THE CITY OF TENGYUEH--THE CELEBRATED WUNTHO SAWBWA--SHAN SOLDIERS.
I was given a comfortable room in the telegraph offices, but I had
little privacy. My room was thronged during all the time of my visit.
The first evening I held an informal and involuntary reception, which
was attended by all the officials of the town, with the dignified
exception of the Brigadier-General. The three members of the Chinese
Boundary Commission, which had recently arranged with the British
Commission the preliminaries to the delimitation of the boundary between
Burma and China, were here, disputing with clerks, yamen-runners, and
chair-coolies for a sight of my photographs and curiosities. The
telegraph Manager Pen, Yeh (the magistrate), and a stalwart soldier
(Colonel Liu), formed the Commission, and they retain hallowed
recollections of the benignity of the Englishmen, and the excellence of
their champagne. Colonel Liu proved to be the most enlightened member of
the party. He is a tall, handsome fellow, fifty years of age, a native
of Hunan, the most warlike and anti-foreign province in China. He was
especially glad to see a foreign doctor. The gallant Colonel confided to
me a wish that had long been uppermost in his heart. From some member,
unknown, of the British Commission he had learnt of the marvellous
rejuvenating power of a barbarian medicine--could I get him some?
_Could I get him a bottle of hair-dye?_ Unlike his compatriots, who
regard the external features of longevity as the most coveted attribute
of life, this gentleman, in whose brain the light of civilisation was
dawning, wished to frustrate the doings of age. Could I get him a bottle
of hair-dye? He was in charge of the fort at Ganai, two days out on the
way to Bhamo, and would write to the officer in charge during his
absence directing him to provide me with an escort worthy of my
benefaction.
One celebrity, who lives in the neighbourhood of Tengyueh, did not
favour me with a visit. That famous dacoit, the outlawed Prince of
Wuntho--the Wuntho Sawbwa--lives here, an exile sheltered by the Chinese
Government. A pure Burmese himself, the father-in-law of the amiable
Sawbwa of Santa, he is believed by the Government of Burma to have been
"concerned in all the Kachin risings of 1892-1893." A reward of 5000
rupees is offered for his head, which will be paid equally whether the
head be on or off the shoulders. Another famous outlaw, the Shan Chief
Kanhliang, is also believed to be in hiding in the neighbourhood of
Tengyueh. The value of _his_ head has been assessed at 2000 rupees.
Tengyueh is more a park than a town. The greater part of the city within
the walls is waste land or gardens. The houses are collected mainly near
the south gate, and extend beyond the south gate on each side of the
road for half a mile on the road to Bhamo. There is an excellent wall in
admirable order, with an embankment of earth 20ft. in width. But I saw
no guns of any kind whatever, nor did I meet a single armed man in the
town or district.
Tengyueh is so situated that the invading army coming from Burma will
find a pleasant pastime in shelling it from the open hills all around
the town. This was the last stronghold of the Mohammedans. It was
formerly a prosperous border town, the chief town in all the fertile
valley of the Taiping. It was in the hands of the rebels till June 10th,
1873, when it was delivered over to the Imperialists to carnage and
destruction. The valley is fertile and well populated, and prosperity is
quickly returning to the district.
There is only one yamen in Tengyueh of any pretension, and it is the
official residence of a red-button warrior, the Brigadier-General
(_Chentai_) Chang, the successor, though not, of course, the immediate
successor, of Li-Sieh-tai, who was concerned in the murder of Margary
and the repulse of the expedition under Colonel Horace Browne in 1875. A
tall, handsome Chinaman is Chang, of soldierly bearing and blissful
innocence of all knowledge of modern warfare. Yungchang is the limit of
his jurisdiction in one direction, the Burmese boundary in the other;
his only superior officer is the Titai in Tali.
The telegraph office adjoins the City Temple and Theatre of Tengyueh. At
this time the annual festival was being celebrated in the temple.
Theatrical performances were being given in uninterrupted succession
daily for the term of one month. Play began at sunrise, and the curtain
fell, or would have fallen if there had been a curtain, at twilight. Day
was rendered hideous by the clangour of the instruments which the
blunted senses of Chinese have been misguided into believing are
musical. Already the play, or succession of plays, had continued fifteen
days, and another thirteen days had yet to be endured before its
completion. Crowds occupied the temple court during the performance,
while a considerable body of dead-heads witnessed the entertainment from
the embankment and wall overlooking the open stage. My host, the
telegraph Manager Pen, and his two friends Liu and Yeh, were given an
improvised seat of honour outside my window, and here they sat all day
and sipped tea and cracked jokes. No actresses were on the stage; the
female parts were taken by men whose make-up was admirable, and who
imitated, with curious fidelity, the voice and gestures of women. The
dresses were rich and varied. Scene-shifters, band, supers, and friends
remained on the stage during the performance, dodging about among the
actors. There is no drop curtain in a Chinese theatre, and all scenes
are changed on the open stage before you. The villain, whose nose is
painted white, vanquished by triumphant virtue, dies a gory death; he
remains dead just long enough to satisfy you that he _is_ dead, and then
gets up and serenely walks to the side. There is laughter at sallies of
indecency, and the spectators grunt their applause. The Chinaman is
rarely carried away by his feelings at the theatre; indeed, it may be
questioned if strong emotion is ever aroused in his breast, except by
the first addresses of the junior members of the China Inland Mission,
the thrilling effect of whose Chinese exhortations is recorded every
month in _China's Millions_.
The Manager of the telegraph, to show his good feeling, presented me
with a stale tin of condensed milk. His second clerk and operator was
the most covetous man I met in China. He begged in turn for nearly every
article I possessed, beginning with my waterproof, which I did not give
him, and ending with the empty milk tin, which I did, for "Give to him
that asketh," said Buddha, "even though it be but a little." The chief
operator in charge of the telegraph offices speaks a little English, and
is the medium by which English messages and letters are translated into
Chinese for the information of the officials. His name is Chueh. His
method of translation is to glean the sense of a sentence by the
probable meaning, derived from an inaccurate Anglo-Chinese dictionary,
of the separate words of the sentence. He is a broken reed to trust to
as an interpreter. Chueh is not an offensively truthful man. When he
speaks to you, you find yourself wondering if you have ever met a
greater liar than he. "Three men's strength," he says, "cannot prevail
against truth;" yet he is, I think, the greatest liar I have met since I
left Morocco. Indeed, the way he spoke of my head boy Laotseng, who was
undoubtedly an honest Chinese, and the opinion Laotseng emphatically
held of Chueh, was a curious repetition of an experience that I had not
long ago in Morocco. I was living in Tangier, when I had occasion to go
to Fez and Mequinez. My visit was arranged so hurriedly that I had no
means of learning what was the degree of personal esteem attaching to
the gentleman, a resident of Tangier, who was to be my companion. I
accordingly interrogated the hotel-keeper, Mr. B. "What kind of a man is
D.?" I asked. "Not a bad fellow," he replied, "if he wasn't such a
blank, blank awful liar!" On the road to Wazan I became very friendly
with D., and one day questioned him as to his private regard for Mr. B.
of the hotel. "A fine fellow B. seems," I said, "very friendly and
entertaining. What do you think of him?" "What do I think of him?" he
shouted in his falsetto. "I _know_ he's the biggest blank liar in
Morocco." It was pleasant to meet, even in Morocco, such a rare case of
mutual esteem.
My pony fared badly in Tengyueh. There was a poor stable in the
courtyard with a tiled roof that would fall at the first shower. There
were no beans. The pony had to be content with rice or paddy, which it
disliked equally. The rice was _1-1/2d._ the 7-1/2lbs. There was no
grass, Chueh said, to be obtained in the district. He assured me so on
his honour, or its Chinese equivalent; but I sent out and bought some in
the street round the corner.
Silver in Tengyueh is the purest Szechuen or Yunnanese silver. Rupees
are also current, and at this time were equivalent to 400 cash--the tael
at the same time being worth 1260 cash. Every 10 taels, costing me
_30s._ in Shanghai, I could exchange in Tengyueh for 31 rupees. Rupees
are the chief silver currency west from Tengyueh into Burma.
On May 31st I had given instructions that we were to leave early, but my
men, who did not sleep in the telegraph compound, were late in coming.
To still further delay me, at the time of leaving no escort had made its
appearance. I did not wait for it. We marched out of the town
unaccompanied, and were among the tombstones on the rise overlooking the
town when the escort hurriedly overtook us. It consisted of a
quiet-mannered chairen and two soldiers, one of whom was an impudent cub
that I had to treat with every indignity. He was armed with a sword
carried in the folds of his red cincture, in which was also concealed an
old muzzle-loading pistol, formidable to look at but unloaded. This was
one of the days on my journey when I wished that I had brought a
revolver, not as a defence in case of danger, for there was no danger,
but as a menace on occasion of anger.
Rain fell continuously. At a small village thronged with muleteers from
Bhamo we took shelter for an hour. The men sipping tea under the
verandahs had seen Europeans in Bhamo, and my presence evoked no
interest whatever. Many of these strangers possessed an astonishing
likeness to European friends of my own. Contact with Europeans, causing
the phenomena of "maternal impression," was probably in a few cases
accountable for the moulding of their features, but the general
prevalence of the European type has yet to be explained. "My conscience!
Who could ever have expected to meet _you_ here?" I was often on the
point of saying to some Chinese Shan or Burmese Shan in whom, to my
confusion, I thought I recognised a college friend of my own.
Leaving the village, we followed the windings of the River Taiping,
coasting along the edge of the high land on the left bank of the river.
[Illustration: THE SUBURB BEYOND THE SOUTH GATE OF TENGYUEH. (Stalls
under the Umbrellas.)]
Rain poured incessantly; the creeks overflowed; the paths became
watercourses and were scarcely fordable. "Bones," my opium-eating coolie
with the long neck, slipped into a hole which was too deep even for his
long shanks, and all my bedding was wetted. It was ninety li to Nantien,
the fort we were bound to beyond Tengyueh, and we finished the distance
by sundown. The town is of little importance. It is situated on an
eminence and is surrounded by a wall built, with that strange spirit of
contrariness characteristic of the Chinese, and because it incloses a
fort, more weakly than any city wall. It is not more substantial nor
higher than the wall round many a mission compound. Some 400 soldiers
are stationed in the fort, which means that the commander draws the pay
for 1000 soldiers, and represents the strength of his garrison as 1000.
Their arms are primitive and rusty muzzle-loaders of many patterns;
there are no guns to be seen, if there are any in existence--which is
doubtful. The few rusty cast-iron ten-pounders that lie _hors de combat_
in the mud have long since become useless. There may be ammunition in
the fort; but there is none to be seen. It is more probable, and more in
accordance with Chinese practice in such matters, that the ammunition
left by his predecessor (if any were left, which is doubtful) has long
ago been sold by the colonel in command, whose perquisite this would
naturally be.
The fort of Nantien is a fort in name only--it has no need to be
otherwise, for peace and quiet are abroad in the valley. Besides, the
mere fact of its being called a fort is sufficiently misleading to the
neighbouring British province of Burma, where they are apt to picture a
Chinese fort as a structure seriously built in some accordance with
modern methods of fortification.
I was given a comfortable room in a large inn already well filled with
travellers. All treated me with pleasant courtesy. They were at supper
when I entered the room, and they invited me to share their food. They
gave me the best table to myself, and after supper they crowded into
another room in order to let me have the room to myself.
Next day we continued along the sandy bed of the river, which was here
more than a mile in width. The river itself, shrunk now into its
smallest size, flowed in a double stream down the middle. Then we left
the river, and rode along the high bank flanking the valley. All paved
roads had ended at Tengyueh, and the track was deeply cut and jagged by
the rains. At one point in to-day's journey the road led up an almost
vertical ascent to a narrow ledge or spur at the summit, and then fell
as steeply into the plain again. It was a short-cut, that, as you would
expect in China, required five times more physical effort to compass
than did the longer but level road which it was intended to save. So
narrow is the ridge that the double row of open sheds leaves barely room
for pack mules to pass. The whole traffic on the caravan route to Burma
passes by this spot. The long bamboo sheds with their grass roofs are
divided into stalls, where Shan women in their fantastic turbans, with
silver bracelets and earrings, their lips and teeth stained with
betel-juice, sit behind the counters of raised earth, and eagerly
compete for the custom of travellers. More than half the women had
goitre. Before them were laid out the various dishes. There were pale
cuts of pork, well soaked in water to double their weight, eggs and
cabbage and salted fish, bean curds, and a doubtful tea flavoured with
camomile and wild herbs. There were hampers of coarse grass for the
horses, and wooden bowls of cooked rice for the men, while hollow
bamboos were used equally to bring water from below, to hold sheaves of
chopsticks where the traveller helped himself, and to receive the cash.
Trade was busy. Muleteers are glad to rest here after the climb, if only
to enjoy a puff of tobacco from the bamboo-pipe which is always carried
by one member of the party for the common use of all.
Descending again into the river valley, I rode lazily along in the sun,
taking no heed of my men, who were soon separated from me. The broad
river-bed of sand was before me as level as the waters of a lake. As I
was riding slowly along by myself, away from all guard, I saw
approaching me in the lonely plain a small body of men. They were moving
quickly along in single file, and we soon met and passed each other.
They were three Chinese Shan officers on horseback, dressed in Chinese
fashion, and immediately behind them were six soldiers on foot, who I
saw were Burmese or Burmese Shans. They were smart men, clad in loose
jerseys and knickerbockers, with sun-hats and bare legs, and they
marched like soldiers. Cartridge-belts were over their left shoulders,
and Martini-Henry rifles, carried muzzle foremost, on their right. I
took particular note of them because they were stepping in admirable
order, and, though small of stature, I thought they were the first armed
men I had met in all my journey across China who could without shame be
presented as soldiers in any civilised country.
They passed me, but seemed struck by my appearance; and I had not gone a
dozen yards before they all stopped by a common impulse, and when I
looked back they were still there in a group talking, with the officers'
horses turned towards me; and it was very evident I was the subject of
their conversation. I was alone at the time, far from all my men,
without weapon of any kind. I was dressed in full Chinese dress and
mounted on an unmistakably Chinese pony. I rode unconcernedly on, but I
must confess that I did not feel comfortable till I was assured that
they did not intend to obtrude an interview upon me. At length, to my
relief, the party continued on its way, while I hurried on to my
coolies, and made them wait till my party was complete. I was probably
alarmed without any reason. But it was not till I arrived in Burma that
I learnt that this was the armed escort of the outlawed Wuntho Sawbwa,
the dacoit chief who has a price set on his head. The soldiers' rifles
and cartridge-belts had been stripped from the dead bodies of British
sepoys, killed on the frontier in the Kachin Hills.
My men, when we were all together again, indicated to me by signs that
I would shortly meet an elephant, and I thought that at last I was about
to witness the realisation of that story, everywhere current in Western
China, of the British tribute from Burma. Sure enough we had not gone
far when, at the foot of a headland which projected into the plain, we
came full upon a large elephant picking its way along the margin of the
rocks--a remarkable sight to my Chinese. Its scarlet howdah was empty;
its trappings were scarlet; the mahout was a Shan. It was the elephant
of the Wuntho Prince--a little earlier and I might have had the
privilege of meeting the dacoit himself. The elephant passed
unconcernedly on, and we continued down the plain of sand to the village
of Ganai, where we were to stay the night.
It was market-day in the town. A double row of stalls extended down the
main street, each stall under the shelter of a huge umbrella. Japanese
matches from Osaka were for sale here, and foreign nick-nacks, needles
and braid and cotton, and Manchester dress stuffs mixed with the
multitudinous articles of native produce. This is a Shan town, but large
numbers of native women--Kachins--were here also with their ugly black
faces, and coarse black fringes hiding their low foreheads. Far away
from the town an obliging Shan had attached himself to us as guide. He
was dressed in white cotton jacket and dark-blue knickerbockers, with a
dark-blue sash round his waist. He was barelegged, and rode as the
Chinese do, and as you would expect them to do who do everything _al
reves_, with the heel in the stirrup instead of the toe. His turban was
dark-blue, and the pigtail was coiled up under it, and did not hang down
from under the skull cap as with the Chinese. When I rode into the town
accompanied by the guide, all the people forsook the market street and
followed the illustrious stranger to the inn which had been selected for
his resting-place. It was a favourite inn, and was already crowded. The
best room was in possession of Chinese travellers, who were on the road
like myself. They were dozing on the couches, but what must they do when
I entered the room but, thinking that I should wish to occupy it by
myself, rise and pack up their things, and one after another move into
another apartment adjoining, which was already well filled, and now
became doubly so. Their thoughtfulness and courtesy charmed me. They
must have been more tired than I was, but they smiled and nodded
pleasantly to me as they left the room, as if they were grateful to me
for putting them to inconvenience. They may be perishing heathen, I
thought, but the average deacon or elder in our enlightened country
could scarcely be more courteous.
Ganai is a mud village thatched with grass. It is a military station
under the command of the red-button Colonel Liu, whom I met in Tengyueh.
The Colonel had earned his bottle of hair-dye. He had written to have me
provided with an escort, and by-and-by the two officers who were to
accompany me on the morrow came in to see me. As many spectators as
could find elbow-room squeezed into my room behind them. Both were
gentlemanly young fellows, very amiable and inquisitive, and keenly
desirous to learn all they could concerning my honourable family. Their
curiosity was satisfied. By the help of my Chinese phrase-book I gave
them all particulars, and a few more. You see it was important that I
should leave as favourable an impression as possible for the benefit of
future travellers. More than one of my ancestors I brought to life again
and endowed with a patriarchal age and a beard to correspond. As to my
own age they marvelled greatly that one so young-looking could be so
old, and when, in answer to their earnest question, I modestly confessed
that I was already the unhappy possessor of two unworthy wives, five
wretched sons, and three contemptible daughters, their admiration of my
virtue increased tenfold.
The officers left me after this, but till late at night I held _levées_
of the townsfolk, our landlady, who was most zealous, no sooner
dismissing one crowd than another pressed into its place. The courtyard,
I believe, remained filled till early in the morning, but I was allowed
to sleep at last.
A large crowd followed me out of the town in the morning, and swarmed
with me across the beautiful sward, as level as the Oval, which here
widens into the country. No guest was ever sped on his way with a
kindlier farewell. The fort is outside the town; we passed it on our
left; it is a square inclosure of considerable size, inclosed by a mud
wall 15 feet high; it is in the unsheltered plain, and presents no
formidable front to an invader. At each of the four corners outside the
square are detached four-sided watch-towers. No guns of any kind are
mounted on the walls, and there are no sentries; one could easily
imagine that the inclosure was a market-square, but imagination could
never picture it as a serious obstacle to an armed entry into Western
China. The river was well on our right. The plain down which we rode is
of exceeding richness and highly cultivated, water being trained into
the paddy-fields in the same way that everywhere prevails in China
proper. Buffaloes were ploughing--wearily plodding through mud and water
up to their middles. We were now among the Shans, and those working in
the fields were Shans, not Chinese. Ganai, Santa, and other places are
but little principalities or Shan States, governed by hereditary
princelets or Sawbwas, and preserving a form of self-government under
the protection of the Chinese. There are no more charming people in the
world than the Shans. They are courteous, hospitable, and honest, with
all the virtues and few of the vices of Orientals. "The elder brothers
of the Siamese, they came originally from the Chinese province of
Szechuen, and they can boast of a civilisation dating from twenty-three
centuries B.C." So Terrien de Lacouperie tells us, who had a happy
faculty of drawing upon his imagination for his facts.
Under the wide branches of a banyan tree I made my men stop, for I was
very tired, and while they waited I lay down for an hour on the grass
and had a refreshing sleep. While I slept, the rest of the escort sent
to "_sung_" me to Santa arrived. Within a few yards of my resting place
there is a characteristic monument, dating from the time when Burma
occupied not only this valley but the fertile territory beyond it, and
beyond Tengyueh to the River Salween. It is a solid Burmese pagoda,
built of concentric layers of brick and mortar, and surmounted with a
solid bell-shaped dome that is still intact. It stands alone on the
plain near a group of banyans, and its erection no doubt gained many
myriads of merits for the conscience-stricken Buddhist who found the
money to build it. All goldleaf has been peeled off the pagoda years
ago.
It was a picturesque party that now enfiladed into the wide stretch of
sand which in the rainy season forms the bed of the river. Mounted on
his white pony, there was the inarticulate European who had discarded
his Chinese garb and was now dressed in the æsthetic garments of the
Australian bush; there were his two coolies and Laotseng his boy, none
of whom could speak any English, the two officers in their loose Chinese
clothes, mounted on tough little ponies, and eight soldiers. They were
Shans of kindly feature, small and nimble fellows, in neat
uniforms--green jackets edged with black and braided with yellow, yellow
sashes, and loose dark-blue knickerbockers--the uniform of the Sawbwa of
Ganai. They were armed with Remington rifles, carried their cartridges
in bandoliers, and seemed to be of excellent fighting material. All
their accoutrements were in good order.
Now we had to cross the broad stream, here running with a swift current
over the sand, in channels of varying depths that are frequently
changing. For the width of nearly half a mile at the crossing place the
water was never shallower than to my knee, nor deeper than to my waist.
We all crossed safely, but, to my tribulation, the soldier who was
carrying my two boxes tripped in the deepest channel and let both boxes
slip from the carrying pole into the water. All the notes and papers
upon which this valuable record is founded were much damaged. But it
might have been worse. I had a presentiment that an accident would
happen, and had waded back to the channel and was standing by at the
time. But for this the papers might have been floated down to the
Irrawaddy and been lost to the world--loss irreparable!
The sun was very hot. I laid out my things on the bank and dried them.
Long and narrow dugouts, as light and swift as the string-test gigs of
civilisation, paddled or poled, were gliding with extraordinary speed
down the channel near the bank. Riding then a little way, we dismounted
under a magnificent banyan tree, one of the finest specimens, I should
think, in the world. Ponies and men were dwarfed into Lilliputians under
the amazing canopy of its branches. A number of villagers, come to see
the foreigner, were clambering like monkeys over its roots, which
"writhed in fantastic coils" over half an acre. Their village was hard
by, a poor array of mud houses; the teak temple to which we were
conducted was raised on piles in the centre of the village. The temple
was lumbered like an old curiosity shop with fragmentary gods and torn
missals. Yet the ragged priest in his smirched yellow gown, and shaven
head that had been a week unshaven, seemed to enjoy a reputation for no
common sanctity, to judge by the reverence shown him by my followers,
and the contemptuous indifference with which he regarded their
obeisance. He was club-footed and could only hobble about with
difficulty--an excuse he would, no doubt, urge for the disorder of his
sanctuary. To me, of course, he was very polite, and gave me the best
seat he had, while Laotseng prepared me a bowl of cocoa. Then we rode
along the right bank of the river, but kept moving away from the stream
till in the distance across the plain at the foot of the hills, we saw
the Shan town of Santa, the end of our day's stage.
Native women, returning from the town, were wending their way across the
plain--lank overgrown girls with long thin legs and overhanging mops of
hair like deck-swabs. They were a favourite butt of my men, who chaffed
them in the humorous Eastern manner, with remarks that were, I am
afraid, more coarse than witty. Kachins are not virtuous. Their customs
preclude such a possibility. No Japanese maiden is more innocent of
virtue than a Kachin girl.