeared in the early afternoon, then in due season Nankou
Pass, with the best known and most striking section of China’s great
artificial barrier, and soon after dark of the shortest, yet in some
ways the longest, day of the year our respective families might have
been dimly seen striving to identify us beneath the long failure to
shave which our hasty home-coming had imposed upon us, as the express
discharged its multitude at Hsi-chi-men on the far northwestern corner
of Peking.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 2. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
      printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.





End of Project Gutenberg's Wandering in Northern China, by Harry A. Franck