At Tientsin I sweltered in the Astor House, and I put it on record that
I found it hotter in Northern China than I did on the Guinea coast in
West Africa. It was probably, of course, the conditions under which I
lived, for the hotel had been so well arranged for the bitter winter
it was impossible to get a thorough draught of air through any of
the rooms. James Buchanan did not like it either, for in the British
concessions in China dogs come under suspicion of hydrophobia and have
always to be on the leash, wherefore, of course, I had to take the poor
little chap out into the Chinese quarter before he could have a proper
run, and he spent a great deal more time shut up in my bedroom than he
or I liked.
But Tientsin was a place apart, not exactly Chinese as I know
China--certainly not Europe; it remains in my mind as a place where
Chinese art learns to accommodate itself to European needs. All the
nations of the world East and West meet there: in the British quarter
were the Sikhs and other Indian nationalities, and in the French the
streets were kept by Anamites in quaint peaked straw hats. I loved
those streets of Tientsin that made me feel so safe and yet gave me a
delightful feeling of adventure--adventure that cost me nothing; and I
always knew I could go and dine with a friend or come back and exchange
ideas with somebody who spoke my own tongue. But Tientsin wasn't any
good to me as a traveller. It has been written about for the last sixty
years or more. I went on.
One night Buchanan and I, without a servant--we missed the servant we
always had in China--wended our way down to the railway station and
ensconced ourselves in a first-class carriage bound for Mukden. The
train didn't start till some ungodly hour of the night, but as it was in
the station I got permission to take my place early, and with rugs and
cushions made myself comfortable and was sound asleep long before we
started. When I wakened I was well on the way to my destination.
I made friends with a British officer of Marines who, with his sister,
was coming back across Russia. He had been learning Japanese, and I
corrected another wrong impression. The British do sometimes learn a
language other than their own. At Mukden we dined and had a bath. I find
henceforth that all my stopping-places are punctuated by baths, or by
the fact that a bath was not procurable. A night and day in the train
made one desirable at Mukden, and a hotel run by capable Japanese made
it a delight. The Japanese, as far as I could see, run Manchuria; must
be more powerful than ever now Russia is out of it; Kharbin is Russian,
Mukden Japanese. The train from there to Chang Ch'un is Japanese, and
we all travelled in a large open carriage, clean and, considering how
packed it was, fairly airy. There was room for everybody to lie down,
just room, and the efficient Japanese parted me from my treasured James
Buchanan and put him, howling miserably, into a big box--rather a dirty
box; I suppose they don't think much of animals--in another compartment.
I climbed over much luggage and crawled under a good deal more to see
that all was right with him, and the Japanese guards looked upon me as
a mild sort of lunatic and smiled contemptuously. I don't like being
looked upon with contempt by Orientals, so I was a little ruffled when I
came back to my own seat. Then I was amused.
Naturally among such a crowd I made no attempt to undress for the night,
merely contenting myself with taking off my boots. But the man next me,
a Japanese naval officer, with whom I conversed in French, had quite
different views. My French was rather bad and so was his in a different
way, so we did not get on very fast. I fear I left him with the
impression that I was an Austrian, for he never seemed to have heard
of Australia. However, we showed each other our good will. Then he
proceeded to undress. Never have I seen the process more nattily
accomplished. How he slipped out of blue cloth and gold lace into a
kimono I'm sure I don't know, though he did it under my very eyes, and
then, with praiseworthy forethought, he took the links and studs out
of his shirt and put them into a clean one ready for the morrow, stowed
them both away in his little trunk, settled himself down on his couch
and gave himself up to a cigarette and conversation. I smoked too--one
of his cigarettes--and we both went to sleep amicably, and with the
morning we arrived at Chang Ch'un, and poor little Buchanan made the
welkin ring when he saw me and found himself caged in a barred box.
However that was soon settled, and he told me how infinitely preferable
from a dog's point of view are the free and easy trains of Russia and
China to the well-managed ones of Japan.
These towns on the great railway are weird little places, merely
scattered houses and wide roads leading out into the great plain, and
the railway comes out of the distance and goes away into the distance.
And the people who inhabit them seem to be a conglomeration of nations,
perhaps the residuum of all the nations. Here the marine officer and
his sister and I fell into the hands of a strange-looking individual who
might have been a cross between a Russian Pole and a Chinaman, with a
dash of Korean thrown in, and he undertook to take us to a better hotel
than that usually-frequented by visitors to Chang Ch'un. I confess I
wonder what sort of people do visit Chang Ch'un, not the British tourist
as a rule, and if the principal hotel is worse than the ramshackle place
where we had breakfast, it must be bad. Still it was pleasant in the
brilliant warm sunshine, even though it was lucky we had bathed the
night before at Mukden, for the best they could do here was to show us
into the most primitive of bedrooms, the very first effort in the way of
a bedroom, I should think, after people had given up _k'angs_, and there
I met a very small portion of water in a very small basin alongside an
exceedingly frowsy bed and made an effort to wash away the stains of
a night's travel. Now such a beginning to the day would effectually
disgust me; then, fresh from the discomforts of Chinese travel, I found
it all in the day's work.
I found too that I had made a mistake and not brought enough money with
me. Before I had paid for Buchanan's ticket I had parted with every
penny I possessed and could not possibly get any more till I arrived
at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank at Kharbin. I am rather given to a
mistake of that sort; I always feel my money is so much safer in the
bank's charge than in mine.
We went on through fertile Manchuria and I saw the rich fields that
coming out I had passed over at night. This train was Russian, and
presently there came along a soldier, a forerunner of an officer
inspecting passengers and carriages. Promptly his eye fell on Buchanan,
who was taking an intelligent interest in the scenery--he always
insisted on looking out of the window--and I, seeing he, the soldier,
was troubled, tried to tell him my intentions were good and I would pay
at Kharbin; but I don't think I made myself understood, for he looked
wildly round the compartment, seized the little dog, pushed him in
a corner and threw a cushion over him. Both Buchanan and I were so
surprised we kept quite still, and the Russian officer looked in, saw a
solitary woman holding out her ticket and passed on, and not till he
was well out of the way did James Buchanan, who was a jewel, poke up his
pretty little head and make a few remarks upon the enormity of smuggling
little dogs without paying their fares, which was evidently what I was
doing.
We arrived at Kharbin about nine o'clock at night, and as I stepped out
on to a platform, where all the nations of the earth, in dirty clothes,
seemed yelling in chorus, a man came along and spoke to me in English.
The soldier who had aided and abetted in the smuggling of Buchanan was
standing beside me, evidently expecting some little remembrance, and I
was meditating borrowing from the officer of Marines, though, as they
were going on and I was not, I did not much like it. And the voice in
English asked did I want a hotel. I did, of course. The man said he was
the courier of the Grand Hotel, but he had a little place of his own
which was much better and he could make me very comfortable. Then I
explained I could not get any money till the bank opened next day and
he spread out his hands as a Chinaman might have done. “No matter, no
matter,” he would pay, his purse was mine.
Would I go to his house?
Could I do anything else under the circumstances? And I promptly took
him at his word and asked for a rouble--Kharbin is China, but the rouble
was the current coin--and paid off the soldier for his services. I bade
farewell to my friends and in a ramshackle droshky went away through the
streets of Kharbin, and we drove so far I wondered if I had done wisely.
I had, as it turned out.
But I heard afterwards that even in those days anything might have
happened in Kharbin, where the population consists of Japanese and
Chinese and Russians and an evil combination of all three, to say
nothing of a sprinkling of rascals from all the nations of the earth.
“There is not,” said a man who knew it well, “a decent Chinaman in the
whole place.”
In fact to all intents and purposes it is Russian. There were Russian
students all in uniform in the streets, and bearded, belted drivers
drove the droshkies with their extra horse in a trace beside the shafts,
just as they did in Russia. Anyhow it seems to me the sins of Kharbin
would be the vigorous primal sins of Russia, not the decadent sins of
old-world China.
Kharbin when I was there in 1914 had 60,000 inhabitants and 25,000
Russian soldiers guarding the railway in the district. The Russian
police forbade me to take photographs, and you might take your choice:
Chinese _hung hu tzes_ or Russian brigands would rob and slay you on
your very doorstep in the heart of the town. At least they would in
1914, and things are probably worse now. All the signs are in Russian
and, after the Chinese, looked to me at first as if I should be able to
understand them, but closer inspection convinced me that the letters,
though I knew their shape, had been out all night and were coming home
in not quite the condition we would wish them to be. There is a Chinese
town without a wall a little way over the plain--like all other Chinese
towns, a place of dirt and smells--and there is a great river, the
Sungari, a tributary of the Amur, on which I first met the magnificent
river steamers of these parts. Badly I wanted to photograph them, but
the Russian police said “No, no,” I would have to get a permit from
the colonel in command before that could be allowed, and the colonel in
command was away and was not expected back till the middle of next week,
by which time I expected to be in Vladivostok, if not in Kharbarosvk,
for Kharbin was hardly inviting as a place of sojourn for a traveller.
Mr Poland, as he called himself, did his best for me. He gave me a
fairly large room with a bed in it, a chair, a table and a broken-down
wardrobe that would not open. He had the family washing cleared out of
the bath, so that I bathed amidst the fluttering damp garments of his
numerous progeny, but still there was a bath and a bath heater that with
a certain expenditure of wood could be made to produce hot water; and
if it was rather a terrifying machine to be locked up with at close
quarters, still it did aid me to arrive at a certain degree of
cleanliness, and I had been long enough in China not to be carping.
But it is dull eating in your bedroom, and I knew I had not done wisely,
for even if the principal hotel had been uncomfortable--I am not saying
it was, because I never went there--it would have been more amusing to
watch other folks than to be alone.
The day after I arrived I called upon Mr Sly, the British consul, and I
was amused to hear the very dubious sounds that came from his room when
I was announced.
I cleared the air by saying hastily: “I'm not a distressed British
subject and I don't want any money,” though I'm bound to say he looked
kind enough to provide me with the wherewithal had I wanted it. Then he
shook his head and expressed his disapproval of my method of arrival.
“The last man who fell into Kharbin like that,” said he, “I hunted for
a week, and two days later I attended his funeral,” so badly had he been
man-handled. But that man, it seems, had plenty of money; it was wisdom
he lacked. My trouble was the other way, certainly as far as money was
concerned. It would never have been worth anyone's while to harm me for
the sake of my possessions. I had fallen into the hands of a Polish
Jew named Polonetzky, though he called himself Poland to me, feeling, I
suppose, my English tongue was not equal to the more complicated word,
and he dwelt in the Dome Stratkorskaya--remember Kharbin is China--and
I promised if he dealt well by me that I would recommend his
boarding-house to all my friends bound for Kharbin. He did deal well by
me. So frightened was he about me that he would not let me out of his
sight, or if he were not in attendance his wife or his brother was
turned on to look after me.
“I am very good friends,” said he, “with Mr Sly at present. I do not
want anything to happen.”
Mr Sly, we found, knew one of my brothers and he very kindly asked me
to dinner. That introduced me to the élite of the place, and after
dinner--Chinese cooks are still excellent on the borders--we drove in
his private carriage and ended the evening in the public gardens.
The coachmen here are quite gorgeous affairs; no matter what their
nondescript nationality--they are generally Russians, I think, though I
have seen Chinamen, Tartars, driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi--they
wear for full livery grey beaver hats with curly brims like Johnny
Walker or the Corinthians in the days of the Regent. It took my breath
away when I found myself bowling along behind two of these curly brimmed
hats that I thought had passed away in the days of my grandfather.
The gardens at Kharbin are a great institution. There in the summer's
evening the paths were all lined with lamps; there were open-air
restaurants; there were bands and fluttering flags; there were the most
excellent ices and insidious drinks of all descriptions, and there were
crowds of gaily dressed people--Monte Carlo in the heart of Central
Asia! Kharbin in the summer is hot, very hot, and Kharbin in the winter
is bitter cold. It is all ice and snow and has a temperature that ranges
somewhere down to 40° Fahrenheit below zero, and this though the sun
shines brilliantly. It is insidious cold that sneaks on you and takes
you unawares, not like the bleak raw cold of England that makes the very
most of itself. They told me a tale of a girl who had gone skating and
when she came off the ice found that her feet were frozen, though she
was unaware of her danger and had thought them all right. Dogs are often
frozen in the streets and Chinamen too, for the Chinaman has a way of
going to sleep in odd places, and many a one has slept his last sleep in
the winter streets of Kharbin--the wide straggling streets with houses
and gardens and vacant spaces just like the towns of Australia. A
frontier town it is in effect. We have got beyond the teeming population
of China.
And then I prepared to go first east to Vladivostok and then north
to Siberia, and I asked advice of both the British consul and my
self-appointed courier, Mr Poland.
Certainly he took care of me, and the day before I started east he
handed me over to his wife and suggested she should take me to the
market and buy necessaries for my journey. It was only a little over
twenty-four hours so it did not seem to me a matter of much consequence,
but I felt it would be interesting to walk through the market. It was.
This class of market, I find, is very much alike all over the world
because they sell the necessaries of life to the people and it is only
varied by the difference of the local products. Kharbin market was
a series of great sheds, and though most of the stalls were kept by
Chinamen, it differed from a market in a Chinese town in the fact that
huge quantities of butter and cheese and cream were for sale. Your true
Chinaman is shocked at the European taste for milk and butter and cream.
He thinks it loathsome, and many a man is unable to sit at table and
watch people eat these delicacies. Just as, of course, he is shocked at
the taste that would put before a diner a huge joint of beef or mutton.
These things Chinese refinement disguises. I suspect the proletariat
with whom I came in contact in Shansi would gladly eat anything, but
I speak of the refined Chinaman. Here in this market, whether he was
refined or not, he had got over these fancies and there was much butter
and delicious soured cream for sale. My Polish Jewess and I laboured
under the usual difficulty of language, but she made me understand I had
better buy a basket for my provisions, a plate, a knife, a fork--I had
left these things behind in China, not thinking I should want them--a
tumbler and a couple of kettles. No self-respecting person, according to
her, would dream of travelling in Siberia without at least a couple
of kettles. I laid in two of blue enamel ware and I am bound to say I
blessed her forethought many and many a time.
Then we proceeded to buy provisions, and here I lost my way. She engaged
a stray Chinaman, at least I think he was a Chinaman, with a dash of the
gorilla in him, to carry the goods, and I thought she was provisioning
her family against a siege or that perhaps there was only one market
a month in Kharbin. Anyhow I did not feel called upon to interfere. It
didn't seem any concern of mine and she had a large little family. We
bought bread in large quantities, ten cucumbers, two pounds of butter,
two pounds of cream--for these we bought earthenware jars--two dozen
bananas, ten eggs and two pounds of tea. And then I discovered these
were the provisions for my journey to Vladivostok, twenty-seven hours
away! I never quite knew why I bought provisions at all, for the train
stopped at stations where there were restaurants even though there was
no restaurant car attached to it. Mr Sly warned me to travel first class
and I had had no thought of doing aught else, for travelling is very
cheap and very good in Russia, but Mr Poland thought differently.
“I arrange,” said he, “I arrange, and you see if you are not
comfortable.”
I am bound to say I was, very comfortable, for Buchanan and I had a
very nice second-class carriage all to ourselves. At every station a
conductor appeared to know if I wanted boiling water, and we had any
amount of good things to eat, for the ten eggs had been hard boiled
by Mrs “Poland,” and the bread and butter and cream and cucumbers and
bananas were as good as ever I have tasted. I also had two pounds of
loaf sugar, German beet, I think, and some lemons.
And so we went east through the wooded hills of Manchuria. They were
covered with lush grass restfully green, and there were flowers, purple
and white and yellow and red, lifting their starry faces to the cloudy
sky, and a soft damp air blew in through the open window. Such a change
it was after China, with its hard blue skies, brilliant sunshine and
dry, invigorating air. But the Manchus were industrious as the Chinese
themselves, and where there were fields the crops were tended
as carefully as those in China proper, only in between were the
pasture-lands and the flowers that were a delight to me, who had not
seen a flower save those in pots since I came to China.
I spread out my rugs and cushions and, taking off my clothes and getting
into a kimono--also bought in the Kharbin market; a man's kimono as the
women's are too narrow--I slept peacefully, and in the morning I found
we had climbed to the top of the ridge, the watershed, the pleasant
rain was falling softly, all around was the riotous green, and peasants,
Russian and Chinese, came selling sweet red raspberries in little
baskets of green twigs.
And the flowers, the flowers of Siberia! After all I had heard about
them, they were still something more beautiful than I could have hoped
for; and then the rain passed, the life-giving rain, the rain that
smoothed away all harshness and gave such a charm and a softness to the
scenery. And it was vast. China was so crowded I never had a sense of
vastness there; but this was like Australia, great stretches of land
under the sky, green, rich lush green, and away in the distance was a
dim line of blue hills. Then would come a little corrugated-iron-roofed
town sprawled out over the mighty plain, a pathway to it across the
surrounding green, and then the sun came out and the clouds threw great
shadows and there was room to see the outline of their shapes on the
green grass.
There were Chinese still on the stations, but they were becoming more
and more Russianised. They still wore queues, but they had belted
Russian blouses and top-boots, and they mixed on friendly terms with
flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Russians similarly attired. And the evening
shadows gathered again and in the new world we steamed into Vladivostok.
The Russians I came across did not appreciate fresh air. The porter of a
hotel captured me and Buchanan, and when we arrived on a hot July night
I was shown into a bedroom with double windows hermetically sealed and
the cracks stopped up with cotton wool!
I protested vehemently and the hotel porter looked at me in
astonishment. Tear down those carefully stopped-up cracks! Perish the
thought. However, I persuaded him down that cotton wool must come, and
he pulled it down regretfully. I called at the British consulate next
day and asked them to recommend me to the best hotel, but they told me
I was already there and could not better myself, so I gave myself up
to exploring the town in the Far East where now the Czech Slovaks have
established themselves.
It is a beautifully situated town set in the hills alongside a narrow
arm of the sea, rather a grey sea with a grey sky overhead, and the
hills around were covered with the luxuriant green of midsummer,
midsummer in a land where it is winter almost to June. The principal
buildings in Vladivostok are rather fine, but they are all along the
shore, and once you go back you come into the hills where the wood-paved
streets very often are mere flights of steps. It is because of that
sheltered arm of the sea that here is a town at all.
Along the shore are all manner of craft. The British fleet had come on
a visit, and grey and grim the ships lay there on the grey sea, like a
Turner picture, with, for a dash of colour, the Union Jacks. The Russian
fleet was there too, welcoming their guests, and I took a boat manned
by a native of the country, Mongolian evidently, with, of course, an
unknown tongue, but whether he was Gold or Gilyak I know not. He was a
good boatman, for a nasty little sea got up and James Buchanan told me
several times he did not like the new turn our voyaging had taken, and
then, poor little dog, he was violently sick. I know the torments of
sea-sickness are not lightly to be borne, so after sailing round the
fleets I went ashore and studied the shipping from the firm land.
I was glad then that Mr Sly at Kharbin had insisted that I should see
the Russian port. The whole picture was framed in green, soft tender
green, edged with grey mist, and all the old forgotten ships of wood,
the ships that perhaps were sailed by my grandfather in the old East
India Company, seemed to have found a resting-place here. They were
drawn up against the shore or they were going down the bay with all
their sails set, and the sunlight breaking through the clouds touched
the white sails and made them mountains of snow. There was shipbuilding
going on too, naturally--for are there not great stores of timber in the
forests behind?--and there were ships unloading all manner of things.
Ships brought vegetables and fruit; ships brought meat; there were
fishing-boats, hundreds of them close against each other along the
shore, and on all the small ships, at the mast-heads, were little
fluttering white butterflies of flags. What they were there for I do
not know, or what they denoted. Oh, the general who commands the Czech
Slovaks has a splendid base. I wish him all success. And here were the
sealing-ships, the ships that presently would go up to the rookeries to
bring away the pelts.
One of my brothers was once navigating lieutenant on the British ship
that guarded the rookeries “north of 53°,” and I remembered, as Buchanan
and I walked along the shore, the tales he had told me of life in these
parts. His particular ship had acquired two sheep, rather an acquisition
for men who had lived long off the Chinese coast, and had a surfeit of
chickens; so while they were eating one, thinking to save the other a
long sea voyage they landed him on an island, giving him in charge of
the man, an Aleut Indian, my brother called him, who ruled the little
place. Coming back they were reduced to salt and tinned food, but they
cheered themselves with thoughts of the mutton chops that should regale
them when they met again their sheep. Alas for those sailor-men! They
found the Indian, but the sheep was not forthcoming.
His whilom guardian was most polite. He gave them to understand he was
deeply grieved, but unfortunately he had been obliged to slay the sheep
as he was killing the fowls!
The ward-room mess realised all too late that mutton was appreciated in
other places than on board his Majesty's ships.
I thought all the races of the earth met in Kharbin, but I don't know
that this port does not run it very close. There were Japanese, Chinese,
Russians, Koreans in horsehair hats and white garments; there were the
aboriginal natives of the country and there were numberless Germans.
And then, in July, 1914, these people, I think, had no thought of the
World's War.
And here I came across a new way of carrying, for all the porters had
chairs strapped upon their backs and the load, whatever it was, was
placed upon the chair. Of all ways I have seen, that way strikes me as
being the best, for the weight is most evenly distributed. Most of the
porters, I believe, were Koreans, though they did not wear white; nor
did they wear a hat of any description; their long black, hair was
twisted up like a woman's, but they were vigorous and stalwart. We left
weakness behind us in China. Here the people looked as if they were
meat-fed, and though they might be dirty--they generally were--they all
looked as if they had enough.
Always the principal streets were thronged with people. At night the
town all lighted up is like a crescent of sparkling diamonds flung
against the hill-sides, and when I went to the railway station to take
train for Kharbarosvk, thirty hours away, at the junction of the Ussuri
and the Amur, that large and spacious building was a seething mass of
people of apparently all classes and all nationalities, and they were
giving voice to their feelings at the top of their lungs. Everybody, I
should think, had a grievance and was makin the most of it. I had not
my capable Mr Poland to arrange for me, so I went first class--the exact
fare I have forgotten, but it was ridiculously low--and Buchanan and I
had a compartment all to ourselves. Indeed I believe we were the only
first-class passengers. I had my basket and my kettles and I had laid in
store of provisions, and we went away back west for a couple of hours,
and then north into the spacious green country where there was room and
more than room for everybody.