MANCHURIA, THE EASTERN THREE PROVINCES
We approached China, not by a steamer landing at Shanghai or Tientsin or
Canton, as most travelers do, but in the more modern, interesting way,
through Japan and its great new continental dependency, Korea (Chosen).
The Eastern Three Provinces, as the Chinese call what we know as
Manchuria, are situated much like our northeastern states, with Siberia
and Mongolia taking the place of Canada. Yet the moment we crossed the
big railway bridge over the Yalu River, we realized that we were in
China, even though we were not yet in China proper. At the very edge of
the river we began to see women with bound feet, coolies in blouses and
blue cotton trousers drawing rickshaws and pushing wheelbarrows, and in
front of the stores and hotels long upright wooden signs with strange
characters on them.
[Illustration:
Fourth and first pages of our passport, signed by Charles E. Hughes,
Secretary of State.
]
In a way, however, Manchuria is partly Japanese and partly Russian.
After the war of 1904–5 between Japan and Russia the southern part of
the great railroad which the Russians had built there was turned over to
Japan. So the American-style trains that run through Korea not only go
on to Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, but there is a Japanese railway,
also with the kind of trains we have at home, 500 miles long from Dairen
and Port Arthur to Changchun, and many miles of Russian railway north of
that. The Japanese govern the land along their railway and certain parts
of all the large cities on its route. The rest of Manchuria is ruled by
a Chinese who is really independent of Peking and the rest of China.
[Illustration:
Second and third pages of our passport. The visas were stamped in many
different colors.
]
[Illustration:
A coolies’ tea shop in Mukden. The water is heated in these huge
teakettles. The woman in charge has bound feet.
]
Two or three miles beyond the Japanese part of Mukden (near the railway
station) is the old city of Mukden. More exactly this is Fengtien, for
Mukden is the name given it by the Russians. Like almost all the cities
of China, it has a great wall about it made of huge bricks like blocks
of stone and with gateways so built that the roads through them have to
make two sharp turns. All Chinese city gates have this double-elbow
form, because the people used to think (as many of them do still) that
the air is full of invisible evil spirits, which can move only in a
straight line. Such gates also help to protect the city against enemies.
[Illustration:
An interesting study in Manchu costumes and customs. The woman in
front wears the peculiar headdress of her race, but grandmother,
behind, is enjoying an unburdened head and a long pipe. Being Manchu
women, neither has bound feet. The man looks as if he might welcome
a style that demanded shorter skirts.
]
Queer Sights in Fengtien
Inside its walls Fengtien is a real Chinese city. Most of the streets
are rough and many of them are very narrow; that is the way the Chinese
have built their cities for thousands of years. Along the streets we saw
huge brass teakettles as large as nail-kegs. There was a charcoal fire
under each of them, and steam poured forth from the great spouts. The
Chinese are always drinking tea, and the little stands or stores behind
the great kettles are tea shops for the coolies and other poorer people.
Many of the women who tended these kettles wore the queer Manchu
headdress. This is something like a thin board nearly as wide as it is
long, set across the top of the head, with the jet-black hair wound
about it, and adorned with flowers and jewelry. Unlike their Chinese
sisters Manchu women do not have bound feet.
Before other shops hung big wooden signs shaped like the strings of
“cash”—little brass coins with a square hole in the center—which some
Chinese still use as money. Such a sign shows that the shop is that of a
money-changer. There are so many kinds of money in China that places
where one can exchange one sort for another are common in all its
cities.
[Illustration:
You might think that the queer contraption carried by this peddler was
a jumble of big jackstraws. Instead, it consists of bamboo cages,
and in each cage is—not a bird, or a squirrel—but a cricket, a
singing cricket! The Chinese like to have them around and are
willing to pay for the pleasure.
]
Among the peddlers of all manner of things who went up and down the
streets shouting their wares, were men with dozens of little cages made
of strips of bamboo as thin as straws. Inside each cage was a cricket or
two, or a katydid, or a grasshopper of the singing kind. The Chinese buy
these caged insects for their shops or their houses, just as we do
singing-birds. All along the streets we could hear the little creatures
contentedly chirping. I bought one for my little boy, who was then two
years old, thinking that it would be about the right size of bird for
him. But the cricket did not seem to like to belong to foreigners. It
would not sing for us at all. We had not intended to keep it a prisoner
long, for after all, birds and crickets and polar bears probably like
their freedom as well as the rest of us. So after a few hours we took
the cricket to the park and turned it loose. But I am afraid our
kindness did not do it much good; for two Chinese boys at once began
chasing it and probably they soon caught it and sold it back to the
cricket-seller again.
For nearly three hundred and fifty years, the Manchus, big men of the
Mongolian race who originally came from Manchuria, ruled all the Chinese
Empire. They had a throne at Mukden, which travelers still go to see. It
is as empty now as the great palace in which it stands. To-day we might
almost say that there are no Manchus. There are many thousands of people
in China who still call themselves by that name; but while ruling China
the Manchus became so much like the Chinese that it is hard to tell them
from the rest of the population. We shall find that the Chinese almost
always absorb the people who come to live with them, even their
conquerors.
One of the most amusing things in Mukden is its street-car system. The
cars are drawn by mules, and run from the Japanese railway station to
the old city of Fengtien. They are such miserable old cars that only the
poorer Chinese usually ride in them. Other people go by rickshaw or by
automobile or in what foreigners call a Peking cart, a sort of box set
on two wheels, covered by a rounded roof, and with no springs whatever.
Yet those same street cars once ran on Third Avenue in New York! When
electric cars took their place there they were sold to Tokyo, and when
the Japanese capital also adopted electric trolleys those old cars were
sent on to Mukden. The Chinese ruler of the Eastern Three Provinces
hopes soon to have electric street cars also, and then the old cars that
have traveled so far may go still farther, or perhaps be turned into
playhouses for rich Chinese children.
Up and Down Manchuria
As we traveled up and down Manchuria by the Japanese railway, we did not
wonder that China would like to get back these three eastern provinces.
Manchuria is not only a very fertile country, it has few inhabitants
compared to crowded China. Thousands of Chinese coolies come to
Manchuria every summer, to work in the harvest fields and elsewhere.
Some of them go back home each autumn; but quite a few remain, so that
the old home of the Manchus is not only ruled over by a Chinese but a
large proportion of its inhabitants are now Chinese.
[Illustration:
Horse cars such as this one make leisurely trips between the Japanese
railway station in Mukden, Manchuria, and the old walled town. These
cars once saw service on Third Avenue, New York.
]
The most important crop we saw along the way is what the Chinese call
_kaoliang_, very much like the Kaffir-corn or sorghum grown in our own
southern states. Great fields of this, so high that a man on horseback
can hide in it, stretched away over the horizon. Bandits sometimes
conceal themselves in the _kaoliang_-fields, so that the people of
Manchuria and of a part of northern China proper are always glad when
the grain is cut. Most Americans think that all Chinese eat rice. Up in
the north, however, where the winters are as cold as in Canada, there
are millions who almost never taste rice, but live on _kaoliang_, and
millet, and even corn and wheat, which also grow there.
[Illustration:
The grain of the _kaoliang_, one of the most important crops of
northern China and Manchuria, which often grows to a height of
fifteen feet. Incidentally, a field of _kaoliang_ makes a fine
hiding place for bandits.
]
Another very important crop in Manchuria is the soya-bean. The food part
of this is pressed out and made into a kind of curd, which the Chinese
everywhere eat. Some of it is made into a salty sauce into which the
people dip each chopstickful of their food. A Chinese would dislike
going without his soya-sauce as much as we would dislike being deprived
of salt. What is left of the soya-bean after the food value has been
pressed out of it is shipped, in great round blocks that look like
grindstones, to all parts of China, to be used as fertilizer.
[Illustration:
Up in Harbin and the rest of northern Manchuria one often sees things
which remind him of Russia, for many of the people in that region
are Russians. Here is a droshky, such as might be hired for a ride
in Moscow.
]
Northern Manchuria is a kind of Russianized China. Beginning at
Changchun, where travelers change from the American style trains of the
Japanese railway to Russian trains that remind one of Europe, there are
more Russians at the stations and farmhouses along the way than there
are Chinese. Even some of the men in Chinese soldier uniforms are
Russians, big blond men who look so much like us that we are surprised
that they cannot understand us. But it is harder to get along here than
on the Japanese railway line. All Japanese stations have their names on
the signboards in English as well as in Japanese. On the signboards
north of Changchun, however, the names are in Chinese and Russian, but
not in English.
[Illustration:
In Harbin in July it is terribly hot, and flies are very numerous. The
people don’t understand that they ought to “swat” flies and kill
them off, but they use a sort of horse-tail fly scarer such as this
peddler has for sale.
]
Gaudy Russian churches, with queerly shaped steeples, and painted in
bright blue, green, and other strange colors, rise above all the larger
towns. Especially in Harbin, the traveler can almost imagine himself in
Russia. There, for instance, it is bad manners to go into an office
without leaving your hat and overcoat in the anteroom. You are expected,
on entering a store, to shake hands with the proprietor and the clerks,
and to do so again when you leave. We saw many Russian beggars, too, men
who had lost everything and been driven out of their native land when
Russia changed its government. At Manchuli, beyond which lies Bolshevik
Russia, we turned back toward Mukden and Peking.