IN THE PROVINCE OF KWANGTUNG
Kwangtung, the province in which Canton is located, is as big as some of
our largest states, and rich and important. From Sze Yap, the Four
Districts, on the western side of the Canton delta, come nearly all the
Chinese laundrymen and restaurant-keepers and other Chinese who live in
the United States. In fact a large proportion of the Chinese in all
other parts of the world are from Sze Yap. If you ask them they may say
they are from Canton. But that is either because they know by experience
that you have never heard of Sze Yap and that you may know of Canton, or
because they mean by that name the province of Kwangtung.
On the junk that carried me from the Bund in Canton to Kongmoon,
principal port of the Four Districts, my cabin was much like a piano-box
turned on its side, and the queerly shaped boat was piled with Chinese
cargo until it looked like a haystack floating down the river. First we
went upstream a little way, towed by a launch that showered sparks and
cinders on us, and steered by half a dozen men who walked back and forth
along a cleated board at the stern, pushing an enormous oar that stuck
out behind. When we wished to warn another boat, a man beat with a
hammer on a hanging piece of iron. Roosters among the cargo did their
part in helping to keep us awake nearly all night.
[Illustration:
The queer cargo boat in which I went from Canton (seen in the
background) to Kongmoon in the Four Districts.
]
A Visit to Sze Yap
There is a railroad more than a hundred miles long from Kongmoon on into
Sze Yap. It is an interesting railroad because it was built by a Chinese
who came to the United States when he was seventeen and later was a
foreman during the construction of one of our great transcontinental
railways. He had worked in California as a laundryman and a
fruit-picker, but finally grew rich. He still owns a big store in
Seattle. He decided to spend his money for the good of his home
district, so he came back and built this railroad. He was more than
eighty years old when I spent a night with him at his railroad
headquarters at Sunning, but he was still president and general manager
and superintendent as well as owner of the line.
[Illustration:
Making brown paper of rice straw. The chopped straw is soaked in water
and pressed out into sheets. The wet sheets are pulled off one at a
time and put on the mud walls to dry.
]
Almost every day I met Chinese men in Sze Yap who had been in the United
States and spoke more or less English. That was lucky, for the people of
the Four Districts do not speak real Chinese. This is the reason that
the Chinese we have in America cannot talk to those from other parts of
China. One evening I spent with a Mr. Lee who, with his brothers, owns a
Chinese restaurant in Cleveland. He took me to a restaurant in Kung-yik
where I had a real American meal. Another man I met was dressed like an
American high school student, and spoke English so perfectly that I did
not know he was Chinese until I had looked closely at his face. As a
matter of fact, he could not speak Chinese, for he had been born and
educated in Oregon. His name was Fred Hang. He had come home to be
married, so that his family line would not die out, and soon after the
wedding was over he was going back to the university of his native
state. He acted as if he were very homesick for America, and he must
have found it stupid not to be able to talk to his Chinese relatives.
[Illustration:
Palm-leaf fans are made of the young leaves of a low palm, which are
fastened to sticks so as to be kept open and are laid out to dry.
The ground here is covered with drying fans.
]
One of the curious facts about Sze Yap is that the millions of Chinese
palm-leaf fans come from one little section of it, around the old town
of Sunwei. The very short palm-trees or bushes from which these fans are
made do not seem to grow well in any other place. When they are large
enough, the leaves are cut and piled up in stacks. Then they are spread
open with a stick and laid out to dry. After that, old women cut the
ends off and sew a cloth border around them. These women earn about ten
cents a day, and the fans are so cheap in China that almost every coolie
in the south carries one. The tops of the leaves are made into
raincoats.
Dangerous Pirates
There are a great many pirates in the lower Canton delta, as there have
been for hundreds of years. They capture people and hold them for
ransom, tying them to stakes and leaving them to die if someone does not
pay to have them freed. They have better boats and better weapons than
the government itself, and now and then they capture and loot foreign
steamers. The English captains of two boats I traveled on were killed
soon afterward by pirates, and one night a band of them stole one of the
big steam launches that ferry people across Hong Kong Harbor, carrying
it off, passengers and all. Yet two American missionaries who are
working among the lepers on an island in the delta can go anywhere among
the pirates and are treated like old friends. The pirates watch for
Chinese returning from America and other foreign countries and often rob
them of all they have earned. I met one old man who had only an old
silver watch left when he got back to the town he had emigrated from
when he was a boy.
From the Yang-tze to Canton
Once I went overland from the Yang-tze to Canton. The northern part of
the province was very mountainous, and the mountains were dotted with
the whitewashed stone-heaps that are the graves of that region. Cement
graves of horseshoe shape and of all sizes, some of them as big as a
house, are common in other parts of Kwangtung and in Fukien. The ranges
of high hills about Sunwei are dotted with graves as far as one can see,
and Paak Wan Shan, or White Cloud Mountain, near Canton is covered with
thousands of them.
Part of that trip from the Yang-tze was down the North River of Canton,
and the last 140 miles of it was on a railroad built by Americans. This
was intended to run all the way from Canton to Hankow, where one can
take a train for Peking. Some day, if the Chinese ever stop fighting
among themselves, that important line will be finished, and then Peking
and Canton will perhaps become better friends. The trains on that
railroad and on the one in Sze Yap were crowded with soldiers, most of
whom had no tickets. Two other railroads enter Canton, but I found that
the one from Hong Kong had been broken by the armies of rival Chinese
generals who used this region as a battle-field.
China’s Largest Island
From Canton I went to Hainan (“South of the Sea”), China’s largest
island. It also belongs to Kwangtung Province, and some day it will
probably be joined to the peninsula stretching toward it from the
mainland, for the channel becomes more shallow every year, and ship
captains always dread the passage through the Straits of Hainan. We saw
the wrecks of several steamers on our way to Hoihow, the principal port
of Hainan. There is no real harbor, and passengers have to climb down
rope ladders into sailboats that are often dancing wildly in the waves.
Sometimes, when the tide is out, they have to wade the last half mile to
shore.
[Illustration:
“Field women” and girls lifting water into the rice fields by means of
sluiceways with a chain of paddles such as are used in many parts of
southern China.
]
Kiungchow, the chief city, and much of the northern part of Hainan, are
not very different from the rest of China. But in the interior there are
great valleys of palm-trees, from which copra, or coconut-meat, is
exported. The climate and landscape remind the traveler that he is not
very far from the Philippines.
A tribe called the Loi lives in the mountainous center of the island,
especially about the beautiful peaks called the Five Finger Mountains.
The woods are thick, and travelers there are always much troubled by
leeches. The Loi have their own headmen and are not governed by Chinese
law. In harvesting rice, they cut off the upper six inches and bundle
it, hanging the bundles head-down over poles and threshing it as they
need rice to eat. Rattan, to gather which is painful work since it grows
among masses of thorns, is sold to Chinese who export it.
Hainan is particularly noted for its pigs. On the way inland I met
thousands of coolies _carrying_ pigs—the pigs seem to prefer this to
being driven, and the Chinese humor them. If the pigs are small, a man
carries one at either end of his shoulder-pole. If they are large, two
men carry one on a pole between them. Every steamer that passes Hoihow
east-bound takes a load of pigs. They are piled up on the deck like
cordwood, sometimes six or eight layers deep, each in the kind of
basket-net in which they are brought from the interior. You may imagine
what such a ship smells like!
The Valuable Bamboo
Bamboo is another important Hainan product. It would take at least a
whole page even to mention all the things the Chinese make out of that
very valuable plant. It is not properly called a tree, though sometimes
it reaches fifty feet in height, and shoots up so fast that one can
almost see it growing. The rivers of Hainan have enormous water-wheels
made of bamboo, so large that you wonder how a people without pulleys or
other modern contrivances can raise them. Dozens of sections of the
hollow bamboo are set at an angle on the outside of the wheel, and as
the wheel turns, these dip up the water, pouring it into troughs that
carry it away into the fields. When the river is too low to run a
water-wheel, the farmer has to walk along the top of his wheel all day
long.
[Illustration:
This little pig really went to market, and he was carried there too.
In China pigs won’t walk to market, and as they are the most
important product of Hainan Island they have to be transported
somehow.
]
Another way of raising water in rice-growing southern China is by a
wooden sluice that has an endless chain of upright boards running
through it. Men, women (since Hainan women do not have bound feet) and
children trot up and down all day on the kind of treadmills that keep
such sluices working. Sometimes the sluices are run by hand, with two
handles like the pedals of a bicycle. The Chinese have invented all
sorts of primitive devices to raise water for their irrigation, but they
never seem to have thought of windmills. The treadmill is useful in
various ways in a country where there is plenty of cheap labor. Some of
the boats on Canton’s river are propelled by a big stern-wheel turned by
many coolies climbing forever up a treadmill inside.
Down the West River
The last time I came back to Canton I traveled the whole length of the
Si-kiang, or West River, through the province of Kwangsi. The little
Chinese steamers were so crowded with passengers that men slept even on
the floor under my cot. Most of them smoked opium, and the sweetish odor
of that destructive drug was in my nostrils during the entire two weeks’
journey. Although it is against the law in China to grow poppies and
transport the opium made from them, nearly every steamer down the
Si-kiang carries tons of it. The rival generals make much money out of
it, and no one dares interfere with them. Some of the boats fly the flag
of the United States, because a rascal who pretends to own them gets
them registered as American ships and no Chinese can interfere with a
boat flying our flag. There are very few of our countrymen, however, who
take such mean advantage, and our consuls are gradually driving out of
the country those who do.
An attempt on the part of China to stop the importation of opium from
India resulted in a war with Great Britain in 1840, and in China’s being
forced to open certain ports to opium or anything else that Western
nations chose to send. However, in 1907 an agreement was made between
Great Britain and China by which the Indian Government was to reduce
gradually the opium exportation to China.
Kwangsi is much poorer than Kwangtung, because so much of its land is
rocky. Along the upper part of the West River stand queerly shaped rock
hills like rows of fantastic skyscrapers. Many have caves in them,
sometimes a hundred feet up, and bandits often use these as their
headquarters. In the Bay of Along, at the western end of Kwangtung
Province, there are thousands of these rocky peaks that seem to float on
the blue sea. I do not know a more beautiful place than this bay
anywhere in the world.
A Chinese who had been cook for the British customs commissioner at
Nanning, capital of Kwangsi Province, opened a foreign restaurant. But
there are few foreigners in Nanning, and those have their own homes,
cooks and all. So the enterprising Chinese did not get much trade until
he began serving the favorite Chinese dish in those parts. It is a
mixture of cat and snake meat, and Chinese who have eaten it say it is
very “sweet” and good. I did not try it.
At Kachek in the island of Hainan I saw a man roasting dogs in a pit he
had dug in the ground. People who were attending a fair and theatrical
entertainment near by sometimes came to him for a feast of dog-meat.
Dried rats may occasionally be seen hanging before shops in southern
China. Yet it would not be fair to say that the Chinese in general eat
cats, rats, dogs, and snakes. In a few parts of the country they do,
especially in times of famine. It is claimed by some Chinese that
wherever any of these animals are used as food, it is because of certain
medicinal qualities that they are supposed to possess. For instance, the
snake meat is said to be a remedy for a kind of leprous ailment; and the
Chinese say that the “rats” are not really rats as Americans know them,
but a sort of field mice which feed on the rice plant.