_Stages to Tali-fu_. _Worst roads yet experienced_. _Stampede among
ponies_. _Hybrid crowd at Anning-cheo_. _Simplicity of life of common
people_. _Does China want the foreigner? Straits Settlements and China
Proper compared_. _China's aspect of her own position_. _Renaissance of
Chinese military power_. _Europeans_ NOT _wanted in the Empire_.
_Emptiness of the lives of the common people_. _Author erects a printing
machine in Inland China_. _National conceit_. _Differences in make-up of
the Hua Miao and the Han Ren_. _The Hua Miao and what they are doing_.
_Emancipation of their women_. _Tribute to Protestant missionaries_.
_Betrothal and marriage in China_. _Miao women lead a life of shame and
misery_. _Crude ideas among Chinese regarding age of foreigners_. _Musty
man and dusty traveller at Lao-ya-kwan_. _Intense cold_. _Salt trade_.
_Parklike scenery, pleasant travel, solitude._
From the figures of heights appearing below, one would imagine that
between the capital and Tali-fu hard climbing is absent. But during each
stage, with the exception of the journey from Sei-tze to Sha-chiao-kai,
there is considerable fatiguing uphill and downhill work, each evening
bringing one to approximately the same level as that from which he
started his morning tramp. I went by the following route:--
Length of Height
stage above sea
1st day--Anning-cheo 70 li 6,300 ft.
2nd day--Lao-ya-kwan 70 li 6,800 ft.
3rd day--Lu-fêng-hsien 75 li 5,500 ft.
4th day--Sei-tze 80 li 6,100 ft.
5th day--Kwang-tung-hsien 60 li 6,300 ft.
6th day--Rest day.
7th day--Ch'u-hsiong-fu 70 li 6,150 ft.
8th day--Luho-kai 60 li 6,000 ft.
9th day--Sha-chiao-kai 65 li 6,400 ft.
10th day--Pu-pêng 90 li 7,200 ft.
11th day--Yün-nan-ï 65 li 6,800 ft.
12th day--Hungay 80 li 6,000 ft.
14th day--Chao-chow 60 li 6,750 ft.
15th day--Tali-fu 60 li 6,700 ft.
A long, winding and physically-exhausting road took me from
Sha-chiao-kai to Yin-wa-kwan, the most elevated pass between Yün-nan-fu
and Tali-fu, and continued over barren mountains, bereft of shelter, and
void of vegetation and people, to Pupêng. A rough climb of an hour and a
half then took me to the top of the next mountain, where roads and ruts
followed a high plateau for about thirty li, and with a precipitous
descent I entered the plain of Yün-nan-ï. Then over and between barren
hills, passing a small lake and plain with the considerable town of
Yün-nan-hsien ten li to the right, I continued in a narrow valley and
over mountains in the same uncultivated condition to Hungay, situated in
a swampy valley. Having crossed this valley, another rough climb brings
the traveler to the top of the next pass, Ting-chi-ling, whence the road
descends, and leads by a well-cultivated valley to Chao-chow. After an
easy thirty li we reached Hsiakwan,[AD] one of the largest commercial
cities in the province, lying at the foot of the most magnificent
mountain range in Yün-nan, and by the side of the most famous lake. A
paved road takes one in to his destination at Tali-fu, where I was
welcomed by Dr. and Mrs. Clark, of the China Inland Mission, and
hospitably entertained for a couple of days.
The roads in general from Yün-nan-fu to Tali-fu were worse than any I
have met from Chung-king onwards, partly owing to the mountainous
condition of the country, and partly to neglect of maintenance.
Where the road is paved, it is in most places worse than if it had not
been paved at all, as neither skill nor common sense seems to have been
exercised in the work. It is probably safe to say that there are no
ancient roads in Yün-nan, in the sense of the constructed highways which
have lasted through the centuries, for the civilization of the early
Yün-nanese was not equal to such works. As a matter of fact, the
condition of the roads is all but intolerable. Many were never made, and
are seldom mended--one may say that with very few exceptions they are
never repaired, except when utterly impassable, and then in the most
make-shift manner.
My highly-strung Rusty received a shock to his nervous system as I led
him leisurely from the incline leading into Anning-cheo (6,300 feet),
through the arched gateway in a pagoda-like entrance, which when new
would have been a credit to any city. The stones of the main street were
so slippery that I could hardly keep on my legs. Frightened by one of
their number dragging its empty wooden carrying frame along the ground
behind it, a drove of unruly-pack-ponies lashed and bucked and tossed
themselves out of order, and an instant afterwards came helter-skelter
towards my ten-inch pathway by the side of the road. All of my men
caught the panic, and in their mad rush several were knocked down and
trampled upon by the torrent of frightened creatures. I thought I was
being charged by cavalry, but beyond a good deal of bruising I escaped
unhurt. Closer and closer came the hubbub and the din of the town--the
market was not yet over. As I approached the big street, throngs of
blue-cottoned yokels, quite out of hand, created a nerve-racking uproar,
as they thriftily drove their bargains. I shrugged my shoulders, gazed
long and earnestly at the motley mob, and putting on a bold front,
pushed through in a careless manner. Ponies with salt came in from the
other end of the town, and in their waddling the little brutes gave me
more knocks.
It was an awful crowd--Chinese, Minchia, Lolo, and other specimens of
hybridism unknown to me. Yet I suppose the majority of them may be
called happy. Certainly the simplicity of the life of the common people,
their freedom from fastidious tastes, which are only a fetter in our own
Western social life, their absolute independence of furniture in their
homes, their few wants and perhaps fewer necessities, when contrasted
with the demands of the Englishman, is to them a state of high
civilization. Here were farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers, and retired
people living a simple, unsophisticated life. All the strength of the
world and all its beauties, all true joy, everything that consoles, that
feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark paths, everything
that enables us to discern across our poor lives a splendid goal and a
boundless future, comes to us from true simplicity. I do not say that we
get all this from the Chinese, but in many ways they can teach us how to
live in the _spirit of simplicity_. They were living from hand to mouth,
with seemingly no anxieties at all--and yet, too, they were living
without God, and with very little hope.
And here the foreigner re-appeared to disturb them. Even in Anning-cheo,
only a day from the capital, I was regarded as a being of another
species, and was treated with little respect. I was not wanted.
No international question has become more hackneyed than "Does China
want the foreigner?" Columns of utter nonsense have from time to time
been printed in the English press, purporting to have come from men
supposed to know, to the effect that this Empire is crying out, waiting
with open arms to welcome the European and the American with all his
advanced methods of Christendom and civilization. It has by general
assent come to be understood that China _does_ want the foreigner. But
those who know the Chinese, and who have lived with them, and know their
inherent insincerity in all that they do, still wonder on, and still
ask, "Does she?"
To the European in Hong-Kong, or any of the China ports, having
trustworthy Chinese on his commercial staff--without whom few
businesses in the Far East can make progress--my argument may seem to
have no _raison d'etre_. He will be inclined to blurt out vehemently the
absurdity of the idea that the Chinese do not want the foreigner. First,
they cannot do without him if China is to come into line as a great
nation among Eastern and Western powers. And then, again, could anyone
doubt the sincerity of the desire on the part of the Celestial for
closer and downright friendly intercourse if he has had nothing more
than mere superficial dealings with them?
Thus thought the writer at one time in his life. He has had in a large
commercial firm some of the best Chinese assistants living, in China or
out of it, and has nothing but praise for their assiduous perseverance
and remarkable business acumen and integrity.
As a business man, I admire them far and away above any other race of
people in the East and Far East. Is there any business man in the
Straits Settlements who has not the same opinion of the Straits-born
Chinese? But as one who has traveled in China, living among the Chinese
and with them, seeing them under all natural conditions, at home in
their own country, I say unhesitatingly that at the present time only an
infinitesimal percentage of the population of the vast Interior
entertain genuine respect for the white man, and, in centers where
Western influence has done so much to break down the old-time hatred
towards us, the real, unveneered attitude of the ordinary Chinese is one
not calculated to foster between the Occident and the Orient the
brotherhood of man. Difficult is it for the foreigner in civilized parts
of China--and impossible for the great preponderance of the European
peoples at home--to grasp the fact that in huge tracts of Interior China
the populace have never seen a foreigner, save for the ubiquitous
missionary, who takes on more often than not the dress of the native.
Although the Chinese Government recognizes the dangerous situation of
the nation _vis-à-vis_ with nations of Europe, and has ratified one
treaty after another with us, the nation itself does not, so far as the
traveler can see, appreciate the fact that she cannot possibly resist
the white man, and hold herself in seclusion as formerly from the
Western world. China is discovering--has discovered officially, although
that does not necessarily mean nationally--as Japan did so admirably
when her progress was most marked, that steam and machinery have made
the world too small for any part thereof to separate itself entirely
from the broadening current of the world's life.
Whilst not for a moment failing to admire the aggressive character of
Occidentals, and the resultant necessity of thwarting them--we see[1]
this especially in official circles in Yün-nan--Chinese leaders of
thought and activity are recognizing that in international relations the
final appeal can be only to a superior power, and that power, to be
superior, must be thorough, and thorough throughout. So different to
what has held good in China for countless ages. That is why China is
making sure of her army, and why she will have ready in 1912--ten years
before the period originally intended--no less than thirty-six
divisions, each division formed of ten thousand units.[A] China is now
endeavoring to walk the ground which led Japan to greatness among the
nations--she takes Japan as her pattern, and thinks that what Japan has
done she can do--and, officially abandoning her long course of
self-sufficient isolation, is plunging into the flood of international
progress, determined to acquire all the knowledge she can, and thus win
for herself a place among the Powers.
But I am in Yün-nan, and things move slowly here.
All this does not mean that my presence is desired, or that fear of me,
the foreigner, has ceased. On the contrary, it signifies that I am more
greatly to be feared. The European is _not_ wanted in China, no matter
how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who
sits and devours all the newspaper copy--good, bad and
indifferent--which filters through regarding China becoming the El
Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of
teaching the Chinese to foreignize as much as he can, teaching the
leaders of the people to strive to modify national life, and to raise
public conduct and administration to the best standards of the West.
When China is capable of looking after herself, and able to maintain the
position she is securing by the aid of the foreigner in her provinces,
following her present mode of thought and action, the foreigner may go
back again. But it is to be hoped that the evolution of the country will
be different.
Another feature impressed upon me was the emptiness of the lives of the
people. Education was rare, and any education they had was confined to
the Chinese classics.
Neither of the three men I had with me could read or write. The thoughts
of these people are circumscribed by the narrow world in which they
live, and only a chance traveler such as myself allows them a glimpse of
other places. Each man, with rare exception, lives and labors and dies
where he is born--that is his ambition; and in the midst of a people
whose whole outlook of life is so contracted, I find difficulty in
believing that progress such as Japan made in her memorable fifty-year
forward movement will be made by the Chinese of Yün-nan in two hundred
years. Everything one can see around him here, at this town of
Anning-cheo, seems to make against it. In my dealings with Chinese in
their own country--I speak broadly--I have found that they "know
everything." I erected a printing-press in Tong-ch'uan-fu some months
ago--a type of the old flat handpress not unlike that first used by
Caxton. It was a part of the equipment of the Ai Kueh Hsieh Tang (Love
of Country School), and I was invited by the gentry to erect it. Now the
thing had not been up an hour before all the old fossils in the place
knew all about it. Printing to them was easy--a child could do it. It is
always, "O ren teh, o ren teh" ("I know, I know"). These men, dressed in
their best, stood with arms behind them, and smiled stupidly as I
labored with my coat off fixing their primitive machinery. Yet they did
_not_ know, and now, within a few months, not a sheet has been printed,
and the whole plant is going to rack and ruin.
This is the difference between the Chinese and the tribespeople of
Yün-nan. Here we see the god of the missionary again, quite apart from
any religious basis. The tribesman comes and lays himself at the feet of
the missionary, and says at once, "I do not know. Tell me, and I will
follow you. I want to learn." That is why it is that the Chinese stand
open-eyed and open-mouthed when they see the Miao making strides
altogether impossible to themselves, in proportion to their standard of
civilization, and this position of things will not be altered, unless
they cease to deceive themselves. I have seen a Miao boy of nine who
never in his life had seen a Chinese character, who did not know that
school existed and, whose only tutoring depended on the week's visit of
the missionary twice a year. I have seen this youngster read off a sheet
of Chinese characters no Chinese boy of his age in the whole city would
succeed in. I have not been brought into contact with any other tribe as
I have with the Hua Miao.[1]
But if the progress this once-despised people are making is maintained,
the Yün-nanese will very soon be left behind in the matter of practical
scholarship. These Miao live the simplest of simple lives, but they wish
to become better--to live purer lives, to become civilized, to be
uplifted; and therefore they are most humble, most approachable, and are
slowly evolving into a happy position of proud independence. Education
among the Hua Miao is not lost: among the Chinese much of the labor put
forward in endeavors to educate them is lost, or seems to bear no
immediate fruit. The Miao are living by confidence and hope that turns
towards the future; the Yün-nanese are content with their confidence in
the past. The Miao, however, were not like this always--but a few years
ago they were not heard of outside China.
The coming emancipation of their women, demands some attention. The few
Europeans who have lived among the multitudes in Central China would not
associate beds of roses with the lives of the women anywhere.
The daughter is seldom happy, and unless the wife present her husband
with sons, who will perpetuate the father's name and burn incense at his
tablet after his death, her life is more often than not made absolutely
unbearable--a fact more than any other one thing responsible for the
numerous suicides. She is the drudge, the slave of the man. And the
popular belief is that all the women of the Middle Kingdom are
essentially Chinese; but little is heard of the tribespeople--more
numerous probably than in any other given area in all the world--whose
womankind are as far removed from the Chinese in language, habits and
customs as English ladies of to-day are removed from Grecians. A decade
or so ago no one heard of the Miao women: they were the lowest of the
low, having no _status_. They were far worse off than their Chinese
sisters, who, no matter what they had to endure after marriage, were
certainly safeguarded by law and etiquette allowing them to enter the
married state with respectability; but no social laws, no social ties
protect the Miao women.
Until a few years ago their "club" was a common brothel, too horrible to
describe in the English language. As soon as a girl gave birth to her
first child she came down on the father to keep her. In many cases, it
is only fair to say, they lived together faithfully as man and wife,
although such cases were not by any means in the majority. The poor
creatures herded together in their unspeakable vice and infamy, with no
shame or common modesty, fighting for the wherewithal to live, and only
by chance living regularly with one man, and then only just so long as
he wished. Little girls of ten and over regularly attended these awful
hovels, and children grew out of their childhood with no other vision
than that of entering into the disgraceful life as early as Nature would
allow them. It meant little less than that practically the whole of the
population was illegitimate, viewed from a Western standpoint. No such
thing as marriage existed. Men and women cohabited in this horrible orgy
of existence, with the result that murder, disease and pestilence were
rife among them. It was only a battle of the survival of the fittest to
pursue so terrible a life. Nearly all the people were diseased by the
transgression of Nature's laws.
After a time, however, through the instrumentality of Protestant
missionaries, these wretched people began to see the light of
civilization. Gradually, and of their own free will, the girls gave up
their accursed dens of misery and shame, and the men lived more in
accord with social law and order.
The Miao, too, had hitherto been dependent for their literature upon the
Chinese character, which only a few could understand. Soon they had
literature in their own language,[AE] and a great social reform set in.
They showed a desire for Western learning such as has seldom been seen
among any people in China--these were people lowest down in the social
scale; and now the latest phase is the establishment of bethrothal and
marriage laws, calculated to revolutionize the community and to
introduce what in China is the equivalent for home life.
Betrothal among the Chinese is a matter with which the parties most
deeply concerned have little to do. Their parents engage a go-between or
match-maker, and another point is that there is no age limit. Not so now
with the Christian Miao. No paid go-between is engaged, and brides are
to be at a minimum age of eighteen years, and bridegrooms twenty. The
establishment of these laws will, it is hoped, make for the emancipation
from a life of the most dreadful misery of thousands of women in one of
the darkest countries of the earth.[AF]
But now the Miao is pressing forward under his burdens, to guide himself
in the struggle, to retrieve his falls and his failures; and in the
future lies his hope--the indomitable hope upon which the interest of
humanity is based--and he has in addition the grand expectation of
escaping despair even in death. It is all the praiseworthy work of our
fellow-countrymen, living isolated lives among the people, building up a
worthy Christian structure upon Miao simplicity and humble fidelity to
the foreigner.
But I digress from my travel.
Little out of the ordinary marked my travels to Lao-ya-kwan (6,800
feet), an easy stage. My meager tiffin at an insignificant mountain
village was, as usual, an educational lesson to the natives. Each tin
that came from my food basket--one's servant delighted to lay out the
whole business--underwent the severest criticism tempered with unmeaning
eulogy, picked up and put down by perhaps a score of people, who did not
mean to be rude. When I used their chopsticks--dirty little pieces of
bamboo--in a manner very far removed from their natural method, they
were proud of me. Outrageously panegyric references were made when an
old man, scratching at his disagreeable itch-sores under my nose,
clipped a youngster's ear for hazarding my age to be less than that of
any of the bystanders, the length of my moustache and a three-day growth
on my chin giving them the opinion that I was certainly over sixty.[AG]
I entered Lao-ya-kwan under an inauspicious star. No accommodation was
to be had, all the inns were literally overrun with sedan chairs and
filled with well-dressed officials, already busy with the "hsi-lien"
(wash basin). In my dirty khaki clothes, out at knee and elbow, looking
musty and mean and dusty, with my topee botched and battered, I
presented a most unhappy contrast as I led my pony down the street under
the sarcastic stare of bystanding scrutineers. The nights were cold, and
in the private house where I stayed, mercifully overlooked by a trio of
protesting effigies with visages grotesque and gruesome, rats ran
fearlessly over the room's mud floor, and at night I buried my head in
my rugs to prevent total disappearance of my ears by nibbling. Not so my
men. They slept a few feet from me, three on one bench, two on another.
Bedding was not to be had, and so among the dirty straw they huddled
together as closely as possible to preserve what bodily heat they had.
Snow fell heavily. In the early morning sunlight on January 13th the
undulating valley, with its grand untrodden carpet of white, looked
magnificently beautiful as I picked out the road shown me by a poor
fellow whose ears had got frost-nipped.
No easy work was it climbing tediously up the narrow footway in a sharp
spur rising some 1,000 feet in a ribbed ascent, overlooking a fearful
drop. Over to the left I saw an unhappy little urchin, hardly a rag
covering his shivering, bleeding body, grovelling piteously in the
snow, while his blind and goitrous mother did her best at gathering
firewood with a hatchet. The pass leading over this range, through which
the white crystalline flakes were driven wildly in one's face, was a
half-moon of smooth rock actually worn away by the endless tramping of
myriads of pack-ponies, who then were plodding through ruts of steps
almost as high as their haunches.
A man with a diseased hip joined me thirty li farther on, dismounting
from his pile of earthly belongings which these men fix on the backs of
their ponies. It is a creditable trapeze act to effect a mount after
the pony is ready for the journey. He had, he said, met me before. He
knew that I was a missionary, and had heard me preach. He remembered my
wife and myself and children passing the night in the same inn in which
he stayed on one of his pilgrimages from his native town somewhere to
the east of the province. I had never seen him before! I had no wife; I
have never preached a sermon in my life. I should be pained ever again
to have to suffer his unmannerly presence anywhere.
Ponies were being loaded near my table. The rapscallion in question
explained that the black blocks were salt, taking a pinch from my
salt-cellar with his grimy fingers to add point to his remarks. I kicked
at a couple of mongrels under the rude form on which I sat--they fought
for the skins of those potato-like pears which grow here so
prolifically. The person announced that they were dogs, and that an
idiosyncrasy of Chinese dogs was to fight. Several wags joined in, and
all appeared, through the traveling nincompoop, to know all about my
past and present, lapsing into a desultory harangue upon all men and
things foreign. The street reminded me of Clovelly--rugged and
ragged--and the people were wrinkled and wretched; and, indeed, being a
Devonian myself by birth, I should be excused of wantonly intending to
hurt the delicate feelings of the lusty sons of Devon were I to declare
that I thought the life not of a very terrible dissimilarity from that
port of antiquity in the West.
Salt was everywhere, much more like coal than salt, certainly as black.
The blocks were stacked up by the sides of inns ready for transport,
carried on the backs of a multitude of poor wretches who work like oxen
from dawn to dusk for the merest pittance, on the backs of droves and
droves of ponies, scrambling and spluttering along over the slippery
once-paved streets.
All day long, with the exception of two or three easy ascents, we were
travelling in pleasantly undulating country of park-like magnificence.
My men dallied. I tramped on alone; and sitting down to rest on the
rocks, I realized that I was in one of the strangest, loneliest, wildest
corners of the world. Great mountain-peaks towered around me, white and
sparkling diadems of wondrous beauty, and at my feet, black and
stirless, lay a silent pool, reflecting the weird shadows of my coolies
flitting like specters among the jagged rocks of these most solitary
hills.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote AD: Hsiakwan would be supplied by a branch line of the main
railway in the Kunlong scheme advocated by Major H.R. Davies, leaving at
Mi-tu, to the south of Hungay.--E.J.D.]
[Footnote AE: The written language was framed and instituted by the Rev.
Sam. Pollard, of the Bible Christian Mission (now merged into the United
Methodist Mission).--E.J.D.]
[Footnote AF: The marriage laws were instituted by the China Inland
Mission at Sa-pu-shan, where a great work is being done among the Hua
Miao. A good many more stipulations are embodied in the excellent rules,
but I have no room here to detail.--E.J.D.]
[Footnote AG: The Chinese have the crudest ideas of the age of
foreigners. Among themselves the general custom is for a man to shave
his upper lip so long as his father is alive, so that in the ordinary
course a man wearing a moustache is looked upon as an old man. In
Tong-ch'uan-fu the rumor got abroad that three "uei kueh ren" ("foreign
men") went riding horses--(two young ones and one old one. The "old one"
was myself, because I had hair on my top lip, despite the fact that I
was considerably the junior. And the fact that one was a lady was not
deemed worthy of the slightest consideration.--E.J.D.]