_Lu-fêng-hsien and its bridge_. _Magnificence of mountains towards the
capital_. _Opportunity for Dublin Fusiliers_. _Characteristic climbing.
Crockery crash and its sequel_. _Mountain forest_. _Changeableness of
climate_. _Wayside scene and some reflections_. _Is your master drunk?
Babies of the poor_. _Loess roads_. _Travelers, and how they should
travel_. _Wrangling about payment at the tea-shop_. _The lying art among
the Chinese_. _Difference of the West and East_. _Strange Chinese
characteristic_. _Eastern and Western civilization, and how it is
working_. _Remarks on the written character and Romanisation_. _Will
China lose her national characteristics? "Ih dien mien, ih dien mien."_
_A nasty experience of the impotently dumb_. _Rescued in the nick of
time._
When the day shall come for its history to be told, the historian will
have little to say of Lu-fêng-hsien, that is--if he is a decent sort of
fellow.
He may refer to its wonderful bridge, to its beggars and its ruins. The
stone bridge, one of the best of its kind in the whole empire, and I
should think better than any other in Yün-nan, stands to-day
conspicuously emblematic of ill-departed prosperity. So far as I
remember, it was the only public ornament in a condition of passable
repair in any way creditable to the ratepayers of the hsien. The wall is
decayed, the people are decayed, and in every nook and cranny are
painful evidences of preventable decay, marked by a conservatism among
the inhabitants and unpardonable indolence.
The bridge, however, has stood the test of time, and bids fair to last
through eternity. Other travelers have passed over it since the days of
Marco Polo, but I should like to say a word about it. Twelve yards or so
wide, and no less than 150 yards long, it is built entirely of grey
stone; with its massive piers, its excellent masonry, its good
(although crude) carving, its old-time sculpturing of dreadful-looking
animals at either end, its decorative triumphal arches, its masses of
memorial tablets (which I could not read), its seven arches of beautiful
simplicity and symmetry and perfect proportion, it would have been a
credit to any civilized country in the world. I noticed that, in
addition to cementing, the stones and pillars forming the sides of the
roadway were also dovetailed. Among the works of public interest with
which successive emperors have covered China, the bridges are not the
least remarkable; and in them one is able to realize the perseverance of
the Chinese in the enormous difficulties of construction they have had
to overcome.
Passing over the stream--the Hsiang-shui Ho, I believe--I stepped out
across the plain with one foot soaked, a pony having pulled me into the
water as he drank. Peas and beans covered with snow adjoined a
heart-breaking road which led up to a long, winding ascent through a
glade overhung by frost-covered hedgerows, where the sun came gently
through and breathed the sweet coming of the spring. From midway up the
mountain the view of the plain below and the fine range of hills
separating me from the capital was one of exceeding loveliness, the
undisturbed white of the snow and frost sparkling in the sunshine
contrasting most strikingly with the darkened waves of billowy green
opposite, with a background of sharp-edged mountains, whose summits were
only now and again discernible in the waning morning mist. Snow lay deep
in the crevices. My frozen path was treacherous for walking, but the
dry, crisp air gave me a gusto and energy known only in high latitudes.
In a pass cleared out from the rock we halted and gained breath for the
second ascent, surmounted by a dismantled watch-tower. It has long since
fallen into disuse, the sound tiles from the roof having been
appropriated for covering other habitable dwellings near by, where one
may rest for tea. The road, paved in some places, worn from the side of
the mountain in others, was suspended above narrow gorges, an entrance
to a part of the country which had the aspect of northern regions. The
sun, tearing open the curtain of blue mist, inundated with brightness
one of the most beautiful landscapes it is possible to conceive. A
handful of Dublin Fusiliers with quick-firing rifles concealed in the
hollows of the heights might have stopped a whole army struggling up the
hill-sides. But no one appeared to stop me, so I went on.
Climbing was characteristic of the day. Lu-fêng-hsien is about 5,500
feet; Sei-tze (where we were to sleep) 6,100 feet. Not much of a
difference in height; but during the whole distance one is either
dropping much lower than Lu-feng or much higher than Sei-tze. For thirty
li up to Ta-tsü-sï (6,900 feet) there is little to revel in, but after
that, right on to the terrific drop to our destination for the night, we
were going through mountain forests than which there are none better in
the whole of the province, unless it be on the extreme edge of the
Tibetan border, where accompanying scenery is altogether different.
From a height of 7,850 feet we dropped abruptly, through clouds of thick
red dust which blinded my eyes and filled my throat, down to the city of
Sei-tze. I went down behind some ponies. Upwards came a fellow
struggling with two loads of crockery, and in the narrow pathway he
stood in an elevated position to let the animals pass. Irony of fate!
One of the horses--it seemed most intentional--gave his load a tilt: man
and crockery all went together in one heap to a crevice thirty yards
down the incline, and as I proceeded I heard the choice rhetoric of the
victim and the muleteer arguing as to who should pay.
Just before that, I dipped into the very bosom of the earth, with
rugged hills rising to bewildering heights all around, base to summit
clad luxuriously in thick greenery of mountain firs, a few cedars, and
the Chinese ash. Black patches of rock to the right were the death-bed
of many a swaying giant, and in contrast, running away sunwards, a
silver shimmer on the unmoving ocean of delicious green was caused by
the slantwise sun reflections, while in the ravines on the other side a
dark blue haze gave no invitation. Smoothly-curving fringes stood out
softly against the eternal blue of the heavens. Farther on, eloquent of
their own strength and imperturbability, were deep rocks, black and
defiant; but even here firs grew on the projecting ledges which now and
again hung menacingly above the red path, shading away the sunlight and
giving to the dark crevices an atmosphere of damp and cold, where men's
voices echoed and re-echoed like weird greetings from the grave. Onwards
again, and from the cool ravines, adorned with overhang branches,
forming cosy retreats from the now blazing sun, one emerged to a road
leading up once more to undiscovered vastnesses. Yonder narrowed a
gorge, fine and delicately covered, pleasing to one's aesthetic sense.
The center was a dome, all full of life and waving leafage, ethereal and
sweet; and running down, like children to their mother, were numerous
little hills densely clothed in a green lighter and more dainty than
that of the parent hill, throwing graceful curtsies to the murmuring
river at the foot. As I write here, bathed in the beauty of spring
sunlight, it is difficult to believe that a few hours since the
thermometer was at zero. Little spots of habitation, with foodstuffs
growing alongside, looking most lonely in their patches of green in the
forest, added a human and sentimental picturesqueness to a scene so
strongly impressive.
A thatched, barn-like place gave us rest, the woman producing for me a
huge chunk of palatable rice sponge-cake sprinkled with brown sugar.
Little naked children, offspring of parents themselves covered with
merest hanging rags, groped round me and treated me with courteous
curiosity; goats smelt round the coolie-loads of men who rested on low
forms and smoked their rank tobacco; smoke from the green wood fires
issued from the mud grates, where receptacles were filled with boiling
water ready for the traveler, constantly re-filled by a woman whose
child, hung over her back, moaned piteously for the milk its mother was
too busy to give to it. Near by a young girl gave suck to a deformed
infant, lucky to have survived its birth; her neck was as big as her
breasts--merely a case of goitre. Coolies passed, panting and puffing,
all casting a curious glance at him to whose beneficence all were
willing to pander.
At tiffin I counted thirty-three wretched people, who turned out to see
the barbarian. They desired, and desired importunately, to touch me and
the clothes which covered me. And I submitted.
This half-way place was interesting owing to the fact that the lady in
charge of the buffet could speak two words of French--she had, I
believe, acted as washerwoman to a man who at one time had been in the
Customs at Mengtsz. Great excitement ensued among the perspiring
laborers of the road and the dumb-struck yokels of the district. The
lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a
guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a
place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted
for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire
village, she endured such terrible poverty that one would have thought
her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out. But
no! The lusty dame was still sprightly. She had been three times
divorced. The person at present connected with her in the bonds of
wedded life--also goitrous and morally repulsive--stood by and gazed
down upon her like a proud bridegroom. He resented the levity of Shanks
and his companion, but, owing to the detail of a sightless eye, he could
not see all that transpired. However, we were all happy enough. Charges
were not excessive. My men had a good feed of rice and cabbage, with the
usual cabbage stump, two raw rice biscuits (which they threw into the
ashes to cook, and when cooked picked the dirt off with their long
finger-nails), and as much tea as they could drink--all for less than a
penny.
There is something in traveling in Yün-nan, where the people away from
the cities exhibit such painful apathy as to whether dissolution of this
life comes to them soon or late, which breeds drowsiness. After a tramp
over mountains for five or six hours on end, one naturally needed rest.
To-day, as I sat after lunch and wrote up my journal, I nearly fell
asleep. As I watched the reflections of all these ill-clad figures on
the stony roadway, and dozed meanwhile, one rude fellow asked my man
whether I was drunk!
I was not left long to my reverie.
Entering into a conversation intended for the whole village to hear, my
bulky coolie sublet his contract for two tsien for the eighty li--we had
already done fifty. The man hired was a weak, thin, half-baked fellow,
whose body and soul seemed hardly to hang together. He was the first to
arrive. As soon as he got in; this same man took a needle from the
inside of his great straw hat and commenced ridding his pants of
somewhat outrageous perforations. Such is the Chinese coolie, although
in Yün-nan he would be an exception. Late at night he offered to put a
shoe on my pony. I consented. He did the job, providing a new shoe and
tools and nails, for 110 cash--just about twopence.
I could not help, thinking of the children I had seen to-day, "Sad for
the dirt-begrimed babies that they were born." These children were all a
family of eternal Topsies--they merely grew, and few knew how. They are
rather dragged up than brought up, to live or die, as time might
appoint. Babies in Yün-nan, for the great majority, are not coaxed, not
tossed up and down and petted, not soothed, not humored. There are none
to kiss away their tears, they never have toys, and dream no young
dreams, but are brought straight into the iron realities of life. They
are reared in smoke and physical and moral filth, and become men and
women when they should be children: they haggle and envy, and swear and
murmur. When in Yün-nan--or even in the whole of China--will there be
the innocence and beauty of childhood as we of the West are blessed
with?
Roads here were in many cases of a light loess, and some of red
limestone rock, with a few li of paved roads. Many of the main roads
over the loess are altered by the rains. Two days of heavy rain will
produce in some places seas of mud, often knee-deep, and this will again
dry up quite as rapidly with the next sunshine. They become undermined,
and crumble away from the action of even a trickling stream, so as to
become always unsafe and sometimes quite impassable.
Delays are very dear to the heart of every Chinese. The traveler, if he
is desirous of getting his caravan to move on speedily, has little
chance of success unless he assumes an attitude of profoundest
indifference to all men and things around him--never _appear_ to be in a
hurry.
We are accompanied to-day to Kwang-tung-hsien by the coolie who carried
the load yesterday. He sits by staring enviously at his compatriots in
the employ of the foreign magnate, who rests on a stone behind and
listens to the conversation. They invite him to carry again; he refuses.
Now the argument--natural and right and proper--is ensuing with warmth.
Lao Chang, with the air of a hsien "gwan," sits in judgment upon them,
bringing to bear his long experience of coolies and the amount of
"heart-money" they receive, and has decided that the fellow should
receive a tenth of a dollar and twenty cash in addition for carrying the
heavier of the loads the remaining thirty li, as against ten cents
offered by the men. He is now extending philosophic advice to them all,
based on a knowledge of the coolie's life; the little meeting breaks up,
good feeling prevails, and the loads carried on merrily. I still linger,
sipping my tea. Lao Chang has grumbled because he has had to shell out
seven cash, and I have already drunk ten cups (he generally uses the tea
leaves afterwards for his personal use).
But wrangling about payment prevails always where Chinese congregate. In
China, by high and low, lies are told without the slightest apparent
compunction. One of the men in the above-mentioned dispute had an
irrepressible volubility of assertion. He at once flew into a temper,
adopting the style of the stage actor, proclaiming his virtue so that it
might have been heard at Yün-nan-fu. He was preserving his "face." For
in this country temper is often, what it is not in the West, a test of
truth. Among Westerners nothing is more insulting sometimes than a
philosophic temper; but in China you must, as a first law unto yourself,
protect yourself at all costs and against all comers, and it generally
requires a good deal of noise. Here the bully is not the coward. In
respect of prevarication, it seems to be absolutely universal; the poor
copy the vice from the rich. It seems to be in the very nature of the
people, and although it is hard to write, my experience convinces me
that my statement is not exaggeration. I have found the Chinese--I speak
of the common people, for in my travels I have not mixed much with the
rich--the greatest romancer on earth. I question whether the great
preponderance of the Chinese people speak six consecutive sentences
without misrepresentation or exaggeration, tantamount to prevarication.
Regretting that I have to write it, I give it as my opinion that the
Chinese is a liar by nature. And when he is confronted with the charge
of lying, the culprit seems seldom to feel any sense of guilt.
And yet in business--above the petty bargaining business--we have as the
antithesis that the spoken word is his bond. I would rather trust the
Chinese merely on his word than the Jap with a signed contract.
The Chinese knows that the Englishman is not a liar, and he respects him
for it; and it is to be hoped that in Yün-nan there will soon be seen
the two streams of civilization which now flow in comparative harmony in
other more enlightened provinces flowing here also in a single channel.
These two streams--of the East and the West--represent ideas in social
structure, in Government, in standards of morality, in religion and in
almost every human conception as diverse as the peoples are racially
apart. They cannot, it is evident, live together. The one is bound to
drive out the other, or there must be such a modification of both as
will allow them to live together, and be linked in sympathies which go
farther than exploiting the country for initial greed. The Chinese will
never lose all the traces of their inherited customs of daily life, of
habits of thought and language, products which have been borne down the
ages since a time contemporary with that of Solomon. No fair-minded man
would wish it. And it is at once impossible.
The language, for instance. Who is there, who knows anything about it,
who would wish to see the Chinese character drop out of the national
life? Yet it is bound to come to some extent, and in future ages the
written language will develop into pretty well the same as Latin among
ourselves. Romanization, although as yet far from being accomplished,
must sooner or later come into vogue, as is patent at the first glance
at business. If commerce in the Interior is to grow to any great extent
in succeeding generations, warranting direct correspondence with the
ports at the coast and with the outside world, the Chinese hieroglyph
will not continue to suffice as a satisfactory means of communication.
No correspondence in Chinese will ever be written on a machine such as I
am now using to type this manuscript, and this valuable adjunct of the
office must surely force its way into Chinese commercial life. But only
when Romanization becomes more or less universal.
This, however, by the way.
My point is, that no matter how Occidentalized he may become, the
Chinese will never lose his national characteristics--not so much
probably as the Japanese has done. What the youth has been at home, in
his habits of thought, in his purpose and spirit, in his manifestation
of action, will largely determine his after life. Chinese mental and
moral history has so stamped certain ineffaceable marks on the language,
and the thought and character of her people, that China will never--even
were she so inclined--obliterate her Oriental features, and must always
and inevitably remain Chinese. The conflict, however, is not racial, it
is a question of civilization. Were it racial only, to my way of
thinking we should be beaten hopelessly.
And as I write this in a Chinese inn, in the heart of Yün-nan--the
"backward province"--surrounded by the common people in their common,
dirty, daily doings, a far stretch of vivid imagining is needed to see
these people in any way approaching the Westernization already current
in eastern provinces of this dark Empire.
This is what I wrote sitting on the top of a mountain during my tour
across China. But it will be seen in other parts of this book that
Western ideas and methods of progress in accord more with European
standards are being adopted--and in some places with considerable
energy--even in the "backward province." In travel anywhere in the
world, one becomes absorbed more or less with one's own immediate
surroundings, and there is a tendency to form opinions on the
limitations of those surroundings. In many countries this would not lead
one far astray, but in China it is different. Most of my opinion of the
real Chinese is formed in Yün-nan, and it is not to be denied that in
all the other seventeen provinces, although a good many of them may be
more forward in the trend of national evolution and progress, the same
squalidness among the people, and every condition antagonistic to the
Westerner's education so often referred to, are to be found. But China
has four hundred and thirty millions of people, so that what one writes
of one particular province--in the main right, perhaps--may not
necessarily hold good in another province, separated by thousands of
miles, where climatic conditions have been responsible for differences
in general life. With its great area and its great population, it does
not need the mind of a Spencer to see that it will take generations
before every acre and every man will be gathered into the stream of
national progress.
The European traveler in China cannot perhaps deny himself the pleasure
of dwelling upon the absurdities and oddities of the life as they strike
him, but there is also another side to the question. Our own
civilization, presenting so many features so extremely removed from his
own ancient ideas and preconceived notion of things in general, probably
looks quite as ridiculous from the standpoint of the Chinese. The East
and the West each have lessons to offer the other. The West is offering
them to the East, and they are being absorbed. And perhaps were we to
learn the lessons to which we now close our eyes and ears, but which are
being put before us in the characteristics of Oriental civilization, we
may in years to come, sooner than we expect, rejoice to think that we
have something in return for what we have given; it may save us a rude
awakening. It does not strike the average European, who has never been
to China, and who knows no more about the country than the telegrams
which filter through when massacres of our own compatriots occur, that
Europe and America are not the only territories on this little round
ball where the inhabitants have been left with a glorious heritage.
But I was speaking of my men delaying on the road to Kwang-tung-hsien,
when they laughed at my impatience.
"Ih dien mien, ih dien mien," shouted one, as he held out a huge blue
bowl of white wormlike strings and a couple of chopsticks. "Mien," it
should be said, is something like vermicelli. A tremendous amount of it
is eaten; and in Singapore, without exception, it is dried over the
city's drains, hung from pole to pole after the rope-maker's fashion.
Its slipperiness renders the long boneless strings most difficult of
efficient adjustment, and the recollection of the entertainment my
comrades received as I struggled to get a decent mouthful sticks to me
still.
After that I hurried on, got off the "ta lu," and suffered a nasty
experience for my foolishness. When nearing the city, inquiring whether
my men had gone on inside the walls, a manure coolie, liar that he was,
told me that they had. I strode on again, encountering the crowds who
blocked the roadway as market progressed, who stared in a suspicious
manner at the generally disreputable, tired, and dirty foreigner. Each
moment I expected the escort to arrive. I could not sit down and drink
tea, for I had not a single cash on my person. I could speak none of the
language, and could merely push on, with ragtags at my heels, becoming
more and more embarrassed by the pointing and staring public. I turned,
but could see none of my men. I managed to get to the outer gate, and
there sat down on the grass, with five score of gaping idiots in front
of me. Seeing this vulgar-looking intruder among them, who would not
answer their simplest queries, or give any reason for being there,
suspicion grew worse; they naturally wanted to know what it was, and
what it wanted. Some thought I might be deaf, and raved questions in my
ear at the top of their voices. Even then I remained impotently dumb.
Two policemen came and said something. At their invitation I followed
them, and found myself later in a small police box, the street lined
with people, facing an officer.
The man hailed me in speech uncivil. He was huge as the hyperborean
bear, and cruel looking, and with a sort of apologetic petitionary growl
I sidled off; but it was anything but comfortable, and I should not have
been surprised had I found myself being led off to the yamen. After a
nerve-trying half-hour, I was thankful to see the form of my men
appearing at the moment when I was vehemently expressing indignation at
not being understood.