MUKDEN AND ITS MISSIONS
Mukden stands at an altitude of 160 feet above the sea, in Lat. 41° 51′
N. and Long. 123° 37′ E., in the centre of an immense alluvial plain,
bearing superb crops and liberally sprinkled with farming villages
embowered in wood, a wavy line of low blue hills at a great distance
limiting the horizon. It is 3 miles from the Hun-ho, a tributary of
the Liau, and within its outer wall idles along the silvery Siao-ho
or “small river,” with a long Bund affording a delightful promenade
and an airy position for a number of handsome houses, the residences
of missionaries and mandarins, with stately outer and inner gates,
through which glimpses are obtained of gardens and flowering plants
and pots. This city of 260,000 inhabitants, owing to its connection
with the reigning dynasty, is the second city officially in the empire,
and the Peking “boards” with one exception are nominally duplicated
there. Hence it not only has an army of Chinese and Tartar officials of
all grades, but a large resident population of retired and expectant
mandarins, living in handsome houses and making a great display in the
streets. There is an incessant movement of mule carts, the cabs of
Mukden, with their superb animals and their blue canopies covering both
mule and driver, official mule carts driven at a trot, with four or
more outriders with white hats and red plumes, private carts belonging
to young mandarin swells, who give daily entertainments at a restaurant
on the Bund, mandarins on horseback with runners clearing the way,
carts waiting for “lotus viewers,” tall, “big-footed” women promenading
with their children, their hair arranged in loops on silver frames and
decorated with flowers, hospital patients on stretchers and in chairs,
men selling melons and candies, and beggars who by blowing through a
leaf imitate the cry of nearly every bird. Then in the summer evenings,
when the mercury has fallen to 80°, the servants of rich men bring out
splendid ponies and mules and walk them on the Bund, and there come
the crowds to stare at the foreigners and hang round their gates. The
presence of well-dressed women is a feature rare in the East. Up to the
war people were polite and friendly, but progress was difficult and the
smell of garlic strong. At night the dogs bark, guns are fired, drums
and gongs are beaten, and the clappers of the watchmen rival each other
in making night hideous.
All this life lies between the outer wall and the lofty quadrangular
inner wall, 3 miles in circuit, built of brick, flanked by lofty
towers, and pierced by eight gates protected by lofty brick bastions.
This wall, on which three carriages could drive abreast, protects the
commercial and official part of the city, which is densely crowded,
Mukden, besides being a great grain emporium, being the centre of the
Chinese fur trade, which attracts buyers from all parts of the world.
Fine streets, though full of humps and quagmires, divide the city into
nine wards or quarters, the central quarter being Imperial property,
and containing a fine palace with much decorative yellow tiling, the
examination hall, and a number of palaces and _yamens_, all solidly
built. To my thinking no Chinese city is so agreeable as Mukden. The
Tartar capital is free from that atmosphere of decay which broods over
Peking. Its wide streets are comparatively clean. It is regularly
built, and its fine residences are well kept up. It is a busy place,
and does a large and lucrative trade, specially in grain, beans, and
furs. It has various industries, which include the tanning and dressing
of furs and the weaving of silk stuffs; its bankers and merchants are
rich, and it has great commercial as well as some political importance.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF GOD OF LITERATURE, MUKDEN.]
As the old capital of Manchuria and the abode of the Prince ancestors
of the family which was placed on the Chinese throne in 1644, it has
special privileges, among which are “Ministres de Parade,” nominally
holding the same rank as the actual ministers in Peking. Near it are
the superb tombs of the ancestors of the present Emperor, on which
grand avenues of trees converge, bordered by colossal stone animals
after the fashion of those at the Ming tombs near Peking. Formerly
the Manchu Emperors made pilgrimages to these tombs and the sacred
city of their dynasty, but since the second decade of this century the
Chinese Emperor’s portrait only has been sent at intervals in solemn
procession, the Peking road being in the meantime closed to ordinary
traffic.
The Governor-General of Manchuria resides in Mukden, as well as the
military Governor, who is assisted by a civil administrator and by the
Presidents of five Boards. The great offices of State are filled in
duplicate by Chinese and Manchus, and criminals of the two races are
tried in separate courts.
The favorable reception given to Christianity is one of the features
of Mukden. The fine pagoda of the Christian Church is _en évidence_
everywhere. The Scotch U.P. missionaries, who have been established
there for twenty-five years, are on friendly terms with the people, and
specially with many of the mandarins and high officials, who show them
tokens of regard publicly and privately on all occasions. Dr. Christie,
the medical missionary, is the trusted friend as well as the medical
adviser of many of the leading officials and their wives, who, with
every circumstance of ceremonial pomp, have presented complimentary
tablets to the hospital, and altogether the relations between the
Chinese and the missionaries are unique. I attribute these special
relations with the upper classes partly to the fact that Dr. Ross, the
senior missionary, and Dr. Christie, and those who have joined them
subsequently, have studied Chinese custom and etiquette very closely,
and are careful to conform to both as far as is possible, while they
are not only keen-sighted for the good that is in the Chinese, but
bring the best out of them.
Thus Christianity, divested of the nonchalant or contemptuous
insularity by which it is often rendered repulsive, has made
considerable progress not only in the capital but in the province,
and until the roads became unsafe there was scarcely a day during my
long visit in which there were not deputations from distant villages
asking for Christian workers, representing numerous bands of rural
worshippers, who, having received some knowledge of Christianity from
converts, colporteurs, or catechists, had renounced many idolatrous
practices, and desired further instruction. Of the “professing
Christians,” Dr. Ross said that it was only a very small percentage
who had heard the Gospel from Europeans! Four thousand were already
baptized, and nearly as many again were “inquirers” with a view to
baptism. It was most curious to see men coming daily from remote
regions asking for some one to go and instruct them in the “Jesus
doctrine,” for “they had learned as much as they could without
a teacher.” In many parts of Manchuria there are now Christian
communities carrying on their own worship and discipline, and it
is noteworthy that very many of the converts are members of those
Secret Societies whose strongest bond of union is the search after
righteousness.
The Mission Hospital is one of the largest and best equipped in the
Far East, and besides doing a great medical and surgical work, is a
medical school in which students pass through a four years’ curriculum.
There also Dr. Christie gives illustrated popular scientific lectures
in the winter, which are attended among others by a number of sons
of mandarins. Donations, both of money and food, are contributed to
this hospital both by officials and merchants; and General Tso, a
most charitable man and beloved by the poor, only the night before
he started for Korea, sent a bag of tickets for ice, so that the
hospital might not suffer for the lack of it during his absence.
Only a few months before he presented it with a handsome tablet and
subscription.[30]
Even in so civilized a city as Mukden, with its schools and literary
examinations, its thousands of literary aspirants to official position,
its streets full of a busy and splendid officialism, its enormous
trade, its banks and _yamens_, its 20,000 Mussulmans, with their many
mosques, and hatred of the pig, and the slow interpenetration of
enlightened Western ideas, Chinese superstitions of the usual order,
well-known by every reader, prevail.
The system of medicine, though it contains the knowledge and use of
some valuable native drugs among the sixty which are exported, is
in many respects extremely barbarous. The doctors have no operative
surgery and cannot even tie an artery! They use cupping, the cautery,
and acupuncture hot or cold, with long coarse uncleanly needles, with
which they pierce the liver, joints, and stomach for pains, sprains,
and rheumatism. They close all abscesses, wounds, and ulcers with a
black impervious plaster. Witch doctors are resorted to in cases of
hysteria or mental derangement. Vaccination is now to some extent
adopted with calf or transferred lymph, the puncture being made in the
nostrils. In order to ascertain whether a sick person is likely to
live, they plunge long needles into the body, and give up the case as
hopeless if blood does not flow. When death is near the friends dress
the patient in the best clothes they can afford and remove him from the
_kang_ (the usual elevated sleeping place) to the floor, or lay him on
ashes. As the spirit departs they cry loudly in the ear. In connection
with death, it may be mentioned that some of the most striking shops
in Mukden, after the coffin shops, are those in which are manufactured
and sold admirable lifesize representations of horses, men, asses,
elephants, carts, and all the articles of luxury of this life, which
are carried in procession and are burned at the grave, sometimes to the
value of $1,000.
Few children under nine years old are buried, and those only among the
richest class. When death occurs, the mother, wailing bitterly, wraps
the body in matting, and throws it away, _i.e._ she places it where the
dogs can get at it. This ghastly burden must not be carried out of a
door or window, but through a new or disused opening, in order that the
evil spirit which causes the disease may not enter. The belief is that
the Heavenly Dog which eats the sun at the time of an eclipse demands
the bodies of children, and that if they are denied to him he will
bring certain calamity on the household.
I have mentioned the _kang_, which is a marked feature of the houses
and inns of Manchuria, which for its latitude has the coldest winter in
the world, the mercury often reaching 17° F. below zero. The _kang_ is
a brick platform covered with matting and heated economically by flues,
and is at once sleeping and sitting place. The stalks of the _Holcus
Sorghum_ are used for fuel. In winter, when the external temperature
may be a little above and much below zero for a month at a time, the
Chinaman, unable to heat his whole room, drops his shoes, mounts his
_kang_, sits crosslegged on the warm mat, covers his padded socks with
his padded robe, and there takes his meals and receives his friends
in comfort. When I was invited to climb the _kang_ I felt myself a
_persona grata_.
The pawnshops of Mukden, with their high outer walls, lofty gateways,
two or three well-kept courts, fine buildings, and tall stone columns
at the outer gate, with the sign of the business upon them, their
scrupulous cleanliness, and their armies of polite, intelligent clerks,
are as respectable as banks with us. They demand for every sum borrowed
movable property to double its amount. If the pledge be not redeemed
within two years, it falls to the pawnbroker. Government fixes the
interest. The proprietor takes the same position as a capitalist owning
a bank in the West, and a _samshu_ distiller takes an equal place in
local esteem.
The prevalence of suicide is a feature of Mukden as of most Chinese
cities. Certain peculiarities of Chinese justice render it a favorite
way of wreaking spite upon an employer or neighbor, who is haunted
besides by the spirit of the self-murderer. Hence servants angry with
their masters, shopmen with their employers, wives with their husbands,
and above all, daughters-in-law with their mothers-in-law, show their
spite by dying on their premises, usually by opium, or eating the tops
of lucifer matches! It is quite a common thing for a person who has
a grudge against another to go and poison himself in his courtyard,
securing revenge first by the mandarin’s inquiry and next by the
haunting terrors of his malevolent spirit. Young girls were daily
poisoning themselves with lucifer matches to escape from the tyranny of
mothers-in-law and leave unpleasantness behind them.
But it is not the seamy side which is uppermost in Mukden.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] General Tso’s cavalry brigade was perhaps the best-disciplined in
the Chinese army, and he was a severe disciplinarian, but he was also
an earnest philanthropist, and though a strict Mussulman, always showed
himself friendly to the Christian religion, specially in its benevolent
aspects. His soup kitchens saved many a family from starvation. He
established and was the chief support of a foundling hospital. During
the terrible inundation of 1888 he distributed food among the famishing
with his own hands. His friendly help could always be relied on by the
missionaries, who joined in the sorrow with which Manchuria mourned for
his premature death at Phyöng-yang in Korea. The benevolence of rich
Chinese ought not to be overlooked. The charities of China are on a
gigantic scale, and many of them are admirably administered by men who
expend much self-sacrificing effort on their administration.