man’s religion. Yet it recognizes woman’s work. A bronze brazier stands
before the open white marble altar at Peking, in which once a year at
the ancient Chou sacrifices to the God of Heaven, the emperor-pope
burns silk. The Manchu emperor, in abdicating the throne, retained
his sacerdotal offices, though strictly speaking, they should have
fallen to the Ducal Kung Fut Tszes, of Shangtung province, who are
the seventy-seventh in direct line from Confucius. A number of the
Kungs, however, are Christians, and they exerted little insistence on
their Confucian privileges. The care of the worms and the weaving of
silk is distinctly woman’s work in China. This sacrifice is repeated
by the governor at every capital, and heads of families sometimes, in
their own office of patriarch priest, make the silk sacrifice. This is
quite distinct from hiring a Taoist bonze to burn silvered and gilded
imitations of money to appease a devil or “ying” spirit. A patriarch
would have no influence there, the operation requiring a specialist
more familiar with witches and demons! The Chinese women always sit on
chairs and lounges (kangs); the Koreans and Japanese sit on the floor.
This does not mean that the Koreans, whom the Japanese have conquered,
are in sympathy with the latter, for they thoroughly hate each other.
The Chinese never wear a feather, except to denote literary rank in
men. Therefore the bucolic natives who see the fashion of western
women, remark: “Only your women are educated, and very talented at
that, some having a dozen literary degrees.” Millinery is for men, not
for women in China, as only men wear a feathered cap. The gorgeous tail
feathers of the Machi species of pheasant are particularly popular.
Preserves of these birds are kept in the Wei valley, north of the
Peling range of mountains in far western Kansu province, to provide the
men milliners with supplies!
A well-known custom at Chinese weddings is the effort of the bride
to sit upon part of the groom’s gown when they are drinking the
betrothal tea together. The cups are tied with a red string, and the
groom must not break the string in his effort to release his gown. If
the bride succeeds it means that she will be his ruler. A partially
similar custom prevails among the Miaotse aboriginal tribes of Yunnan
province. The friends of the groom endeavor to prevent the bride’s
brothers from throwing her veil on the roof of the house. If the latter
are successful in the rush, the omen is that the bride will rule the
groom, saying in any argument: “Remember that on June 15th my veil
went on your roof!” The midwife is a well-filled calling, but she does
not go by that name. She is called the “life-catcher” throughout the
land. The “mother-in-law” joke does not obtain in China. Its place is
taken by the son-in-law joke. It is the aim of the son-in-law and his
wife to “go and live on mother” as long as possible. Mother resents
it with the usual complaint: “Here comes my son-in-law, with his wife
and six children, to live on us again for a month; dearie me,” etc.!
When a family marries off a daughter, generally to save the expense
of supporting her, they hope to see the last of her as far as that
expense goes. Family courtesy, the Confucian “li” code, prescribes
yearly entertainment, however, of the son-in-law’s family, which is
not reciprocated, and hence the standing of the son-in-law joke as a
mirth-provoker among those who perceive the code’s requirements obeyed,
with exactness but not with cheerfulness!
Although the race has for centuries shaved the heads of the men almost
to baldness, they have a great abhorrence of baldness in women, and
this is frequently pleaded as a cause for divorce or breaking of an
engagement (marriage contract). The women in general have luxuriant
hair, though it is coarse, and its color and luster remain till late
in life, owing to the use of oils, the absence of hats, and the
out-of-door habits. If the lion-like chow dog (yellow or black) is the
pet of the men, the Pekingese toy spaniel is the pet of the Manchu
woman. She calls it her “sleeve dog.” The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi
enumerated its points as follows: “It shall learn to bite a stranger;
its toy body shall be maned and fixed with the fierce eyes of the
great lion seeking its prey. Its ears shall be set like the sails of a
war junk; its nose shall be stubby like the monkey god of the Hindus;
its forelegs shall be bowed so that it can walk over the foot of its
mistress, but shall not be able to stray far from the yamen; its feet
shall be tufted so that its step shall be as on turf; and its color
shall suit every change of gown. It shall be fed on the breasts of
quails, livers of curlews and sharks’ fins. Its drink shall be Hankau,
first-budded tea and antelope’s milk. If ill, it shall be anointed
with the fat of leopards, and drink a thrush-egg full of the juice of
the custard apple and dissolved rhinoceros’ horn. If very ill, piebald
leeches shall be applied to it.” Despite all this poetry which aptly
goes with this fashionable dog, it thrives very well on Spratt’s dog
biscuit in the salons of West End, London, and Fifth Avenue, New York.
A number of ladies are mixing up Chinese and Japanese names for the
pets at the bench shows (Peking Yen, for instance), but the dog answers
very well to the names Jip, Tip, etc., which we used to call those
old favorite toy dogs, the black-and-tans. The dog looks like a cross
between a Pomeranian and a King Charles spaniel. The face is decidedly
lion-like; the bushy tail sweeps well over the back as does that of his
big brother, the Chinese chow dog. The legs are short and bowed, and
the manner is very alert.
Possibly overmuch has been written that the Chinese despise female
children and worship male children. In the economic and religious
structure of old China boys have been more valuable, but the human
heart of the race has responded to love for its girls. Poverty, more
than hardness of heart, has induced the race in instances to sell its
girls; for China has been very poor because of flood and famine,
resulting from inefficiency of government and the non-development of
mines and manufacturing. The two greatest teachers of old China have
for twenty-five centuries taught love of children in the following
among other maxims. Confucius said: “Treat the young tenderly,” and
Mencius wrote: “The great man is he who does not lose his child’s
heart.” Where the parents can afford it, the Chinese dress their boys
and girls expensively and gorgeously, and fondle them as lovingly as do
the Hebrews, who are supposed to set the standard in love for children,
as compared with us colder northern races. One of the first things that
the new government will attempt to suppress will be the sale of girl
slaves and concubinage. The population of China will fall or remain
stationary, which will be a good thing for China. There is, therefore,
no “Yellow Peril” for the West, as the Emperor William enunciated in
1898. The poorer a man, the more children he desires in China, so that
sons may take care of him in old age, but he forgets that he is raising
uneducated sons and neglected girls, who are often sold into slavery.
Better a family of four well-cared-for children in the new hygienic
Cathay than a family of ten in the old China. China’s population will
fall under the new régime, but her efficiency, education and comfort
will advance, and those who will benefit the most, as compared with
their former condition, will be her women.
At the time of the revolution, October, 1911, to February, 1912, there
were 400,000 starving girls and women in the Yangtze and Hwei River
valleys alone who offered to sell themselves for food; China’s courts
will no more defend the legality of such contracts under duress, as we
in the West must revise our “freedom of contract” and “confession” laws
where an uninformed or a restrained individual signs away rights. Every
Chinese boy has till now married early in life, Shanghai being an
exception in having a large demi-monde colony. The _Kuo Kuang Pao_, a
native paper of Peking, complained in a late issue of courtesans (with
modesty they call it rather the “custom of Shanghai”) coming to Peking,
and soliciting students brazenly in the streets. Shanghai has a “slave
refuge” for the protection of abandoned and abused girls. Intense
poverty on account of famine is at the base of this curse. It is not
as common in Hongkong and Canton as in the valleys of the Hoang, Han,
Yangtze and Hwei Rivers.
The position of the Chinese woman, taken by the white man, who is mean
enough to do it, as a common law wife, and of their Eurasian children,
who are often not acknowledged, or are deserted, is a pathetic one in
Hongkong, Shanghai and many treaty ports. It was more common in the
old days than it is now, and men of high position often fell, when the
Oriental ports were designated over an ill-informed world as the “white
man’s grave,” to which no white woman would come. There are Eurasian
schools and orphanages in Hongkong, Shanghai, Macao, etc., and the
colonies of deserted Eurasians have a population of thousands. They are
far from unintelligent. The best billiard player in Hongkong was of
this mixed race. They have dark eyes and hair and dress in both foreign
and Chinese style. They are taller and have larger heads than the pure
Chinese. In the second and third generations the hair turns fairer.
Naturally they partake of the characteristics of each race. A Eurasian
is more sprightly than the Chinese, and he is inclined to the sporting
and spendthrift proclivities of the foreigner. They are the clerks
and second men of the ports. Few rise high, though many now attend
colleges. They are the best penmen and linguists of the Far Fast,
though not earnest enough to become scholars, or persistent enough
to become the successful merchants which the men of their mother’s
race are. Feeling sometimes acutely the opprobrium which is visited
upon them by both races, they often claim a dark foreign nationality,
generally Portuguese of Macao colony.
I want to relate the remarkable history of one Eurasian and his mother.
I shall say no more of his father than that in blood and ability he
was one of the noblest names that came for a long sojourn in the Far
East. His position was such that the father could not own the son,
especially as in time the former married a white woman. The boy, who
from the beginning bore a Chinese name, was the picture of his father,
and his dressing in Chinese clothes and wearing a queue shocked all
of us who knew the history, for the boy was taller than the Chinese
and had the face of a foreigner. Some laughed, for the youth seemed
to be a foreigner on perpetual masquerade. He came into our hong as
clerk, was easily the best penman and figurer in the office. His
manners were those of fashionable West End, London, or genteel Upper
Fifth Avenue; you felt when you heard him speak that you were talking
to your superior. He often had business dealings with his father, yet
he did not seem conscious of the relationship. The son, being even
the abler man, the painful dramatic situation was pitiful. The tall
Eurasian youth married a Chinese woman in time, and reverted to his
mother’s race, and his deserted Chinese mother returned to her blood,
married a Chinese, had many pure blood children, and publicly disowned
her Eurasian boy. Privately, however, the boy and mother sometimes
met, and the scene matched in dramatic pathos the meetings with the
father. The youth seemed to be cheerful despite all these trials. I
never saw him reveal pride or resentment; only in this way, when in
later years for a time, he came into a position of power in a Chinese
company which entered into international trade, he was merciless when
the white competitor withstood him. I have often felt his mighty
blows and been outwitted by his commercial strategy. He smiled in a
complacent way as though to say: “Why might I not circumvent you; you
know something, perhaps, about one race, but nothing about the other.
I, being a Eurasian, know much about the two races.” He deserved all
his conquests. He had something to avenge, and he did right in casting
his life with China and not Europe. The remarkably dramatic setting of
this boy’s, his mother’s and father’s life would have given Shakespeare
material for a tragedy, and the foreigner concerned would have paid
the price of his heartless audacity, despite the romantic poetry
which Pierre Loti wove around such relationships in his book _Madame
Chrysanthème_.
Perhaps the most significant sign of China’s reform is the new status
of women. Never before have Chinese women traveled with their merchant
husbands. In a few isolated instances Chinese ministers have taken
their wives abroad, but there have never been mixed parties of men
and women until the revolution. On November, 1911, a touring party
of prominent members of Chinese trading guilds of several of the
provinces met at Shanghai for a business tour of Japan. They were
accompanied by their wives. The New China has its Mrs. Pankhurst in
Miss Yik Yung Ying, of Canton, who is foreign trained and has admission
to the Nanking Assembly as representing the women of her province of
Kwangtung. She has obtained from the Nanking Assembly a promise of
equal suffrage on equal property and educational conditions. Some of
her suffragettes attacked the assembly police and broke windows in true
Pankhurst style, the patient Chinese wits only remarking: “This froth
will blow off the glass and leave the clear liquid!”
Many girls of the mission schools of Canton, Fuchau and the Yangtze
cities of the rebellion could not be restrained from serving at
the front in the republican revolution. Some of them tried to form
bomb-throwing corps. Where they insisted on service the missionaries
of Wuchang, Hankau, Shanghai and Nanking organized them in several
uniformed Red Cross Corps, which performed effective and brave work.
The large clans, or family villages, are sending to the missions for
graduate teachers to take charge of their girls. The head man (hsiang
lao) sets apart a bedroom, a schoolroom and a courtyard for the
school, and the whole family clan contributes. The mothers of course
continue their instruction in the Chinese classics, folk lore, religion
and their inimitable needlework. Elsewhere I have spoken of the St.
Hilda’s school at Wuchang, under American Episcopal auspices, which
aims to become the Women’s College of Central China. A daughter of the
original reformer, Kang Yu Wei, has studied in America. Miss Li Yu,
the granddaughter of Li Hung Chang, took the course at Wells Female
College, at Aurora, New York, where she was a prize scholar.
Cornell in particular, Hartford High, Leland Stanford, Columbia,
University of Washington State, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, University
of Michigan, and all the women’s and co-ed colleges in America have
enrolled more Chinese women than all the other women’s colleges of the
world, but not so many as they might and will, now that the new régime
has opened with rainbow promise. Forty young Chinese women are studying
medicine in America through the work of China’s first woman doctor,
Miss Ya Mi Kin, who is in charge of the Tientsin Woman’s Hospital and
nurses’ school.
A remarkable Chinese woman doctor, going by the name of Doctor Mary
Stone (educated at University of Michigan), manages the American
hospital at Kiukiang, and Doctor Tsang Cho Kin, a Cantonese lady, is
prominent in modern medical work at Canton, Fuchau and Shanghai. The
American Presbyterian women (to instance only one denomination here)
have seventeen girls’ schools open at Canton alone, and in addition the
following exemplary development: a school for blind girls, in charge
of Doctor Mary Niles; a boarding school for children of lepers; a
hospital school for girls in charge of Mrs. Kerr; a training school for
women teachers; the Hackett Medical College for women; and the Turner
Nurses’ School, under the charge of the noted Doctor Mary Fulton. At
Ningpo there is a girls’ school and a women’s industrial school. At
Shanghai there is the well-known girls’ school at the south gate; and
at Hangchow and Nanking there are girls’ boarding schools. At Nanking
the wives of Chinese taotais (officials such as mayors) are encouraged
to preside over mothers’ meetings. At Peking there is the Bridgman
College for Women, a women’s medical college and nurses’ school, a
girls’ day and industrial school. At Paoting, in Pechili, there is
the Union School for Girls; at Tengchow, in Shangtung, a girls’ high
school and industrial school; and at Tsinan a girls’ school. At many of
these girls’ schools, presided over by foreign women, the Chinese pay
much of the expense; and they are copying the schools to the best of
their ability all over the land for their girls and women, and calling
upon the mission women’s schools for graduates whom they may use as
teachers. There is no greater proof that the New China has begun its
march toward the sun than that its womanhood has at last been thus
recognized in modern education and opportunity.
Womanhood over the world responds to the same chord of sympathy. One of
the contributions to the Woman’s _Titanic_ Memorial came from a Chinese
girl, Ying Low, with this message: “I send this for Captain Smith’s
soul.” The word for woman in Chinese is “nu,” and the probability now
is that she will be new indeed, and the foundation stone of the New
China for her sons.
The first modern style Chinese marriage among those not Christian was
solemnized in April, 1912, in the well-known Chang Su Ho Gardens,
Shanghai. The families concerned were wealthy and the marriage was a
civil one. A ring, music, flowers, witnesses, a public ceremony and
certificate contract all came into use. There was nothing picturesquely
old-style or secret, as the middleman, the closed chair, the ceremony
at the groom’s house, the joined teacups, the contests between teams
of both families, the worshiping of sticks and house coffins, the
discordant orchestra, the chairs of food, the goose present and
heckling of the bride by practical jokers.
XXVIII
AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY IN CHINA
Agriculture has always been a leading calling in China. The farms are
small and are intensively worked. They have been too small, and the
immense population has been crowded into the river plains only of the
vast country. Not one quarter of China and its territories is worked
as it might be. The adopting of machinery and the application of the
single tax to some of the unworked land by the new régime will make
possible the enlargement of farms, and the consequent stocking with
meat, milk, egg, wool and skin-producing animals on a vast scale.
The decrease of population that will occur owing to the decadence of
ancestor-worshiping Confucianism, and the system of early marriage
and concubinage, will necessitate the introduction of agricultural
machinery. An increased agriculture will bring about the exportation
of food products from so fertile and sunny a land. The enhancement of
hygiene with the new medical knowledge will confirm this increased
production in agriculture, as there will be no waste of life through
ignorance, and human surplus vitality will be directed to increasing
the productivity of the land, and the reclamation of the waste spaces.
In agricultural wisdom little can be taught the Chinese. In love of
and assiduity in agriculture no one equals him. Professors King and
Ross, of Wisconsin University, have dealt in an exhaustive way with
the subject, and other books recommended to the inquirer are Ball’s
_Things Chinese_, Williams’s _Middle Kingdom_, Fielde’s _Corner of
Cathay_, the journals of the Royal Asiatic Society, Lay’s _Chinese As
They Are_, and Douglas’s _Society in China_. The list of products is
exceedingly long. Here are just a few as we run down the gamut from the
north to the south: wheat, all millets, maize, buckwheat, sugar beet,
tobacco, pulse, hay, straw braid, soy and other beans, barley, sorghum,
rhubarb and drugs, hemp, all berries and tree fruits, cotton, sesamum,
indigo, persimmons, melons, walnuts, almonds, olives, peanuts, tea,
bamboo, rice, sweet and white potatoes, grass-cloth plant, oranges,
sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, pumeloes, lichee, quince, ginger, loquat,
mulberry, mustard, tallow trees, flowers for perfumery, lily roots for
food and candy, colza nuts for oil, rhus nuts for varnish, camphor,
all hardwoods, insect wax, matting and opium. Their truck farms are
unequaled. They seem to lose not one lettuce or cabbage leaf. Every
bug is nipped in the chrysalis by hand; everybody works from dewy dawn
to twilight’s star! Where China exports $40,000,000 of agricultural
products to-day to the manufacturing nations that border the Pacific
and Atlantic, to-morrow she will export $400,000,000, besides becoming
herself richer in pantry and bank.
The farmers are always searching for soil enrichers, with such success
that you seldom see the nitrogen-starved yellow instead of green field.
Not a handful of ashes is wasted; not an herb or branch but is gathered
for the compost heap to make humus. Water is brought over the land,
that it may deposit its nitrogenous wealth, and the mud of canals is
dredged for the valuable rotted slime. Three times a year a part of
China, 1,200 miles long and 1,200 miles wide, is one vast flooded
field. By placing mud walls around his fields, a farmer does not need
to raise all his irrigation water by power. Rather, he directs gravity,
for he saves the rapid surface draining of the land, especially in
the higher terraces. In the lower terraces he digs wells to store the
surface water against drought. The water showered upon the higher
fields he lets down to the lower during dry periods. They believe in a
rotation of soils as well as in a rotation of crops, and will exchange
bodily a rice field’s and an orchard’s top soil. By intensive farming a
Chinese gets as much from a ten-acre farm as we get from a hundred-acre
one, and he never permits a soil to be impoverished by its crop. You
never see his implements, rude as they are, left uncovered over night.
He carries home even his straw fork, which is made three-pronged by
training nature instead of fashioning by hand. When the farmer’s wife
and girls are not in the field they are working up straw braid for
America’s and Europe’s hats and weaving silk and making embroidery for
western gowns.
South of the Yangtze River human nightsoil is mixed with water and
applied to the farms in liquid form. North of the Yangtze the drier
climate permits of mixing the manure with earth and drying the slabs
for transport. A farmer in South China willingly builds a toilet on the
public road and requests the public, including the humorously shocked
foreigner, with a sign which is much shorter than my words, to remember
how China must be fertilized in order to support more inhabitants to
the acre than any other land! The result is that China’s streams,
outside of the suspended mud and silt that they carry, alone of all
countries, are nearly pure, and foreign sanitary engineers take potable
water directly from the rivers, as at Hankau, Canton, etc. The loss
to the land of fertilizers by burning them as fuel, in the absence
of forests and worked coal mines, is nowhere better illustrated than
in Mongolia and the province of Fukien. In Mongolia the camel dung
is dried and used as fuel. In Fukien, railway development has been
retarded, and the coal of the Ankoi and other mines does not reach the
hut in the field. Straw, therefore, instead of returning to the land,
is of necessity used as fuel. For instance, take the tanning industry.
The hides are thrown in a pond, in which there is a solution of alum.
After peeling, the leather is stretched on springy frames of strong
bamboo, and placed over an earthen furnace for smoking and drying. The
fuel is _straw_, which gives the hide a yellow color, at a lamentable
cost. In their opening era of manufacturing, the Chinese do not intend
to permit dyes, chemicals, refuse or sewage to be drained into their
streams and rivers, which from their source to the sea are used over
and over for irrigation and for drinking.