_Stages to the capital_. _Universality of reform in China_. _Political,
moral, social and spiritual contrast of Yün-nan with other parts of the
Empire_. _Inconsistencies of celestial life_. _Author's start for
Burma_. _The caravan_. _To Che-chi_. _Dogs fighting over human bones_.
_Lai-t'eo-p'o: highest point traversed on overland journey_. _Snow and
hail storms at ten thousand feet_. _Desolation and poverty_. _Brutal
husband_. _Horse saves author from destruction_. _The one hundred li to
Kongshan_. _Wild, rugged moorland and mournful mountains_. _Wretchedness
of the people_. _Night travel in Western China_. _Author knocks a man
down_. _Late arrival and its vexations_. _Horrible inn accommodation_.
_End of the Yün-nan Plateau_. _Appreciable rise in temperature_.
_Entertaining a band of inelegant infidels_. _European contention for
superiority, and the Chinese point of view_. _Insoluble conundrums of
"John's" national character_. _The Yün-nan railway_. _Current ideas in
Yün-nan regarding foreigners_. _Discourteous fu-song and his escapades_.
_Fright of ill-clad urchin_. _Scene at Yang-lin_. _Arrival at the
capital_.
No exaggeration is it to say that the eyes of the world are upon China.
It is equally safe to say that, whilst all is open and may be seen, but
little is understood.
In the Far Eastern and European press so much is heard of the awakening
of China that one is apt really to believe that the whole Empire, from
its Dan to Beersheba, is boiling for reform. But it may be that the husk
is taken from the kernel. The husk comprises the treaty ports and some
of the capital cities of the provinces; the kernel is that vast sleepy
interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so
that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing
conditions so much out of his focus should readily be granted.
From Shanghai, up past Hankow, on to Ichang, through the Gorges to
Chung-king, is a trip likely to strike optimism in the breast of the
most skeptical foreigner. But after he has lived for a couple of years
in an interior city as I have done, with its antiquated legislation, its
superstition and idolatry, its infanticide, its girl suicides, its
public corruption and moral degradation, rubbing shoulders continually
at close quarters with the inhabitants, and himself living in the main a
Chinese life, our optimist may alter his opinions, and stand in wonder
at the extraordinary differences in the most ordinary details of life at
the ports on the China coast and the Interior, and of the gross
inconsistencies in the Chinese mind and character. If in addition he has
stayed a few days away from a city in which the foreigners were shut up
inside the city walls because the roaring mob of rebels outside were
asking for their heads, and he has had to abandon part of his overland
trip because of the fear that his own head might have been chopped off
_en route_, he may increase his wonder to doubt. The aspect here in
Yün-nan--politically, morally, socially, spiritually--is that of another
kingdom, another world. Conditions seem, for the most part, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever. And in his new environment, which may
be a replica of twenty centuries ago, the dream he dreamed is now
dispelled. "China," he says, "is _not_ awaking; she barely moves, she is
still under the torpor of the ages." And yet again, in the capital and a
few of the larger cities, under your very eyes there goes on a reform
which seems to be the most sweeping reform Asia has yet known.
Such are the inconsistencies, seemingly unchangeable, irreconcilable in
conception or in fact; a truthful portrayal of them tends to render the
writer a most inconsistent being in the eyes of his reader.
* * * * *
No one was ever sped on his way through China with more goodwill than
was the writer when he left Tong-ch'uan-fu; but the above thoughts were
then in his mind.
Long before January 3rd, 1910, the whole town knew that I was going to
Mien Dien (Burma). Confessedly with a sad heart--for I carried with me
memories of kindnesses such as I had never known before--I led my
nervous pony, Rusty, out through the Dung Men (the East Gate), with
twenty enthusiastic scholars and a few grown-ups forming a turbulent
rear. As I strode onwards the little group of excited younkers watched
me disappear out of sight on my way to the capital by the following
route--the second time of trying:--
Length of Height
stage above sea
1st day--Che-chi 90 li. 7,800 ft.
2nd day--Lai-t'eo-p'o 90 li. 8,500 ft.
3rd day--Kongshan 100 li. 6,700 ft.
4th day--Yang-kai 85 li. 7,200 ft.
5th day--Ch'anff-o'o 95 li 6,000 ft.
6th day--The Capital 70 li 6,400 ft.
My caravan consisted of two coolies: one carried my bedding and a small
basket of luxuries in case of emergency, the other a couple of boxes
with absolute necessities (including the journal of the trip). In
addition, there accompanied me a man who carried my camera, and whose
primary business it was to guard my interests and my money--my general
factotum and confidential agent--and by an inverse operation enrich
himself as he could, and thereby maintain relations of warm mutual
esteem. They received thirty-two tael cents per man per diem, and for
the stopping days on the road one hundred cash. None of them, of course,
could speak a word of English.
The ninety li to Che-chi was mostly along narrow paths by the sides of
river-beds, the intermediate plains having upturned acres waiting for
the spring. At Ta-chiao (7,500 feet), where I stayed for my first
alfresco meal at midday, the man--a tall, gaunt, ugly fellow, pockmarked
and vile of face--told us he was a traveler, and that he had been to
Shanghai. This I knew to be a barefaced lie. He voluntarily explained to
the visitors, gathered to see the barbarian feed, what condensed milk
was for, but he went wide of the mark when he announced that my pony,[Z]
hog-maned and dock-tailed (but Chinese still), was an American, as he
said I was. A young mother near by, suffering from acute eye
inflammation, was lying in a smellful gutter on a felt mat, two pigs on
one side and a naked boy of eight or so on the other, whilst she heaped
upon the head of the innocent babe she was suckling curses most horribly
blood-curdling. Dogs--the universal scavengers of the awakening
interior, to which merest allusion is barred by one's Western sense of
decency--just outside Che-chi, where I stayed the night, had recently
devoured the corpse of a little child. Its clothing was strewn in my
path, together with the piece of fibre matting in which it had been
wrapped, and the dogs were then fighting over the bones.
To Lai-t'eo-p'o was a day that men might call a "killer."
It is a dirty little place with a dirty little street, lying at the foot
of a mountain known throughout Western China as one of the wildest of
Nature's corners, nearly ten thousand feet high, a terrific climb under
best conditions. A clear half-moon, and stars of a silvery twinkle,
looked pityingly upon me as I started at 3 a.m., ignorant of the
dangerously narrow defile leading along cliffs high up from the Yili Ho.
In the dark, cautiously I groped along. Not without a painful emotion of
impending danger, as I watched the stellular reflections dancing in the
rushing river, did I wander on in the wake of a group of pack-ponies,
and took my turn in being assisted over the broken chasms by the
muleteers. Two fellows got down below and practically lifted the tiny
animals over the passes where they could not keep their footing.
Gradually I saw the nightlike shadows flee away, and with the dawn came
signs of heavy weather.
Snow came cold and sudden. As we slowly and toilsomely ascended, the
velocity of the wind fiercely increased; down the mountain-side, at a
hundred miles an hour, came clouds of blinding, flinty dust, making the
blood run from one's lips and cheeks as he plodded on against great
odds. With the biting wind, howling and hissing in the winding ravines
and snow-swept hollows, headway was difficult. Often was I raised from
my feet: helplessly I clung to the earth for safety, and pulled at
withered grass to keep my footing. The ponies, patient little brutes,
with one hundred and fifty pounds strapped to their backs, came near to
giving up the ghost, being swayed hopelessly to and fro in the fury. For
hours we thus toiled up pathways seemingly fitter for goats than men,
where leafless trees were bending destitute of life and helpless towards
the valley, as the keen wind went sighing, moaning, wailing through
their bare boughs and budless twigs.
Such a gale, wilder than the devil's passion, I have not known even on
the North Atlantic in February.
At times during the day progression in the deepening snow seemed quite
impossible, and my two men, worn and weary, bearing the burden of an
excessively fatiguing day, well-nigh threw up the sponge, vowing that
they wished they had not taken on the job.
But the scenery later in the day, though monotonously so, was grand. The
earth was literally the color of deep-red blood, the crimson paths
intertwining the darker landscape bore to one's imagination a vision of
some bloody battle--veritable rivers of human blood. To cheer the
traveler in his desolation, the sun struggled vainly to pierce with its
genial rays through the heavy, angry clouds rolling lazily upwards from
the black valleys, and enveloping the earth in a deep infinity of
severest gloom. The cold was damp. In the small hemmed-in hollows,
whereto our pathway led, the icy dew clung to one's hair and beard. From
little brown cottages, with poor thatched roofs letting in the light,
and with walls and woodwork long since uniformly rotten, men and women
emerged, rubbing their eyes and buttoning up their garments, looking
wistfully for the hidden sun.
At Shao-p'ai (8,100 feet) a brute of a fellow was administering
cruellest chastisement to his disobedient yoke-fellow, who took her
scourging in good part. I passed along as fast as I could to the ascent
over which a road led in and around the mountain with alarming
steepness, a road which at home would never be negotiated on foot or on
horseback, but which here forms part of the main trade route. From the
extreme summit one dropped abruptly into a protecting gorge, where
falling cascades, sparkling like crystal showers in the feeble sunlight
occasionally breaking through, danced playfully over the smooth-worn,
slippery rocks; a stream foamed noisily over the loose stones, and leapt
in rushing rapids where the earth had given way; there was no grass, no
scenery, no life, and in the sudden turnings the hurricane roared with
heavenly anger through the long deep chasms, over the
twelve-inch river-beds at the foot.
At Lai-t'eo-p'o accommodation at night was fairly good. Men laughed
hilariously at me when I raved at some carpenters to desist their clumsy
hammering three feet above my head. Hundreds of dogs yelped unceasingly
at the moon, and with the usual rows of the men in mutual invitation to
"Come and wash your feet," or "Ching fan, ching fan," the draughts, the
creaks and cracks, the unintermitting din, and so much else, one was not
sorry to rise again with the lark and push onwards in the cold.
Down below this horrid town there is a plain; in this plain there is a
hole fifty feet deep, and had my pony, which I was leading, not pulled
me away from falling thereinto, my story would not now be telling.
To Kongshan (6,700 feet), past Yei-chu-t'ang (8,100 feet) and
Hsiao-lang-t'ang (7,275 feet), one hundred li away, was a journey
through country considerably more interesting, especially towards the
end of the day, a peculiar combination of wooded slope and rough,
rock-worn pathways.
Hsiao-lang-t'ang, twenty-five li from the end of the stage, overlooks a
wide expanse of barren, uninviting moorland. Deep, jagged gullies break
the uneven rolling of the mountains; dark, weird caverns of terrible
immensity yawn hungrily from the surface of weariest desolation, ever
widening with each turn. Mist hid the ugliest spots high up among the
peaks, whose white summits, peeping sullenly from out this blue sea of
damp haze, told a wondrous story of winter's withering all life to
death, a spot than which in summer few places on earth would be more
entrancing. But these mountains are breathing out a solitude which is
eternal. Man here has never been. Far away beyond lies the country of
the aborigines; but even the Lolo, wild and rugged as the country,
fearless of man and beast, have never dared to ascend these heights.
They are mournful, cheerless, devoid of a single smile from the common
mother of us all, lacking every feature by which the earth draws man
into a spirit of unity with his God. Horrid, frowning waste and aimless
discontinuity of land, harbinger of loneliness and of evil! People, poor
struggling beings of our kind, here seemed mocked of destiny, and a hot
raging of misery waged within them, for all that the heart might desire
and wish for had to them been denied. If, indeed, the earth be the home
of hope, and man's greatest possession be hope, then would it seem that
these poor creatures were entirely cut off, shut out from life,
wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature
whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert. There were
no exceptions, it was the common lot. Each day and every day did these
men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued destitution, and
temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding
country, pregnant only with aggravation to their own dire wretchedness.
In such spots, unhappily in Yün-nan not few, does the mystery of life
grow ever more mysterious to one whom distress has never harassed. A
great pity seized my heart, but these poor people would probably have
laughed had they known my thoughts.
As I passed they came uninterestedly to look upon me. They watched in
expressive silence; they were silent because of poverty. And I, too,
kept a seal upon my lips as I ate the good things here provided under
the eyes of those to whom hunger had given none but a jealous outlook.
Pitiful enough were it, thought I, merely to watch without allowing
speech to escape further to taunt them. So I ate, and they looked at me.
I came and went, but never a word was uttered by these men and women, or
even by the children, whose most painful feeling seemed that of their
own feebleness. They were indeed feeble units standing in a threatening
infinitude of life, and their thoughts probably dwelt upon my luxury
and wealth as mine could not help dwelling upon their hungry town of
hungry men and famished children. Words cannot paint their poverty--men
void of hope, of life, of purpose, of idea. Happy for them that they had
known no other.
We ascended over a road of unspeakable torture to one's feet. Gazing
down, far away into a seemingly bottomless abyss, we could faintly hear
in the lulling of the wind the rush of a torrent, fed by a hundred
mountain streams, which washed our path and in horrible disfigurement
tore open the surface of the hill-sides.
The long day was drawing wearily to a close. As the sun was sinking
beyond the uneven hills over which I was to climb before the descent to
the town begins, the effect of the green and gold and red and brown
produced a striking picture of sweet poetic beauty. I stood in
contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat
moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, nonchalantly picking out
mouldy monkey-nuts from some coarse sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female.
Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men
and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone
breaking the hollow's gloom. Uncanny is night travel in China.
"Who knows but that ghosts, those fierce-faced denizens of the hills,
may run against thee and bewitch thee," murmured one man to the others.
They stopped, and I stopped with them. And in the darkness, pegging on
alone at the mercy of these coolies, my own thoughts were not
unsynchronistic.
At last, with no slight misgiving, we came down into the city's smoke.
Dogs barked at me, and ran away like the curs they are. Midway down the
stone footway my yamen runner too cautiously crept up to me in the dark,
muttering something, and I floored him with my fist. Afterwards I
learnt that he came to relieve me of the pony I was leading.
Every room in every wretched inn was occupied; opium fumes already
issued from the doorways, and it was now pitch dark, so that I could
scarce see the sallow faces of the hungry, uncouth crowd, to whom with
no little irritation I tried to speak as I peered carefully into the
caravanserai. Evident it certainly was that the duty lying nearest to me
at that particular moment, to myself and all concerned therein, was to
accept what I was offered, and not wear out my temper in grumbling. My
boy, Lao Chang (an I-pien), the brick, expressed to me his regrets, and
something like real sympathy shone out from his eyes in the dimness.
"Puh p'a teh, puh p'a teh" ("Have no fear, have no fear"), said he; and
as I stood the while piling up cruellest torture upon my uncourtly host,
he made off to prepare a downstair room (to lapse into modern
boarding-house phraseology).
First through an outer apartment, dark as darkest night; on past the
caterwauling cook and a few disreputable culinary hangers-on; asked to
look out for a pony, which I could not see, but which I was told might
kick me; then onward to my boy, who stood on a stool and dropped the
grease of a huge red Chinese candle among his plaited hair, as he
wobbled it above his head to light the way. He gripped me tenderly, took
me to his bosom as it were, gave me one push, and I was there. He
tarried not. What right had he to listen to what I in secret would say
of the horrid keeper and his twice horrid shakedown inn? He passed out
swiftly into outer darkness, uttering a groan I rudely interpreted as,
"That or nothing, that or nothing."
It _was_ a room, that is in so far as four sides, a floor and a ceiling
comprise one. Of that I had no doubt. A sort of uncomely offshoot from
the main inn building, built on piles in the earth after the fashion of
the seashore houses of the Malay--but much dirtier and incomparably more
shaky. For many a long year, longer than mine horrid host would care to
recollect, this now unoccupied space had served admirably as the common
cooking-room--the ruined fireplace was still there; later, it had been
the stable--the ruined horse trough was still there. At one extreme
corner only could I stand upright; long sooty cobwebs graced the black
wood beams overhead, hanging as thick as icicles in a mountain valley;
each step I took in fear and trembling (the slightest move threatened to
collapse the whole dilapidation). Four planks, four inches wide at the
widest part and of varying lengths and thicknesses, placed on a pile of
loose firewood at the head and foot, comprised the bedstead on which I
tremulously sat down. Upon this improvised apology for a bed, under my
mosquito curtains (no traveler should be without them in Western China),
I washed my blistered feet on an ancient _Daily Telegraph_, whilst my
cook saw to my evening meal. His bringing in the rice tallied with my
laying the tablecloth in the same place where I had washed my feet--the
one available spot.
As I ate, rats came brazenly and picked up the grains of rice I dropped
in my inefficient handling of chopsticks, and in scaring off these
hardened, hungry vermin I accidentally upset tea over my bed, whilst at
the same moment a clod-hopping coolie came in with an elephant tread,
with the result that my European reading-lamp lost its balance from the
top of a tin of native sugar and started a conflagration, threatening to
make short work of me and my belongings--not to mention that horrid
fellow and his inn.
During the night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden
couch--moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke
the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing
and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting
commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air,
and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to
gaze out to a disconsolate eternity--gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking
from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I
sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the previous
day was due. There were the rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks
and cracks--no quiet about the place from night to morning. Then came
the barking of dogs, the noises of the cocks and kine, of horses and
foals, of pigs and geese--the general wail of the zoological
kingdom--cows bellowing, duck diplomacy, and much else. So that it were
not surprising to learn that this distinguished traveler in these
contemptible regions was sitting on a broken-down bridge, looking
wearily on to the broken-down tower on the summit of a pretty little
knoll outside Kungshan, thinking that it were well a score of such were
added did their design embrace a warning to evade the place.
Having done some twenty li by moonlight, I managed with little
difficulty to reach Yang-kai (6,350 feet) by 3.0 p.m. This road, which
is not the main road to the capital, was purposely chosen; most
travelers go through Yang-lin. The journey is comprised of pleasant
ascents and descents over the latter portion of the great Yün-nan
Plateau, and a very appreciable difference in the temperature was here
noticed. While the people at the north-east of the province, from which
I had come, were shivering in their rags and complaining about the price
of charcoal, the population here basked under Italian skies in a warm
sun. From Lui-shu-ho (7,200 feet) the country was beautifully wooded
with groves of firs and chestnuts.
At the inn to which I was led the phlegmatic proprietor, after wishing
me peace, assumed unostentatiously the becoming attitude of a Customs
official, and scrutinized with vigor the whole of my gear, from an empty
Calvert's tooth-powder tin to my Kodak camera, showering particularly
condescending felicitations upon my English Barnsby saddle and
field-glasses thereto attached.
His excitement rose at once.
He called loudly for his confederates--a band of inelegant infidels--and
bidding them stand one by one at given distances, he gaped at them
through the glasses with the hilarity of a schoolboy and the stupidity
of an owl. He jumped, he shouted, he waved his arms about me, and
handing them back to me with both hands, shouted deafeningly in my ear
that they were quite beyond his ken; and then he sucked his teeth
disgustingly and spat at my feet. His associates were speechless, asses
that they were, and could only stare, in horror or impudence I know not.
Meantime Lao Chang brought tea, and sallied forth immediately to
fraternize among old friends. As I drank my tea, after having invited
them one by one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty
stare, destitute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese
gentry, sucking at tobacco-pipes as long as their own overfed bodies,
forced upon me a sense of my unfitness for the unknown conditions of the
life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in
the sterile waste of their fashionable life. They spoke to me
subsequently, and I bravely threw at them a Chinese phrase or two; but
when the conversation got above my head, I told them, quietly but
determinedly, that I could not understand, my English speech seemed
vaguely to indicate a sudden collapse of the acquaintance, the opening
of a gulf between us, destined to widen to the whole length and breadth
of Yang-kai, swallowing up their erstwhile confidences. One of them
facetiously remarked that the gentleman wished to eat his rice; and as
they cleared out, falling over each other and the high step at the
entrance to the room, I thought that no matter how old they are, Chinese
are but little children. But had I treated them as little children I
should have found that they were old men.
There was in me withal a sense of better rank in the eyes of this
super-excellent few who worshipped, in "heathen" China, the Satan of
Fashion. As a matter of fact, their rank had emerged from such long
centuries ago that it seemed to me to be so identified with them that
they were hardly capable of analysis of people such as myself. As I
looked pityingly upon them and the involved simplicity of their
immutable natures, I realized an unconquerable feeling of inborn rank
and natural elevation in respect to nationality. This is, however,
against my personal general conception of Eastern peoples, but I must
admit I felt it this afternoon. And so perhaps it is with the majority
of Europeans in the Far East, who, because they have no knowledge of the
language or a familiarity with national customs and ideas, remain always
aliens with the Easterner. They cannot sympathize with him in his joys
and sorrows, his likes and dislikes, his prejudice and bias, or
understand anything of his point of view. This is one of the hardest
lessons for the European traveler in China who has little of the
language. Because we do not understand him, we call the Chinese a
heathen--it is easier.
Now, to the Chinese his country is the best in the world, his province
better than any other of the eighteen, and the village in which he lives
the most enviable spot in the province--the center of his universe.
Speak disparagingly about that little circle, critically or
sympathetically, and he is at once up against you. It may develop
narrowness of mind and smallness of soul. We Westerners think we know
that it does; and the fact that he allows his mental horizon to be
bounded by such narrow confines appears to us to render him anything but
a desirable citizen and a full-sized man. But no matter. The Chinese, on
the other hand, regards as barbarians all those men who have never
tasted the bliss of a true home in the Empire which is celestial--part
of this feeling is patriotism and love of country, part is rank conceit.
But Englishmen are saying that England is the most Christian country in
the world for the very same reason!
Rationally speaking, John is the "old brother" of the world, oldest of
any nation by very many centuries. In common with all other travelers
and those who have lived with this man, and who have made his nature a
serious study, apart from racial bias, I am perplexed with conundrums
which cannot be solved. Some of the conundrums are perhaps superficial,
and disappear with a deeper insight into his life; others are wrought
into his being. Yet he has a fixedness of character, reaching in some
directions to absolute crystallization; he possesses the virility of
young manhood and many of the mutually inconsistent traits of late
manhood and early youth. I wonder at his ignorance of merest rudimentary
political economy--but why? This man explored centuries ago the cardinal
theories of some of our present-day Western classics. However, I have to
teach him the form of the earth and the natural causes of eclipses. He
is frightened by ghosts, burns mock money to maintain his ancestors in
the future state, worships a bit of rusty old iron as an infallible
remedy for droughts; I have seen him shoot at clouds from the city walls
to frighten away the rain--and I despise him for it all. As I revise
this copy, a rumor is current in the town in which I am resting to the
effect that foreigners are buying children and using their heads to oil
the wheels of the new Yün-nan railway, and I despise him for believing
it. The Chinese will not fight, and I sneer at him; he abhors me
because I do. I ridicule his manner of dress; he thinks mine grossly
indecent. I consider his flat nose and the plaited hair and shaven skull
as heathenish; but the Chinese, eating away with his to me ridiculous
chopsticks, looks out from his quick, almond-shaped eyes and considers
me still a foreign devil, although he is too cunning to tell me. His
opinions of me are founded upon the narrow grounds of vanity and
egotism; mine, although I do not admit it even to myself, from something
very much akin thereto.[AA]
I have been looked upon in far-away outposts of the Chinese Empire where
foreigners are still unknown, as an example of those human monstrosities
which come from the West, a creature of a very low order of the human
species, with a form and face uncouth, with language a hopeless jargon,
and with manners unbearably rude and obnoxious. Not that _I_ personally
answer accurately to this description, reader, any more than you would,
but because I happen to be among a people who, as far back as Chinese
opinion of foreigners can be traced, have considered themselves of a
morality and intellectuality superior to yours and mine.
I write the foregoing because it sums up what may be termed the current
ideas regarding Europeans, ideas the reverse of complimentary, which are
the more unfortunate on account of the fact that they are held by the
vast majority of a people forming a quarter of the whole human race.
This is true, despite all the reform.
These ideas may be, and I trust they are, erroneous, but I know that I
must keep in mind the extremely important desideratum in dealing with
the Chinese that they look at me--my person, my manners, my customs, my
theories, my things--through Chinese eyes, and although mistaken,
misled, reach their own conclusions from their own point of view. This
is what they have been doing for centuries, but we know that it all now
is being subjected to slow change. The original stock, however, takes on
no change whatever, and several generations must pass before this
transfer of mental vision can be effected, when the Chinese will view
all things and all peoples in their true light.
Next morning my three men were heavy. The lean fellow--I have christened
him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones--moved about painfully
in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints
needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary
amount of reboiled cabbage, however, bucked him up a bit, and holding up
a crooked, bony finger, he indicated intelligently that we had one
hundred li to cover. Whilst engaged in conversation thus, sounds of
early morning revelry reached me from below. My boy, his accustomed
serenity now quite disturbed, held threateningly above the head of the
yamen runner (who had given me a profound kotow the evening previous
prior to taking on his duties) a length of three-inch sugar cane; he
evidently meant to flatten him out. This I learned was because this
shadower of the august presence wished to take Yang-lin (about 60 li
away) instead of going to Ch'ang-p'o (100 li) as I intended. I got him
in, looked him as squarely in the face as it is possible when a Chinese
wants to evade your scrutiny, told him I wished to go to Ch'ang-p'o, and
that I hoped I should have the pleasure of his company thus far. He
replied with a grinning smile, which one could easily have taken for a
smiling grin--
"Oh, yes, foreign mandarin, Ch'ang-p'o--100 li--foreign mandarin,
foreign mandarin."
And I thought the incident closed. Such is the appalling gullibility of
the Englishman in China.
We stopped for tea at a small hamlet ten li out. The place was deserted
save for a small starving boy, whose chief attention was given to
laborious endeavors to make his clothing meet in certain necessary
areas. He evidently had never seen a foreigner. As he directed his
optics towards me he winced visibly. He walked round me several times,
fell over a grimy pail of soap-suds, stopped, gazed in enraptured
enchantment with parted lips and outstretched arms as if he had begun to
suspect what it was before him. To the eye of the beholder, however, he
gazed as yet only on vacancy, but just as I was about to attempt
self-explanation he was gone, tearing away down the hill as fast as his
legs could carry him, the ragged remains of his father's trousers
flapping gently in the breeze. As I rose to leave crackers frightened my
pony, followed, in a few moments by a howling, hooting, unreasonable
rabble from a temple near by. I found it was the result of a village
squabble. I could scarce keep the order of my march as I left the
tea-shop, so roughly was I handled by the irritated and impatient crowd,
and had much ado to refrain from responding wrathfully to the repeated
jeers of impudent, half-grown beggars of both sexes who helped to swell
the riotous cortege. But through it all none of the insults were meant
for me, so Lao Chang told me, and they did not mean to treat me with
discourtesy.
Trees hollowed out and spanned from field to field served as gutters for
irrigation; shepherds clad in white felt blankets sat huddled upon the
ground behind huge boulders, oblivious of time and of the boisterous
wind, while their sheep and goats grubbed away on the scanty grass the
moorland provided; high up we saw forest fires, making the earth black
and desolate; ruins almost everywhere recalled to one's mind the image
of a past prosperity, which now were replaced by traces of misery,
exterior influences which seemed to breed upon the traveler a deep
discouragement. I came across some women mock-weeping for the dead: at
their elbow two girls were washing clothes, and when little children,
catching sight of me, ran to their mothers, the women stopped their
hulla-baloo, had a good stare at me, exchanged a few words of mutual
inquiry, and then resumed their bellowing.
Soon it became quite warm, and walking was pleasant. I was startled by
the _fu-song_,[AB] who invited me to go to a neighboring town for tea. My
men were far behind. I was at his mercy, so I went. Soon I found myself
passing through the city gates of Yang-lin, the very town I was trying
to keep away from. The yamen fellow turned back at me and chuckled
rudely to himself. I insisted that I did not wish to take tea; he
insisted that I should--I must. He led me to an inn in the main street,
arrangements were made to house me, old men and young lads gathered to
welcome me as a lost brother, and the _fu-song_ told me graciously that
he was going to the magistrate. In cruel English, with many wildly
threatening gestures, did I protest, and the people laughed
acquiescingly.
"Puh tong, puh tong, you gaping idiots!" I repeated, and it caused more
glee.
Swinging myself past them all, I dragged my stubborn pony through the
mob to the gate by which I had entered. My men were not to be found. I
did not know the road nor much of the language. I sat down on a granite
pillar to undergo an embarrassing half-hour. Presently my men hailed me,
and approaching, swore with imposing loftiness at the discomfited guide.
My bull-dog coolie dropped his loads, the _fu-song_ somehow lost his
footing, I yelled "Ts'eo" ("Go"), and with a cheer the caravan
proceeded.
The following day we were at the capital.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote Z: I took a pony because I had made up my mind to return into
China after I had reached Burma. In Tong-ch'uan-fu a good pony can be
bought for, say, _£3_--in Burma, the same pony would sell for £10.
--E.J.D.]
[Footnote AA: For further excellent descriptions of the Chinese nature I
refer the reader to Chester Holcombe's _China: Past and
Present_.--E.J.D.]
[Footnote AB: _i.e._ Yamen escort.]