_A bumptious official_. _Ignominious contrasts of two travelers.
Diminishing respect for foreigners in the Far East_. _Where the European
fails_. _His maltreatment of Orientals_. _Convicts on the way to death_.
_At Ch'u-hsiony-fu_. _Buffaloes and children_. _Exasperating repetition
met in Chinese home life_. _Unæsthetic womanhood_. _Quarrymen and
careless tactics_. _Scope for the physiologist_. _Interesting unit of
the city's humanity_. _Signs of decay in the countryside_. _Carrying the
dead to eternal rest_. _At Chennan-chou_. _Public kotowing ceremony and
its aftermath_. _Chinese ignorance of distance._
All-round idyllic peace did not reign at Kwang-tung-hsien, where I
rested over Sunday. Contacts in social conditions gave rise inevitably
to causes for conflicts.
Arriving early, my men were able to secure the best room and soon after,
with much imposing pomp and show, a "gwan"[AH] arrived, disgusted that he
had to take a lower room. I bowed politely to him as he came in. He did
not return it, however, but stood with a contemptuous grin upon his face
as he took in the situation. I do not know who the person was, neither
have a wish to trace his ancestry, but his bumptiousness and general
misbehavior, utterly in antagonism to national etiquette, made me hate
the sight of the fellow. Pride has been said to make a man a hedgehog. I
do not say that this man was a hedgehog altogether, but he certainly
seemed to wound everyone he touched. He had with him a great retinue, an
extravagant equipage, fine clothes, and presumably a great fortune; but
none of this offended me--it was his contempt which hurt. He seemed to
splash me with mud as he passed, and was altogether badly disposed. In
his every act he heaped humiliation upon me, and insulted me silently
and gratuitously with unbearable disdain. Luckily, be it said to the
credit of the Chinese Government, one does not often meet officials of
this kind; such an atmosphere would nurture the worst feeling. It is, of
course, possible that had I been traveling with many men and in a style
necessary for representatives of foreign Governments, this hog might
have been more polite; but the fact that I had little with me, and made
a poor sort of a show, allowed him to come out in his true colors and
display his unveneered feeling towards the foreigner. That he had no
knowledge of the man crossing China on foot was evident. He was great
and rich--that was the sentiment he breathed out to everyone--and the
foreigner was humble. There is no wrong in enjoying a large superfluity,
but it was not indispensable to have displayed it, to have wounded the
eyes of him who lacked it, to have flaunted his magnificence at the door
of my commonplace.
Had I been able to speak, I should have pointed out to this fellow that
to know how to be rich is an art difficult to master, and that he had
not mastered it; that as an official his first duty in exercising power
was to learn that of humility; and that it is the irritating authority
of such very lofty and imperious beings as himself, who say, "I am the
law," that provokes insurrection. However, I was dumb, and could only
return his contemptuous glance now and again.
To him I could have said, as I would here say also to every foreigner in
the employ of the Chinese Government, "The only true distinction is
superior worth." If foreigners in China are to have social and official
rank respected, they must begin to be worthy of their rank, otherwise
they help to bring it into hatred and contempt. It is a pity some native
officials have to learn the same lesson.
In several years of residence in the Far East I have noticed respect
for the foreigner unhappily diminishing. The root of the evil is in the
mistaken idea that high station exempts him who holds it from observing
the common obligations of life. It comes about--so often have I seen it
in the Straits Settlements and in various parts of India--that those who
demand the most homage make the least effort to merit that homage they
demand. That is chiefly why respect for the foreigner in the Orient is
diminishing, and I have no hesitancy in asserting that the average
European in the East and Far East does not treat the Oriental with
respect. He considers that the Chinese, the Malay, the Burman, the
Indian is there to do the donkey work only. The newcomer generally
discovers in himself an astounding personal omnipotence, and even before
he can talk the language is so obsessed with it that as he grows older,
his sense of it broadens and deepens. And in China--of the Chinese this
is true to-day as in other spheres of the Far East--the native is there
to do the donkey work, and does it contentedly and for the most part
cheerfully. But he will not always be so content and so cheerful. He
will not always suffer a leathering from a man whom he knows he dare not
now hit back.[AI] Some day he may hit back. We have seen it before, how
at some moment, by some interior force making a way to the light, an
explosion takes place: there is an upheaval, all sorts of grave
disorders, and because some Europeans are killed the Celestial
Government is called upon to pay, and to pay heavily. Indemnities are
given, but the Chinese pride still feels the smart.
[1
Pulling away up the sides of barren, sandy hills in my lonely
pilgrimage, I could see wide, fertile plains sheltered in the undulating
hollows of mountains, over which in arduous toil I vanished and
re-appeared, how or where I could hardly calculate. Suddenly, rounding
an awkward corner, a magnificent panorama broke upon the view in a
rolling valley watered by many streams below, all green with growing
wheat. A high spur about midway up the rolling mountain forms a capital
spot for wayfarers to stop and exchange travelers' notes. A couple of
convicts were here, their feet manacled and their white cotton clothing
branded with the seal of death; by the side were the crude wooden cages
in which they were carried by four men, with whom they mixed freely and
manufactured coarse jokes. In six days bang would fall the knife, and
their heads would roll at the feet of the executioners at Yün-nan-fu.
Coming into Ch'u-hsiong-fu[AJ]--the stage is what the men call 90 li, but
it is not more than 70--I was brought to an insignificant wayside place
where the innkeeper upbraided my boy for endeavoring to allow me to pass
without wetting a cup at his bonny hostelry. Had I done so, I should
have avouched myself utterly indifferent to reputation as a traveler.
But I did not stay the night here. I passed on through the town to a new
building, an inn, into which I peered inquiringly. A well-dressed lad
came courteously forward, in his bowing and scraping seeming to say,
"Good sir, we most willingly embrace the opportunity of being honored
with your noble self and your retinue under our poor roof. Long since
have we known your excellent qualities; long have we wished to have you
with us. We can have no reserve towards a person of your open and noble
nature. The frankness of your humor delights us. Disburden yourself, O
great brother, here and at once of your paraphernalia."
I stayed, and was charged more for lodging than at any other place in
all my wanderings in China. My experience was different from that of
Major Davies when he visited this city in 1899. He writes:--
"The people of this town are particularly conservative and exclusive.
They have such an objection to strangers that no inn is allowed within
the city walls, and no one from any other town is allowed to establish a
shop.... When the telegraph line was first taken through here there was
much commotion, and so determined was the opposition of the townspeople
to this new-fangled means of communication that the telegraph office had
to be put inside the colonel's yamen, the only place where it would be
safe from destruction."
The proprietor of the inn in which I stayed was a man of about fifty, of
goodly person and somewhat corpulent, comely presence, good humor, and
privileged freedom. He had a pretty daughter. He was an exception to the
ordinary father in China, in the fact that he was proud of her, as he
was of his house and his faring. But in all conscience he should have
been abundantly ashamed of his charges, for my boy said I was charged
three times too much, and I have no cause for doubting his word either,
for he was fairly honest. I once had a boy in Singapore who acted for
three weeks as a "ganti"[AK] whilst my own boy underwent a surgical
operation, and between misreckonings, miscarriages, misdealings,
mistakes and misdemeanors, had he remained with me another month I
should have had to pack up lock, stock and barrel and clear.
I stayed here a day in the hope of getting my mail, but had the
pleasure of seeing only the bag containing it. It was sealed, and the
postmaster had no authority to break that seal.
There were no telegraph poles in the district through which I was
passing; the connections were affixed to the trunks of trees. The
telegraph runs right across the Ch'u-hsiong-fu plain, on entering which
one crosses a rustic bridge just below a rather fine pagoda, from which
an excellent view is obtained of the old city. The wall up towards the
north gate, where there is another pagoda, is built over a high knoll.
Inside the wall half the town is uncultivated ground. Four youngsters
here were having a great time on the back of a lazy buffalo, who,
turning his head swiftly to get rid of some irritating bee, dislodged
the quartet to the ground, where they fought and cursed each other over
the business.
Everything that one sees around here is particularly "Chinesey." It may
be supposed that I am not the first person who has gone through town
after town and found in all that he looks at, particularly the houses,
certain forms identical, inevitable, exasperating by common repetition.
It has been said that poetry is not in things, it is in us; but in China
very little poetry comes into the homes and lives of the common
millions: they are all dead dwelling-houses, even the best, bare homes
without life or brightness. Among the working-classes of the West there
is to be found a kind of ministering beauty which makes its way
everywhere, springing from the hands of woman. When the dwelling is
cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift
finds a way to make order and puts care and art into everything in her
house, puts a soul into the inanimate, and gives those subtle and
winsome touches to which the most brutish of human beings is sensible.
But in China woman does nothing of this. Her life is unaesthetic to the
last degree. No happy improvisations or touches of the stamp of
personality enter her home; one cannot trace the touches of witchery in
the tying of a ribbon. Everywhere you find the same class of furniture
and garniture, the same shape of table, of stool, of form, of bed, of
cooking utensils, of picture, of everything; and all the details of her
housekeeping are so apathetically uninteresting. The Chinese woman has
no charming art, rather is it a common, horrid, daily grind. She is not,
as the woman should be, the interpreter in her home of her own grace,
and she differs from her Western sister in that it is impossible for her
to express in her dress also the little personalities of character--all
is eternally the same. But I know so very little of ladies' clothing,
and therefore cease.
Quarrying was going on high up among the hills as I left the city. Men
were out of sight, but their hammering was heard distinctly. As each
boulder was freed these wielders of the hammer yelled to passers-by to
look out for their heads, gave the stone a push to start it rolling, and
if it rolled upon you it was your own fault and not theirs--you should
have seen to it that you were somewhere else at the time. If it blocked
the pathway, another had to be made by those who made the traffic.
Directly under the quarry I was accosted by a beggar. "Old foreign man!
Old foreign man!" he yelled. Stones were falling fast; it is possible
that he does not sit there now.
Physiognomists do not swarm in China. There is grand scope for someone.
There would be ample material for research for the student in the
soldiers alone who would be sent to guard him from place to place. He
would not need to go farther afield; for he would be given fat men and
lean men, brave men and cowards, some blessed with brains and some not
one whit brainy, civil and surly, stubby and lanky, but rogues and liars
all. Travelers are always interested in their chairmen; oftentimes my
interest in them was greater than theirs in me, until the time came for
us to part. Then the "Ch'a ts'ien,"[AL] always in view from the outset of
their duty, brought us in a manner nearer to each other.
As I came out of the inn at Ch'u-hsiong-fu somewhat hurriedly, for my
men lingered long over the rice, I stumbled over the yamen fellow who
crouched by the doorside. He laughed heartily. Had I fallen on him his
tune might have been changed; but no matter. This unit of the city
humanity was not bewilderingly beautiful. He was profoundly
ill-proportioned, very goitrous, and ravages of small-pox had bequeathed
to him a wonderful facial ugliness. He had, however, be it written to
his honor, learnt that life was no theory. One could see that at a
glance as he walked along at the head of the procession, with a stride
like an ox, manfully shouldering his absurd weapon of office, which in
the place of a gun was an immense carved wooden mace, not unlike a leg
of the old-time wooden bedstead of antiquity. His ugliness was
embittered somewhat by sunken, toothless jaws and an enigmatical stare
from a cross-eye; he was also knock-kneed, and as an erstwhile gunpowder
worker, had lost two fingers and a large part of one ear. But he had
learnt the secret of simple duty: he had no dreams, no ambition
embracing vast limits, did not appear to wish to achieve great things,
unless it were that in his fidelity to small things he laid the base of
great achievements. He waited upon me hand and foot; he burned with
ardor for my personal comfort and well-being; he did not complicate life
by being engrossed in anything which to him was of no concern--his only
concern was the foreigner, and towards me he carried out his duty
faithfully and to the letter. I would wager that that man, ugly of face
and form, but most kindly disposed to one who could communicate little
but dumb approval, was an excellent citizen, an excellent father, an
excellent son.
So very different was another traveler who unceremoniously forced
himself upon me with the inevitable "Ching fan, ching fan," although he
had no food to offer. He commenced with a far-fetched eulogium of my
ambling palfrey Rusty, who limped along leisurely behind me. So far as
he could remember, poor ignorant ass, he had never seen a pony like it
in his extensive travels--probably from Yün-nan-fu to Tali-fu, if so
far; but as a matter of fact, Rusty had wrenched his right fore fetlock
between a gully in the rocks the day before and was now going lame.
Dressed fairly respectably in the universal blue, my unsought companion
was of middle stature, strongly built, but so clumsily as to border
almost on deformity, and to give all his movements the ungainly
awkwardness of a left-handed, left-legged man. He walked with a limp,
was suffering (like myself) with sore feet; if not that, it was
something incomparably worse. Not for a moment throughout the day did he
leave my side, the only good point about him being that when we
drank--tea, of course--he vainly begged to be allowed to pay. In that he
was the shadow of some of my friends of younger days.
But of men enough.
From Ch'u-hsiong-fu on to Tali-fu the whole country bears lamentable
signs of gradual ruin and decay, a falling off from better times. The
former city is probably the most important point on the route, and is
mentioned as a likely point for the proposed Yün-nan Railway.
The country has never recovered from the terrible effects of the great
Mohammendan Rebellion of 1857. Foundations of once imposing buildings
still stand out in fearful significance, and ruins everywhere over the
barren country tell plain tales all too sad of the good days gone.
Temples, originally fit for the largest city in the Empire, with
elaborate wood and stone carving and costly, weird images sculptured in
stone, with particularly fine specimens of those blood-curdling
Buddhistic hells and their presiding monsters, with miniature ornamental
pagodas and intricate archways, are all now unused; and when the people
need material for any new building (seldom erected now in this
district), the temple grounds are robbed still more. In the days of its
prosperity Yün-nan must have been a fair land indeed, bright, smiling,
seductive; now it is the exact antithesis, and the people live sad,
flat, colorless existences.
For three days my caravan was preceded by twelve men, headed by a sort
of gaffer with a gong, carrying a corpse in a massive black coffin,
elaborate in red and blue silk drapings and with the inevitable white
cock presiding, one leg tied with a couple of strands of straw to the
cover, on which it crowed lustily. Their mission was an honorable one,
carrying the honored dead to its last bed of rest eternal; for this dead
man had secured the fulfillment of the highest in human destiny--to have
his bones buried near the scene of his youth, near his home. This is a
simple custom the Chinese cherish and reverence, of highest honor to the
dead and of no mean value to the living. To the dead, because buried
near the home of his fathers he would not be subject to those delusive
temptations in the future state of that confused and complex life; to
the living, because it gave work to a dozen men for several days, and
enabled them to have a good time at the expense of the departed. A
perpetual and excruciatingly unmusical chant, in keeping with the
occasion's sadness, rent the mountain air, interrupted only when the
bearers lowered the coffin and left the remains of the great dead on a
pair of trestles in the roadway, whilst they drank to his happiness
above and smoked tobacco which the relatives had given them. Once this
heaper-up of Chinese merit[AM] was dumped unceremoniously on the turf
while the headman entered into a blackguarding contest with one of the
fellows who was alleged to be constantly out of step with his brethren,
because he was a much smaller man. The gaffer gave him a bit of a
drubbing for his insolence.
Rain came on at Chennan-chou, a small town of about three hundred
houses, where I sought shelter in the last house of the street. The
householder, a shrivelled, goitrous humpback, received me kindly,
removed his pot of cabbage from the fire to brew tea for his uninvited
guest, and showed great gratitude (to such an extent that he nearly fell
into the fire as he moved to push the children forward towards me) when
I gave a few cash to three kiddies, who gaped open-mouthed at the
apparition thus found unexpectedly before their parent's hearth. More
came in, my beneficent attention being modestly directed towards them;
others followed, and still more, and more, whilst the man, removing from
his mouth his four-foot pipe, and wiping the mouthpiece with his soiled
coat-sleeve before offering it to me to smoke, smiled as I distributed
more cash.
"They are all mine," he said cutely.
Poor fellow! There must have been a dozen nippers there, and I sighed at
the thought of what some men come to as the last of half a string of
cash slipped through my fingers.[AN]
Outside the town, on the lee side of a triumphal arch--erected, maybe,
to the memory of one of the virtuous widows of the district--I untied my
pukai and donned my mackintosh and wind-cap. A gale blew, my fingers
ached with the cold, breathing was rendered difficult by the rarefied
air. As we were thus engaged and discussing the prospects of the storm,
yelling from under a gigantic straw hat, a fellow said--
"Suan liao" ("not worth reckoning") "only five more li to
Sha-chiao-kai."
We had thirty li to do. Such is the idea of distance in Yün-nan.[AO]
The storm did not come, however, and my men ever after reminded me to
keep out my wind-cap and my mackintosh, partly to lighten their loads,
of course, and partly on account of the good omen it seemed to them to
be.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote AH: "Gwan" is the Chinese for "official."]
[Footnote AI: I have seen a European, with an imperfect hold of an
eastern language, knock an Asiatic down because he thought the man was a
fool, whereas he himself was ignorant of what was going on. The message
the coolie was bringing was misunderstood by the conceited assistant,
and as a result of having just this smattering of the vernacular, he ran
his firm in for a loss of fifty thousand dollars.--E.J.D.]
[Footnote AJ: Ts'u-hsiong-fu, as it is pronounced locally, with a strong
"ts" initial sound.]
[Footnote AK: Meaning a relief hand (Malay).]
[Footnote AL: Literally, "tea money."]
[Footnote AM: "Heaping up merit" is one of the elementary practices of
Chinese religious life.]
[Footnote AN: Chennan-chou, which stands at a height of 6,500 feet, has
been visited again since by myself. My caravan consisted on this
occasion of two ponies (one I was riding), two coolies, a servant, and
myself. As we got to the archway in the middle of the street leading to
the busy part of the town, my animal nearly landed me into the gutter,
and the other horse ran into a neighboring house, both frightened by
crackers which were being fired around a man who was bumping his head on
the ground in front of an ancestral tablet, brought into the street for
the purpose. A horrid din made the air turbulent. I sought refuge in the
nearest house, tying my ponies up to the windows, and was most
hospitably received as a returned prodigal by a well-disposed old man
and his courtly helpmate. The genuineness of the hospitality of the
Chinese is as strong as their unfriendliness can be when they are
disposed to show a hostile spirit to foreigners. Just as I had laid up
for dinner the din stopped, we breathed gunpowder smoke instead of air,
everyone from the head-bumping ceremony came around me, and there
lingered in silent admiration. My boy came and whispered, quite aloud
enough for all to hear, that in that part of the town cooked rice could
not be bought, and that I was going to be left to look after the horses
and the loads whilst the men went away to feed. He advised the assembled
crowd that if they valued sound physique they had better keep their
hands off my gear and depart. My friendly host shut the doors and
windows, with the exception of that through which I watched our
impedimenta, and at once commenced good-natured inquiry into my past,
and concerning vicissitudes of life in general. Luckily, I was able to
give the old man good reason for congratulating me upon my ancestral
line, my own great age, the number of my wives and offshoots--mostly
"little puppies"--and as each curious caller dropped in to sip tea, so
did one after another of the patriarchal dignitaries who were
responsible for the human product then entertaining the crowd come
vividly before the imagination of the company, and they were graced with
every token of age and honor. (Chinese speak of sons as "little
puppies.")]
[Footnote AO: In crossing a river here I slipped, and from ray pocket
there rolled a box of photographic films, and in reaching over to
re-capture it, I let my loaded camera fall into the water. I was
disappointed, as most of my best pictures were thus (as I imagined)
spoilt. But when I developed at Bhamo, I found not a single film damaged
by water, and every picture was a success from both the roll in the tin
and the roll in the camera. It is a tribute to the Eastman-Kodak Company
Ltd. that their non-curling films will stand being dipped into rivers
and remain unaffected. The films in question should have been developed
six months prior to the date of my exposure.--E.J.D.]