province of Shansi, which is as large as England. It is the richest
in minerals of all the provinces. The famous Ping Ting coal and iron
mines are near. The city lies in a great plain 3,000 feet above the
sea on the Fen River, and has railway connection with Peking and all
the east and south. It is to have connection with the capital of Kansu
province, and all the great northwest for thousands of miles. Mills
will arise, for stone, clay, iron and coal are available in this
province as nowhere else. Though the air of the city is exhilarating
and there is little consumption, skin diseases and diseases due to poor
water are prevalent. With irrigation in operation, fertilization of
this loess province would be unnecessary, so that Tai Yuen will yet be
a great wheat and millet center. Her grain, stock and wool merchants
will be taking contracts to feed and clothe America and Britain when
our fields are impoverished and overrun with people. It will be a
financial center, for Shansi’s wealth in China’s new industrial era can
not be computed. Even now the Shansi bankers are the best known, their
guild houses being in every city of the land. The railway, electric
light, post, telegraph and telephone have arrived, and so has the
printing press, raying out reform. The railway has brought progress
to quaint Tai Yuen. There are match factories, police department, a
public band, modern schools of all sorts, an agricultural and military
school, modern roads and a street-cleaning department, a modern jail
which aims to teach instead of confirming in despair. Confucius fled
here to the Wei State, when his own state persecuted him, and this
province is the home of the original clan of Chinese, the Chou, who
instituted ancestor worship and the rule of princes at the beginning
of history. The great Shansi University was established here in 1901
by the British with indemnity funds restored to the Chinese at the
request of British missions, which was a singularly Samaritan act; for
on July 9, 1900, at the yamen in Tai Yuen, all the missionaries, their
wives and children, were put to a brutal death by the infamous “Boxer,”
the Luciferian brute, Governor Yu Hsien, whose name is hated by the
progressive Chinese as much as we hate it, and the Manchu officials
who took their “tip” from the dowager empress, Tse Hsi. Doctor Timothy
Richard, promoter of the successful Red Cross in China, was the first
president of this institution, and W. E. Soothill was its second
president. Both these gentlemen lead in Britain’s educational influence
in China. English, of course, is taught. Like all the northern cities,
Tai Yuen is cursed in fall with the penetrating loess and sand-storms.
The blue-roofed and blue-walled Temple of Heaven is beautiful, with its
magnificent eaves, carved terminals, colored frieze, columns, statues,
scrolls, paintings and theater. There are also Confucian, Manchu-Fox,
Buddhist and Taoist temples and pagodas, and a Mohammedan mosque, for
this is the first city, going west, where we meet this last sect,
whose sphere extends right on to the far northwest. There is a notable
four-storied fort over the Romanesque south gate.
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Treeless mountains of South China, Kwangtung province. Modern road
broken down from the disintegrated granite; stone houses of
farmers; rice cultivation with water-buffalo.
]
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Sport in South China, Kwangtung province. Dragon-boat racing in
June. Crews sometimes number a hundred paddlers to a boat. There
is frequently great loss of life. This photograph disproves two
statements: that the Chinese are phlegmatic and dislike sport.
]
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Pechili province merchants ready for a trip into cold Mongolia.
They are the class which is calling for more railways. Woolen
clothing is taking the place of the padded cotton garments shown,
and leather shoes are rapidly coming into use.
]
The Manchus have their own Tartar or military city, which will now
become the administrative headquarters. Many furs are brought
down from the Mohammedan and Mongolian plains in the west and north.
There are mission schools and hospitals, a military parade ground,
and an arsenal. The twin pagodas of thirteen stories, with narrow
galleries, are famous. The pailoo memorial arches are distinct from
the open southern type, the Shansi type being a solid top-heavy tower.
More ponies are to be seen here than in most of the cities, and the
horsemanship of the Mongols is daring, as we should expect from the
descendants of Kublai Khan’s hordes, whom Marco Polo praised in that
famous memorial that was dictated in a prison of Europe more terrible
to him than all the dangers of Far Cathay.
Yunnan, the capital of the great copper and tin province, is five
hundred miles from the Gulf of Tonquin, with which a French narrow
gage railway, completed at awful cost of men and money, now connects
it. The city is in a plain five thousand feet high, at the foot of the
Tibetan Mountains. A great lake, the Tanklu, near by, is connected by
canal with the city. It is the center of a warmer art than the other
provinces, the architecture showing the elaborate Burmese influence,
which relies on ornament and color more than line and proportion.
Some of the pagodas are square, peculiar to Yunnan, and have nine to
thirteen stories, and galleries, as compared with seven to nine stories
elsewhere. The gate forts are ornate, though the roofs do not curl
up as fantastically and richly as in the east of China. The British
and French are fighting it out for chief foreign influence, with the
latter ahead as yet, because the railway from Mandalay has not been
run through. There are fine French stores where you can purchase
madame’s millinery, confection or perfumery, a French hospital and a
palatial French consulate; but the Chinese have far greater trust in
the Americans and British, for French designs on Chinese territory
are feared. Yunnan does not want to follow Tonquin. There are many
Mohammedans, and their round mosque towers are in evidence.
Great rebellions and massacres have occurred, as in those bloody years
1857–73 when General Tsen made a name for ruthlessness which still
strikes terror throughout China. The city, with a splendid division of
the modern army, went over to the rebels on November 3, 1911. Outside
the walls are two interesting temples. The Golden Heaven Temple is in
the northeastern hills. Part of it is made of gilt copper, and shows
Burmese influence. The stairs, terraces, openwork balustrades, tiling,
roofs and scrolls are very fine. The Buddhist temple cut in the rock
over the lake is a noble work, even extra niches being cut for the
statues. It is not likely that this costly work will ever again be done
in China, for “the god has lost his grip,” the devotee having found
out that he was hollow! The bald monks are scratching their heads and
thinking what new thing they can devise to bolster up the system. Many
of them have gone in the hotel and teaching business! The flags of
the temples have bells attached to them, and bells are hung under the
eaves. Every breeze in Yunnan is laden with silver and gold, therefore.
There are temples and shrines to the goddess Kwan Yun, who is said to
give good luck to travelers. It is proper ritual to roll the prayer
paper on your tongue, and in a ball shoot it toward the statue, where,
if it sticks, it means fortune for you, as the goddess will certainly
be unable to forget you. There are beautiful pavilions at the lake, and
Yunnan can now be considered a health resort for Southern and French
China. It is a center of engineering, and the headquarters of the
inventors of the stone-and-chain suspension bridges which are peculiar
to this province of gorges. The piers and pier houses are very
artistic, and stand unique in the world’s architecture.
Yunnan has modern schools, colleges, hotels, hospitals; a mint,
post-office and telegraph station; splendid modern barracks, a fine
parade ground, etc. The university is a modern domed brick building
on a hill in the center of the city. Its dormitories are lighted by
electricity and the equipment is wonderful compared to what used to
be. There is a museum, and English, Japanese, French, science, music,
agriculture and sericulture are among the branches taught. The best
trade school, however, is the modern jail, which is very popular! When
you hire a mechanic in Yunnan you are reasonably sure that you have a
former jailbird, just as in Peking, if you have a good clerk you are
sure he is a Manchu prince incognito, for pensions have been stopped
of late! One sees here the famous Yunnan yellow pigs, and peculiar
white and black fowl, whose bones and skin are black, probably on
account of iron and copper in what they eat. Boys are driving water
buffaloes to the rice and maize fields, which have superseded the poppy
plantations. The stores exhibit the famous jade and the Yunnan (Tali)
landscape-veined marble which is used in the tops of tables, the seats
of chairs and panels of cabinets and screens. Peculiar bamboo and paper
toys in which the figures move by the heat of a candle, are made, which
is another proof that the Chinese love children more than they are said
to do in many books of travel! The city is famous for its copper and
bronze work. The copper smelting by charcoal up to 1911 was an imperial
government monopoly, the ingots being sent overland to Peking by pack
animals, which took the route via Sui-fu and Chungking. At the Peking
mint it was used in the heavy “cash” coinage. Yunnan is noted for its
cloth dyers, who as yet use the famous indigo of the province, instead
of analine dye. The tin, iron, pewter and furniture shops are noted,
and foreign models are being copied with success.
The city is noted for its modern prison, with model workshops, the best
in China. The police corps, uniformed in knee boots, tight tunics and
German caps, and wearing swords, is a model gendarmerie. Yunnan, the
farthest removed city of the empire from the capital, Peking, has been
the foremost in these startling reforms since the French railway came
through from the coast in 1910. Many Hongkong Chinese, who at once
visited the place, are largely responsible for this reform leaven, but
the chief credit is due to the progressive governor, Li Chin Hsi, who,
remote as he was from headquarters, preserved order during the exciting
months of 1911–12. In the streets the chair coolies rush along, with
the right of way, shouting “Pei Ha” (We’ll poke you in the back). It
was once the king town of opium, where a whole city walked for years
in a sleep, but the government has largely stamped out both poppy
field and opium joint. On the parade ground on a fall day of 1909,
with military honors, the governor amusingly burned in public hundreds
of thousands of dollars worth of opium and ivory pipes. On account of
magnesian limestone and minerals in the water, awful-looking victims
of goitre are constantly met. The poppy fields are now being used by a
wide-awake people for the cultivation of mustard, rice, maize, sugar,
banana, orange, pomegranates, bamboo, walnuts, etc.
Many peculiar races and varied costumes are to be seen in this Museum
of Languages: Shans with high black head-dress and a red band across
their foreheads; Mohammedans with green turbans; Lolos without queues
and hair piled on the head like men who have a perpetual nightmare;
Tibetan women driving their pack trains to their mountain home,
the “Roof of the World,” and driving their husbands, too! Burmese
with combs in their hair, though they are not women! Kilted Kachins,
carrying their long, two-handed dha-swords on their shoulders, and
their women wearing bamboo sticks through their ears and chains of
river shells and colored stones on their necks; Annamese in gorgeous
gold silk, embroidered as though they were on their way to claim a
throne; daring, dirty Bhamo muleteers, who dare to be full of polyglot
oaths, for they wear nothing worth throwing mud at; women riding
ponies, donkeys and mules, and trying to evade the thrust of one
another’s pin-filled hair as though they were on tourney; aboriginal
Miaos and Lolos with figured yellow cloaks like circus clowns, and wide
hats whose rims are stayed down to their shoulders with strings; French
surveyors in white duck and kettle helmets, and exhausting themselves
with the vivacious volubility that you listen to on Marseilles’
Cannabiere; British in khaki, Calcutta topey-helmets and putties, and
as “cool as cucumbers” both in tongue and temperature, men who “get
there”; yellow-gowned bonzes wondering where their religion has flown
of late; black-gowned Roman priests and flat-hatted _frères_ of the
Missions d’Etrangeres, wearing Chinese soutanes; gray-gowned Taoists
who are satisfied with their incomes, because while religion has flown
in China, superstition still sticks; blue-gowned Chinese; flame-robed
Tibetan lamas; pink-gowned Buddhists, who are thinking of opening
hotels instead of temples, in which latter there has been a “slump”;
and occasionally an American in a Sabutan hat and a Shangtung silk
suit, ready for anything, and showing the mood in his eyes and laughter.
The district is gorgeous with flowers, camellias, mustard, poppies,
magnolia, indigo, olive, jasmine, and every kind of fern, bush
and vine. Yunnan is rich in animals, including the tiger and black
panther, and fine skins, and some ivory are to be obtained. Beautiful
cranes and duck are to be seen on the lake. It is also rich in
valuable lumber, and therefore its furniture stores are notable. Coal,
iron, zinc, copper and salt are produced in abundance, and there
is much gold, silver, nickel and quicksilver. The tin mines of Kuo
Chia produce 13,000,000 pounds of tin a year. There are also beds
of precious stones, rubies, garnets, sapphires, amethysts, etc. No
district of the empire has so many varied metals as Yunnan. The many
races keep the province more disjointed than any other. An authority
on these aboriginal races is the British consul at Tongyueh, Yunnan,
whose exhaustive articles have appeared in the London _Geographical
Magazine_. In natural scenery Yunnan presents the most sublime panorama
in the world.
Tsinan, the capital of Shangtung province, goes back to 1100 B. C.,
and ethnologically is very interesting, as these are the people of
Confucius and Mencius, the descendants of the Tsi State of original
China. The city, which is walled and moated, is quite beautiful with
trees, springs, mosques, theaters and temples. There are hills all
about, and inside the walls on the north a lake dotted with islands,
on which memorial arches and temples have been erected. Communication
with the sea is had by the famous Yellow River (“China’s Sorrow” of
flood), and the Grand Canal is also in touch. The German railway gives
connection with the east, and national railways are to run north,
south and west. Fine glass and the famous colored vitreous crockery,
called liu-li, are made here. The guild halls and jewelry shops on Kuan
Ti and Fu Run Boulevards are very interesting. The mineral springs
will doubtless gather sanatorium hotels. There is a girls’ school,
a military school, an arsenal, and a modern native university in the
suburbs, where English preferably and German are used in scientific
studies, and peculiarly music is also studied. The markets are well
supplied by a province rich in agriculture. Missions, colleges and
medical schools, like those of the Baptists and Presbyterians, have
a strategic center at Tsinan, as millions of Confucian and Mencian
pilgrims come here on their way to the shrine of Taishan Mountain, and
the birthplaces at Kufow (Yenchow), and Tsou, respectively.
It is to be hoped that the Duke Kung and other members of the Kung
family will take their places in China’s government, intellectual and
religious life. They are the oldest family on earth, older than the
Mikado’s ancestry, and China could with genuine and lasting pride
gather around real leaders of the Kung family for noble causes. A plan
has been drawn up by which, if the Chinese republic is a failure, an
experiment will be made to enthrone one of the Kungs (Confucius), who
happens to be a Christian He would be in somewhat of a quandary, as his
appeal to the Chinese would have to be that he was born a Confucian,
and his appeal to the five nations would be that he was a Christian.
Still a little thing as that might not bother a Chinese diplomat! It
never did in the Manchu days of twist and turn, _volte-face_, and come
back again, smiling ever! The proposed Union University of all the
American and British denominations in Shangtung will be brought from
Wai Hsien and other cities to Tsinan, and this move will be fraught
with great success, for “in union is strength.” Tsinan, with the
province of Shangtung, under the rebel governor, Sun Hao Chi, went over
to the revolution on November 13, 1911.
XXIII
RELIGIOUS AND MISSIONARY CHINA
Buddhism, the religion of China which owns most of the finer pagodas
and temples, celebrated in 1912 the 2500th anniversary of Buddha.
They do not celebrate Buddha’s birth in the body, but rather birth
in the mind or soul, the celebration being called “the anniversary
of Buddha’s enlightenment.” Despite the troubles that Buddhism has
encountered at the instigation of the government’s amban in Tibet, the
celebration occurred there with avidity, as it did also in Mongolia,
at Kuren, etc. Throughout the rest of the land, despite the prominence
of Confucianism, Taoism and Christianity, the Buddhists made their
anniversary well known. Every one was interested in those who once
taught that man should be clean, and sincere in good works, and should
love his fellow man disinterestedly. The thousand little rules for
purchasing a specific pardon in the next world have, however, confused
the Chinese mind, and many of those who looked on called the ritual
now merely a mass of superstition. No one can deny that this is the
world’s most picturesque religion which the Chinese imported from India
so long ago, and of which they are now the leading exponents. There
are temples in San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and London also. If
Buddhism were purified from its accretion of rites, and took up again
vigorous sermons on the virtues, responsibility and self-sacrifice, as
in the days when Asoka’s preachers started out to convert the world
to doctrines of service, it would not be a long step from Buddhism to
Christianity.
Architecturally, the world enthuses over Buddhism, and now that travel
to China is increasing, a cry is going up over the artistic world:
“Save the incomparable pagodas and temples for art’s sake, for they can
never be repeated, the spirit having departed.” Many of the temples
are dropping to pieces, as in the break-up of old faiths the bonzes
have been unable to collect the money which is necessary for upkeep.
The government is maintaining some of the temples, but it uses them as
schools, and the monks themselves have turned some of the temples into
inns. The nation, rich merchants and interested foreigners might take
part in preserving these beautiful monuments, and Christianity, which
is spreading in China, is wide enough in its charity to appreciate
and wish to preserve the beautiful architecture of Buddhism. Let
experiments be tried; let the government, with its supreme authority,
buy out some beautiful Buddhist temples and pagodas and turn them over
as headquarters to Christian schools or medical missions. The Buddhist
monks are a forlorn-looking set, their parishioners contributing too
little for their support. This parsimony has induced the monks to
invent the system of superstitious credit indulgences and absolutions,
which, by working on their fears regarding the future life, they compel
the Chinese--particularly the women--to buy.
As a rule the statues of Buddha are solemn or gentle-faced, as in the
Temple of the Five Hundred Genii at Canton. But there is one hilarious
exception, the laughing gilded Buddha of the Ming Hong Temple, near
Shanghai. The god’s eyebrows, nose, eyes, mouth and chin all curve
into great bows of mirth, like the irresistible Coquelin’s face in a
full-blooded comedy, or DeWolf Hopper’s face in _Wang!_ The Buddhist
priests who run inns keep a guests’ literary book, in which one will
find sentiments written by many of the world’s noted travelers. The
priests wear a yellow gown. Over the left shoulder hangs an over-gown,
made of square red patches, sewed together, typifying the vow and rags
of poverty. On the walls of the famous Lung Chang Buddhist Monastery,
near Chingtu, in Szechuen province, hangs a celebrated text reconciling
Buddhist and Christian teachings on the doctrine of peace. The Chinese
hang a popular text on the walls, which corresponds with “God bless our
home.” It is “Tien Kun Kong Fuk” (May Heaven send happiness).
Disfiguring by branding, just as the Romanists used to flagellate
themselves, has not died out in China, for some of the Buddhist and
Taoist monks of Soochow and elsewhere bear regular scars on their
shaven heads and on their limbs, placed there to show penance during
fasts, and to gain a reputation for holiness, or to use the Chinese
phrase, “attain virtue.” The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi liked to
assume the character of the Buddhist goddess Kwan Yun, and have herself
painted with bare feet riding on a lotus leaf; in her hand a rosary;
and wearing a blue veil, gray robes, a gold, garnet and pearl crown,
earrings and necklaces. The eunuchs and friends of the empress always
referred to her as the “Old Buddha,” which was the nickname that she
liked the best. It is worthy of note that the Taiping rebels in the
60’s destroyed Buddhist temples and slew the bonzes, largely because
the Buddhists of that time were opposed to progress and oppressed the
poor with their “privileged orders.” On account of his not marrying,
the Chinese call a bonze a “Chek Ke” (forsake family). They are,
therefore, despised by Chinese men, but have a stronger hold on the
women, with their picturesque religion, and good omens whenever they
are paid for them.
On the first and fifteenth of each month, a musical service is held
before dawn in the two thousand Confucian temples scattered throughout
China. These temples all contribute a little toward the support of
Confucius’s seventy-seventh direct descendant, Prince Kung Fut Tsze
(which Latinized is Confucius), of Shangtung, though some of the Kungs
are Christians. The Confucian temples contain red and gold tablets
of Confucius and his disciples instead of the statues appearing in
the Buddhist, Taoist and War temples of the land. When Kwang Hsu, the
reform emperor, issued an edict in 1898 that modern schools should
be formed, he ordered that some of the Confucian temples should be
impressed. Confucius did not institute ancestor worship in 550 B. C.
He found that it existed in his own state of Lu (present Shangtung
province) and in the adjoining states of Tsi on the north and Wei and
Sung on the west, all of whom had taken it, with the sacred tripods,
from the parent Chou clan, which brought them from misty prehistoric
days thousands of years back. To Confucius, credit should be given for
adopting ancestor worship as an indispensable rite in the organization
of the growing Tsu clan and of the future conqueror and federator of
China, the Tsin clan, which latter eventually ended feudalism, which
was then, however, adopted by Japan and carried forward to our own
day. Let us quote here the stern Carlyle’s sympathetic tribute to the
ancestor worship of the Chinese: “The emperor and his millions visit
yearly the tombs of their fathers; each man the tomb of his father and
his mother; alone there, in silence, with what of worship or of other
thought there may be, pauses solemnly each man; the divine skies all
silent over, the divine graves--and this divinest grave--all silent
under him; the pulsings of his own soul alone audible. Truly it may be
a kind of worship. Truly if a man can not get some glimpse into the
Eternities, looking through this portal, through what other need he
try it?” Attempts have been, and doubtless will continue to be made to
revivify or modernize Confucianism. The most notable of the viceroys,
Chang Chih Tung, of Wuchang, wrote a book called _China’s Only Hope_
with this in view. Confucius was averse to liquor. One of the odes of
the _Book of Odes_, written 1100 B. C., and edited by Confucius, rails
against drunkenness. The ode realistically describes a riotous banquet
which might have taken place in hilarious Vladivostok in 1904, previous
to the war, when sweet Roederer ran like water.