{184}
_Numerous walled towns--The dirt of them--T'ung Chou--Romance of the
evening light--My own little walled city--The gateways--Hospitable
landlady--Bald heads--My landlady's room--A return present--“The
ringleaders have been executed”--Summary justice--To the rescue of the
missionaries at Hsi An Fu--The Elder Brother Society-Primitive method of
attack and defence--The sack of I Chun._
|Oh that first walled city! It was the first of many walled cities, many
of them so small that it did not take us more than a quarter of an hour
to cross from gate to gate; but to enter one and all was like opening a
door into the past, into the life our forbears lived before the country
I was born and brought up in was ever thought of. When I was a little
girl, I cherished a desire to marry a German baron, a German baron of
the Middle Ages, who lived in a castle, and I could not help thinking,
as the influenza left me and I regained my powers of thought, that here
were the towns of my German baron's time--dirt and all. In my childhood
I had never thought of the dirt, or perhaps I had not minded. One thing
is certain, in the clean land of my childhood I never realised what the
dirt that comes from a packed population, from seething humanity, can
be like. The Chinese live in these crowded towns for the sake of
security--of security in this twentieth century--for even still, China
seems to be much in the condition of Europe of the Middle Ages, safety
cannot be absolutely counted upon inside the gates of a town, but at
least it is a little safer than the open country.
{185}We passed through T'ung Chou when the soft tender evening shadows were
falling upon battlements and walls built by a nation that, though it
is most practical, is also one of the most poetical on earth; we passed
through Chi Chou when the shadows were long in the early morning, and
in the sunlight was the hope of the new-born day. Through the gate was
coming a train of Peking carts, of laden donkeys, of great grain carts
with seven mules, all bound for the capital in the south.
I remember these two perhaps because they were the first of many walled
towns, but Tsung Hua Chou will always remain in my memory as my own
little walled city, the one that I explored carefully all by myself,
and, when I think of a walled town, my thoughts always fly back to that
little town, three-quarters of a mile square, at the foot of the hills
that mark the limit of the great plain of China proper.
It was Tuan's suggestion we should stay there. I would have lingered at
the tombs, but he was emphatic.
“Missie want make picture. More better we stop Tsung Hua Chou. Fine
picture Tsung Hua Chou.”
There weren't fine pictures at Tsung Hua Chou. He had struck up a great
friendship with the “cartee man,” and, perhaps, either he or the “cartee
man” had a favourite gaming-house, or a favourite {186}singing girl
in the town. At any rate we went, and I, for some hardly explainable
reason, am glad we did.
The road from the tombs was simply appalling. The hills frowned down
on us, close on either side, high and steep and rugged, but the rough
valley bottom, up which we went, was the wildest I was to see for a
long time. To say I was tossed and jolted, is to but mildly express the
condition of affairs. I sat on a cushion, I packed my bedding round me,
and with both my hands I held on to the side of the cart, and if for one
moment I relaxed the rigidity of my aching arms, my head or some other
portion of my aching anatomy, was brought into contact with the woodwork
of the cart, just in the place I had reckoned the woodwork could not
possibly have reached me. There were little streams and bridges across
them, which I particularly dreaded, for the bridges were always roughly
paved, but it was nobody's business to see that the road and the
pavement met neatly, and the jolt the cart gave, both getting on and
getting off, nearly shook the soul out of my body. I thought of walking,
for our progress was very slow, but in addition to the going being bad,
the mules went just a little faster than I did, three and a half miles
an hour to my three, and I felt there was nothing for it but to resign
myself and make the best of a bad job. Not for worlds would I have
lingered an hour longer on that road than I was absolutely obliged. And
yet, bad as it was, it was the best road I had till I got back to Peking
again. There may be worse roads than those of China, and there may be
worse ways of getting over them than in a {187}Peking cart, but I do
trust I never come across them.
We entered the gates of the city as the evening shadows were growing
long, and as usual, I was carried back to the days of the Crusaders--or
farther still to Babylon--as we rumbled under the arched gateway, but
inside it was like every other town I have seen, dirty, sordid, crowded,
with uneven pavements that there was no getting away from. Within the
curtain wall, that guarded the gate, there were the usual little stalls
for the sale of cakes, big, round, flat cakes and little scone-like
cakes, studded with sesame seed, or a bright pink sweetmeat; there
were the sellers of pottery ware, basins and pots of all sorts, and the
people stared at the foreign woman, the wealthy foreign woman who ran
to two carts. It is an unheard-of thing in China for a Chinese woman to
travel alone, though sometimes the foreign missionary women do, but they
would invariably be accompanied by a Chinese woman, and one woman would
not be likely to have two carts. One thing was certain however,
my outfit was all that it should have been, bar the lack of a male
protector. It bespoke me a woman of wealth and position in the eyes of
the country folk, and the people of the little towns through which
I passed. It is possible that a mule litter might have enhanced my
dignity; but after all, two Peking carts was very much like having a
first-class compartment all to myself.
There were no foreigners, that I could hear of, in Tsung Hua Chou. The
missionaries had fled during the Boxer trouble, and never come back,
so that I was more of a show than usual, though {188}indeed, in all
the towns I passed through I was a show, and the people stared, and
chattered, and crowded round the carts, and evidently closely questioned
the carters.
They tell me Chinese carters are often rascals, but I grew to like mine
very much before we parted company.
They were stolid men in blue, with dirty rags wrapped round their heads
to keep off the dust, and I have no reason to suppose that they affected
water any more than the rest of the population, whereby I perceive, my
affections are not so much guided by a desire for cleanliness as I had
once supposed. They both had the hands of artists, artists with very
dirty nails, so it may be a feeling of brotherhood had something to do
with my feelings, for I am hoping you who read will count me an artist
in a small way. What romance they wove about me, for the benefit of the
questioning people, I don't know, but the result of their communications
was that the crowd pressed closer, and stared harder, and they were
evil-smelling, and had never, never in all their lives been washed. I
ceased to wonder that I ached all over with the jolting and rumbling of
the cart, I only wondered if something worse had not befallen me, and
how it happened that these people, who crowded round, staring as if
never in their lives had they seen a foreign woman before, did not fall
victims to some horrible pestilence.
For once inside Tsung Hua Chou I saw no beauty in it, for all the
romantic walls outside. The evil-smelling streets we rumbled through
to the inn were wickedly narrow, and down the centre hung notices in
Chinese characters on long strips of {189}paper white and red, and pigs,
and children, and creaking wheelbarrows, and men with loads, blocked the
way. But we jolted over the step into the courtyard of the inn at last,
quite a big courtyard, and quite a busy inn. This was an inn where they
apparently ran a restaurant, for as I climbed stiffly out of my cart a
servant, carrying a tray of little basins containing the soups and stews
the Chinese eat, was so absorbed in gazing at me he ran into the “cartee
man,” and a catastrophe occurred which was the occasion of much bad
language.
[Illustration: 0276]
The courtyard was crowded. There were blue-tilted Peking carts, there
were mules, there were donkeys, there were men of all sorts; but there
was only one wretched little room for me. It was very dirty too, and I
was very tired. What was to be done?
“Plenty Chinese gentlemen sleep here,” declared Tuan, and I could quite
believe it. At the door of every lattice-windowed room that looked out
on to that busy courtyard, stood one, or perhaps two Chinese of the
better class--long petticoats, shaven head, queue and all--each held in
his hand a long, silver-mounted pipe from which he took languid whiffs,
and he looked under his eyelids, which is the polite way, at the
foreign woman. The foreign woman was very dirty, very tired, and very
uncomfortable, and the room looked very hopeless. The “cartee men”
declared that this was the best inn in the town, and anyhow I was
disinclined to go out and look for other quarters. Then there came
tottering forward an old woman with tiny feet, one eye and a yellow
flower stuck in the knot at the back of her bald head. China is the
country of bald {190}women. The men, I presume, would not mind it very
much, as for so long they have shaven off at least half their hair, but
the women certainly must, for if they can they dress their dark hair
very elaborately. And yet have I seen many women, like this innkeeper's
wife, with a head so bald that but a few strands of hair cover its
nakedness, yet those few poor hairs are gathered together into an
arrangement of black silk shaped something like a horn, and beside it
is placed a flower, a rose, a pink oleander blossom, or a bright yellow
flower for which I have no name. That flower gives a finish to a sleek
and well-dressed head, when the owner has plenty of hair, but when she
has only the heavy horn of silk, half a dozen hairs, and the rest of her
bald pate covered with a black varnish, it is a poor travesty. When a
girl marries, immediately after her husband has lifted her veil and she
is left to the women of his family they pluck out the front hairs on
her forehead, so as to give a square effect, and the hair is drawn very
tightly back and gathered generally into this horn. I suspect this
heavy horn is responsible for the baldness, though an American of
my acquaintance declares it is the plucking out of the hairs on the
forehead. “The rest of the hair,” says he, “kinder gets discouraged.”
This innkeeper's wife was very kindly. She said I should not sleep in
that room, I should have her room, and she would go to her mother's.
The mother was a surprise to me. I hope when I am as old as she looked I
shall have a mother to go to.
Now I do not as a rule embrace my landlady. In England I couldn't even
imagine myself feeling particularly kindly towards a dirty little woman
clad {191}in a shirt and trousers of exceedingly dirty blue cotton, but
the intention was so evidently kind and hospitable, I knew not a word of
her tongue, and was by no means sure the valued Tuan would translate my
words of thanks properly, so I could but take both her very dirty little
hands in mine, clasp them warmly, and try and look my thanks.
Then I inspected her room. It was approached through an entrance where
lime was stored, it was rather dark, and it was of good size, though
on one side was stacked a supply of stores for the restaurant. Chinese
macaroni, that looks as if it were first cousin to sheet gelatine, stale
eggs and other nondescript eatables. There was a k'ang, of course,
quite a family k'ang, and there was a large mirror on one wall. I had
forgotten my camp mirror, so I looked in it eagerly, and the reflection
left me chastened. I hadn't expected the journey to improve my looks,
but I did hope it had not swelled up one cheek, and bunged up the other
eye. I felt I did not want to stay in the room with that mirror, but
there were other things worse than the mirror in it. The beautiful
lattice-work window had apparently never been opened since the first
cover of white tissue paper had been put on it, and the smell of human
occupancy there defies my poor powers of description. The dirty little
place I had at first disdained, had at least a door opening on to the
comparatively fresh air of the courtyard. I told Tuan to explain that
while I was delighted to see her room, and admired everything very
much in it, nothing would induce me to deprive her of its comforts. She
certainly was friendly. As I looked in the chastening mirror, I, like
a true woman, I suppose, put up {192}a few stray locks that the jolting
cart had shaken out of place, and she promptly wanted to do my hair
herself with a selection from an array of elderly combs with which
she probably dressed her own scanty locks. That was too much. I had to
decline, I trust she thought it was my modesty, and then she offered me
some of the macaroni. I tried to say I had nothing to give in return and
then Tuan remarked, “As friend, as friend.” So as a friend, from that
little maimed one-eyed old woman up in the hills of China, I took a
handful of macaroni and had nothing to give in return. I hope she feels
as friendly towards me as I shall always do towards her.
It is not always that the difficulty of giving a return present is on
the foreign side, sometimes it is the Chinese who feel it. I remember
a traveller for a business house telling me how on one occasion he had
gone to a village and entertained the elders at dinner, giving
them brandy which they loved, and liqueurs which seemed to the
unsophisticated village fathers ambrosia fit for the gods. The next day,
when he was about to take his departure, a small procession approached
him and one of them bore on a tray a little Chinese handleless cup
covered with another. They said he could speak Chinese, so there was no
need for an interpreter, that he had given them a very good time, they
were very grateful, and they wished to make him a present by which he
might remember them sometimes. But their village was poor and small.
It contained nothing worth his acceptance, and after much consultation,
they had come to the conclusion that the best way would be to present
him with the money, {193}so that he might buy something for himself
when he came to Peking or some other large town. Thereupon the cup was
presented, the cover lifted off, and in the bottom lay a ten cent piece,
worth about twopence halfpenny. Probably it seemed quite an adequate
present to men who count their incomes by cash of which a thousand go to
the dollar.
I don't think my landlady minded much my declining the hospitality of
her room. Possibly she only wished me to see its glories, and presently
she brought to the little room I had at first so despised, and now
looked upon, if not as a haven of rest, at least as one of fresh air,
a couple of nice hard wood stools, and a beautifully carved k'ang table
thick with grease.
“Say must make Missie comfortable,” said Tuan with the usual suggestion
he had done it himself.
And those stools were covered, much to my surprise, with red woollen
tapestry, and the pattern was one that I had seen used many a time in a
little town on the Staffordshire moors, where their business is to dye
and print. And here was one of the results of their labours, a “Wardle
rag,” as we used to call them, up among the hills of Northern China.
I was too tired to do anything but go to bed that night as soon as I had
had my dinner. I had it, as usual, on the k'ang table, the dirt shrouded
by my humble tablecloth, and curious eyes watched me, even as I watched
the trays of full basins and the trays of empty ones that were for ever
coming and going across the courtyard.
Next morning my friendly landlady brought to see me two other
small-footed women, both smoking {194}long pipes, women who said,
through Tuan, their ages were forty and sixty respectively, and who
examined, with interest, me and my belongings. They felt my boots so
much, good, substantial, leather-built by Peter Yapp, that at last I
judged they would like to see what was underneath, and took off a boot
and stocking for their inspection, and the way they felt my foot up and
down as if it were something they had never before met in their lives,
amused me very much, At least at first it amused me, and then it
saddened me. Though they held out their own poor maimed feet, they did
not return the compliment much as I desired it. They took me across the
courtyard into another room where, behind lattice-work windows, that had
not been opened for ages, were two more women sitting on the k'ang, and
two little shaven-headed children. These were younger women, tall and
stout, with feet so tiny, they called my attention to them, that it did
not seem to me possible any woman could support herself upon them. My
boy was not allowed in, so of course I could not talk to them, could
only smile and drink tea.
These two younger women, who were evidently of superior rank, had their
hair most elaborately dressed and wore most gorgeous raiment. One was
clad in purple satin with a little black about it, and the other, a mere
girl of eighteen, but married, for her hair was no longer in a queue,
and her forehead was squared, wore a coat of pale blue silk brocade and
grass-green trousers of the same material. Their faces were impassive,
as are the faces of Chinese women of the better class, but they smiled,
evidently liked their tortured feet to be noticed, gave {195}me tea from
the teapot on the k'ang table, and then presently all four, with the
gaily dressed babies, tottered out into the courtyard, the older women
leading the toddling children, and helping the younger, and, with the
aid of settles, they climbed into two Peking carts, my elderly friends
taking their places on the outside, whereby I judged they were servants
or household slaves.
“Chinese wives,” said Tuan, but whether they were the wives of one man,
or of two, I had no means of knowing. The costumes of the two younger
were certainly not those in which I would choose to travel on a Chinese
road in a Peking cart, but the Chinese have a proverb: “Abroad wear the
new, at home it does not matter,” so they probably thought my humble
mole-coloured cotton _crêpe_, equally out of place.
And when they were gone I set out to explore the town.
It was only a small place, built square, with two main roads running
north, and south, and east, and west, and cutting each other at right
angles in the heart of it. They were abominably paved. No vehicle but a
springless Peking cart would have dreamt of making its way across that
pavement, but then probably no vehicle save a cart or a wheelbarrow in
all the years of the city's life had ever been thought of there.
The remaining streets were but evil-smelling alley-ways, narrow in
comparison with the main ways which, anywhere else, I should have
deemed hopelessly inadequate, thronged as they were with people and
encroached upon by the shops that stood close on either side. They had
no glass fronts, of course, these shops, but otherwise, {196}they were
not so very unlike the shops one sees in the poorer quarters of the
great towns in England. But there was evidently no Town Council to
regulate the use to which the streets should be put. The dyer hung
his long strips of blue cloth half across the roadway, careless of the
convenience of the passer-by, the man who sold cloth had out little
tables or benches piled with white and blue calico--I have seen
tradesmen do the same in King's Road, Chelsea--the butcher had his
very disagreeable wares fully displayed half across the roadway, the
gentleman who was making mud bricks for the repair of his house, made
them where it was handiest in the street close to the house, and the man
who sold cooked provisions, with his little portable kitchen and table,
set himself down right in the fairway and tempted all-comers with little
basins of soup, fat, pale-looking steamed scones, hard-boiled eggs or
meat turnovers.
This place, hidden behind romantic grey walls, at which I had wondered
in the evening light, was in the morning just like any other city,
Peking with the glory and beauty gone out of it, and the people who
thronged those streets were just the poorer classes of Peking, only it
seemed there were more naked children and more small-footed women with
elaborately dressed hair tottering along, balancing themselves with
their arms. I met a crowd accompanying the gay scarlet poles, flags,
musical instruments and the red sedan chair of a wedding. The poor
little bride, shut up in the scarlet chair, was going to her husband's
house and leaving her father's for ever. It is to be hoped she
would find favour in the sight of her husband and {197}her husband's
women-folk. It was more important probably, that she should please the
latter.
The bridal party made a great noise, but then all in that town was
noise, dirt, crowding, and evil smells. The only peaceful place in it
was the courtyard of the little temple close against the city wall.
Outside it stand two hideous figures with hands flung out in threatening
attitude, and inside were more figures, all painted in the gayest
colours. What they meant I have not lore enough to know, but they were
very hideous, the very lowest form of art.
[Illustration: 0286]
There was the recording angel with a black face and the open book--after
all, the recording angel must often wear a black face--and there was
the eternal symbol that has appealed through all ages to all people,
and must appeal one would think above all, to this nation that longs
so ardently for offspring, the mother with the child upon her knee. But
they were all ugly to my Western eyes, and the only thing that charmed
me was the silence, the cleanliness, and the quiet of the courtyard, the
only place in all the busy little city that was at peace.
When I engaged Tuan I had thought he was to do all the waiting upon me I
needed, but it seems I made a mistake. The farther I got from Peking the
greater his importance became, and here he could not so much as carry
for me the lightest wrap. His business appeared to be to engage other
people to do the work. There was one dilapidated wretch to carry the
camera, another the box with the plates, and yet a third bore the black
cloth I would put over my head to focus my pictures properly. It was not
a bit of good protesting, two minutes after I got rid {198}of one lot
of followers, another took their place, and as everyone had to be
paid, apparently, I often thought, for the pleasure of looking at me, I
resigned myself to my fate.
Accompanied by all the idlers and children in the town I climbed the
ramp on to the walls, which are in perfect order, three miles round and
on the top from fifteen feet to twenty broad. That ramp must have been
always steep, the last thing a Chinese ever thinks about is comfort,
steep almost as the walls themselves, and everywhere the stones are
gone, making it a work of difficulty to climb to the top. Tuan helped me
in approved Chinese fashion, putting his hand underneath my elbow, and
once I was there the town was metamorphosed, it was again the romantic
city I had seen from the plain in the evening light. Now the early
morning sunlight, with all the promise of the day in it, fell upon
graceful curved Chinese roofs and innumerable trees, dainty with the
delicate vivid verdure that comes in the spring as a reward to a country
where the winter has been long, bitter, and iron-bound.
The walls of most Chinese cities are built square, with right angles at
the four corners, but in at least two that I have been in, T'ung Chou
and Pao Ting Fu, one corner is built out in a bow. I rather admired the
effect at first, till I found it was a mark of deepest disgrace. There
had been a parricide committed in the town. When such a terrible thing
occurs a corner of the city wall must be pulled down and built out; a
second one, another corner is pulled down and built out, and a
third likewise; but the fourth time such a crime is committed in the
{199}luckless town the walls must be razed to the ground. But such
a disgrace has never occurred in any town in the annals of Chinese
history, those age-long annals that go back farther than any other
nation's, for if a town should be so unlucky as to have harboured four
such criminals within its walls they generally managed, by the payment
of a sum of money, to get a city that had some of its corners still
intact to take the disgrace upon itself.
I strongly suspect too, that it is only when the offender is in high
places that his crime is thus commemorated, for I have only heard
of these two cases, and yet as short a while ago as 1912 there was a
terrible murder in Pao Ting Fu that shocked the town. It appeared there
was an idle son, who instead of working for his family, spent all his
time attending to his cage bird, taking it out for walks, encouraging
it to sing, hunting the graves outside the town for insects for it. His
poor old mother sighed over his uselessness.
“If it were not for the bird!” said she.
The young blood in China, it seems, goes to the dogs over a cage bird, a
lark or a thrush, as the young man in modern Europe comes to grief over
horse-racing, so we see that human nature is the same all the world
over. This Chinese mother brooded over her boy's wasted life, and one
day when he was out she opened the cage door and the bird flew away.
When he came in he asked for the bird and she said nothing, only with
her large, sharp knife went on shredding up the vegetables that she
was putting into a large cauldron of boiling water for supper. He asked
again for the bird. Still she took no {200}notice, and he seized her
knife and slit her up into small pieces and put her into the cauldron.
He was taken, and tried, and was put to death by slicing into a thousand
pieces--yes, even in modern China--but they did not think it necessary
to pull down another corner of the city wall. Possibly they felt the
disgrace of a bygone age was enough for Pao Ting Fu.
The corners of the walls of Tsung Hua Chou were as they were first
built, rectangular, and the watch-towers at those corners and over the
four gates from the distance looked imposing, all that they should be,
but close at hand I saw that they were tumbling into ruins, the doors
were fallen off the hinges, the window-frames were broken, all was
desolate and empty.
“Once the soldier she watch here,” said my boy, whose pronouns were
always somewhat mixed.
“Why not now?”
“No soldier here now. She go work in gold mine ninety li away. Gold mine
belong Plesident.”
Tuan had got as far as the fact that a President had taken the place of
the Manchu Emperor, but I wondered very much whether the inhabitants of
Tsung Hua Chou had. I meditated on my way back to “Missie's inn” on the
limitations of the practical Chinese mind that because it is practical,
I suppose, cannot conceive of the liberty, equality, and fraternity that
a Republic denotes. The President, to the humble Chinese in the street,
has just taken the place of the Emperor, he is the one who rules over
them, his soldiers are withdrawn. That there was a war in Mongolia,
a rebellion impending in the south, were items of news that had not
reached {201}the man in the street in Tsung Hua Chou who, feeling that
the soldiers must be put to some use, concluded they were working in the
President's gold mine ninety li away.
[Illustration: 0292]
A foreigner went to a Chinese tailor the other day to make him a suit of
clothes, and he found occasion to complain that the gentleman's prices
had gone up considerably since he employed him last. The man of
the scissors was equal to the occasion, and explained that, since
“revelations,” so many Chinese had taken to wearing foreign dress, he
was obliged to charge more.
“You belong revolution?” asked the inquiring foreigner, anxious to find
out how far liberty, fraternity, and equality had penetrated.
The tailor looked at him more in sorrow than in scorn. How could he be
so foolish.
“I no belong revelation,” he explained carefully, as one who was
instructing where no instruction should have been necessary. The thing
was self-evident, “I belong tailor man.”
When the revolution first dawned upon the country people all they
realised--when they realised anything at all--was that there was no
longer an Emperor, therefore they supposed they would no longer have to
pay taxes. When they found that Emperor or no Emperor taxes were still
required of them, they just put the President in the Emperor's place.
I strongly suspect that if the greater part of the inhabitants of my
walled city were to be questioned as to the revolution they would reply
like the tailor: “No belong revolution, belong Tsung Hua Chou!”
But in truth the civilisation of China is still so {202}much like that
of Babylon and Nineveh, that it is best for the poor man, if he can, to
efface himself. He does not pray for rights as yet. He only prays that
he may slip through life unnoticed, that he may not come in contact with
the powers that rule him, for no matter who is right or who is wrong
bitter experience has taught him that he will suffer.
We do not realise that sufficiently in the West when we talk of China.
We judge her by our own standards. The time may come when this may be a
right way of judging, but it has not come yet. Rather should we judge as
they judged in the days of the old Testament, in the days of Nineveh and
Babylon, when the proletariat, the slaves, were as naught in the sight
of God or man.
A man told me how in the summer of 1912, travelling in the interior, he
came to a small city in one of the central provinces, a city not unlike
Tsung Hua Chou, like indeed a thousand other little cities in this realm
of Cathay. The soldiers quartered there had not been paid, and they
had turned to and looted the town. The unwise city men, instead of
submitting lest a worse thing happen unto them, had telegraphed their
woes to Peking, and orders had come down to the General in command that
the ringleaders must be executed. But no wise General is going to be
hard on his own soldiers. This General certainly was not. Still justice
had to be satisfied, and he was not at a loss. He sent a body of
soldiers to the looted shops, where certain luckless men were sadly
turning over the damaged property. These they promptly arrested. The
English onlooker, who spoke Chinese, declared to me solemnly these
arrested men were the merchants themselves, {203}their helpers and
coolies. That was nothing to the savage soldiery. There had to be
victims. Had not the order come from the central government. Some of the
men, there were twenty in all, they beat and left dead on the spot, the
rest they dragged to the yamen. The traveller, furious and helpless,
followed. Of course the guilt of the merchants was a foregone
conclusion. They never execute anyone who does not confess his guilt and
the justice of his sentence in China, but they have means of making
sure of the confession. Presently out the unfortunate men came again,
stripped to the waist, with their arms tied up high behind them,
prepared, in fact, for death. The soldiers dragged them along, they
protesting their innocence to unheeding ears. Their women and children
came out, running alongside the mournful procession, clinging to the
soldiers and to their husbands and fathers, and praying for mercy. They
tripped and fell, and the soldiers, the soldiers in khaki, pushed
them aside, and stepped over them, and dragged on their victims. The
traveller followed. No one took any notice of him, and what could he
do, though his heart was sore, one against so many. Through the narrow,
filthy streets they went, past their own looted shops. They looked about
them wildly, but there was none to help, and before them marched the
executioner, with a great sharp sword in his hands, and always the
soldiers in modern uniform emphasised the barbarity of the crime.
Presently they had distanced the wailing women and were outside the
walls, but the foreign onlooker was still with them.
“And one was a boy not twenty,” he said with {204}a sharp, indrawn
breath, wiping his face as he told the ghastly tale.
They knelt in a row, just where the walls of their own town frowned down
on them, and one by one the executioner cut off their heads. The death
of the first in the line was swift enough, but, as he approached the
end of the row the man's arm grew tired and he did not get the last two
heads right off.
“I saw one jump four times,” said the shocked onlooker, “before he
died.”
And then they telegraphed to Peking that order had been restored, and
the ringleaders executed.
Since I heard that man's story, I always read that order has been
restored in any Chinese city with a shudder, and wonder how many
innocents have suffered. For I have heard stories like that, not of one
city, or told by one man, but of various cities, and told by different
men. The Chinese, it seems to me, copy very faithfully the European
newspapers, the great papers of the Western world. Horrors like that
are never read in a Western paper, therefore you never see such things
reported in the Chinese papers. After all they are only the proletariat,
the slaves of Babylon or Nineveh. Who counted a score or so of them
slain? Order has been restored, comes the message for the benefit of the
modern world, and in the little city the bloody heads adorn the walls
and the bodies lie outside to be torn to pieces by the _wonks_ and the
vultures.
And when I heard tales like this, I wondered whether it was safe for a
woman to be travelling alone. It is safe, of course, for the Chinaman,
strange as it may sound after telling such tales, is at bottom more
law-abiding than the average {205}European. True, he is more likely to
insult or rob a woman than a man, because he has for so long regarded a
woman as of so much less consequence than a man, that when he considers
the matter he cannot really believe that any nation could hold a
different opinion. Still, in all probability, she will be safe, just as
in all probability she might march by herself from Land's End to John
o' Groats without being molested. She may be robbed and murdered, and
so she may be robbed and murdered in China. The Chinese are robbed and
murdered often enough themselves poor things. Also they do not suffer in
silence. They revenge themselves when they can.
A man travelling for the British and American Tobacco Company, he was a
young man, not yet eight-and-twenty, told me how, once, outside a small
walled town, he came upon a howling mob, and parting them after the
lordly fashion of the Englishman, who knows he can use his hands, he saw
they were crowding round a pit half filled with quicklime. In it, buried
to his middle, was a ghastly creature with his eyes scooped out, and the
hollows filled up with quicklime.
“If I had had a pistol handy,” said the teller of the tale, “I would
have shot him. I couldn't have helped myself. It seemed the only thing
to put him out of his misery, but, after all, I think he was past all
feeling, and I wonder what the people would have done to me!”
They told him, when he investigated, that this man was a robber, that he
had robbed and murdered without mercy, and so, when he fell into their
hands, they had taken vengeance. {206}Was that Babylon, or Nineveh, I
wondered? Since such things happen in China one feels that the age of
Babylon and Nineveh has not yet gone by. Talk with but a few men who
have wandered into the interior, and you realise the strong necessity
for these walled towns.
When the rumour of the slaughter of the Manchus, and the killing in the
confusion of eight Europeans at Hsi An Fu in Shensi in October 1911,
reached Peking, nine young men banded themselves together into the
Shensi Relief Force, and set out from the capital to relieve the
missionaries cut off there. One of these young men it was my good
fortune to meet, and the story of their doings, told at first hand,
unrolled for me the leaves of history. They set out to help the men and
women of their own colour, but as they passed west from Tai Yuan Fu,
again and again, the people of the country appealed to them to stop
and help them. The Elder Brother Society, the Ko Lao Hui were on the
warpath, and, with whatever good intentions this society had originated,
it was, on this way from Tai Yuan Fu to Hsi An Fu, nothing less than
a band of robbers, pillaging and murdering, and even the walled cities
were hardly a safeguard. Village after village, with no such defences,
was wrecked, burned, and destroyed, and their inhabitants were either
slain or refugees in the mountains. And the suffering that means, with
the bitter winter of China ahead of them, is ghastly to think of.
They died, of course, and those who were slain by the robbers probably
suffered the least.
“What could we do? What could we possibly do?” asked my informant
pitifully. {207}At last they came to Sui Te Chou, a walled city, and Sui
Te Chou was for the moment triumphant. It had driven off the robbers.
The Elder Brother Society had held the little city closely invested.
They had built stone towers, and, from the top of them, had fired into
the city, and at the defenders on the walls, and, under cover of this
fire from the towers, they had attempted to scale the battlements. But
the people on the walls had pushed them down with long spears, and had
poured boiling water upon them, and, finally, the robbers had given
way, and some braves, issuing from the south gate had fallen upon them,
killing many and capturing thirty of them. It was a short shrift
for them, and a festoon of heads adorned the gateway under which the
foreigners passed.
But, though victorious, the braves of Sui Te Chou knew right well that
the lull was only momentary. They were reversing the Scriptural order of
things, and beating their ploughshares into swords. The brigands would
be back as soon as they had reinforcements, the battle would be to the
strong and it would indeed be “Woe to the Vanquished!”
“We could not help them. We could not,” reiterated the teller of the
tale sadly; “we just had to go on.”
It was old China, he said, let us hope the last of old China. In that
town were English missionaries, a man and his wife, another man and
two little children, members of the English Baptist Church, dressed in
Chinese dress, the men with queues. These they rescued, and took along
with them, and glad were they to have two more able-bodied men in the
party, even though they were counterbalanced {208}by the presence of the
woman and two children, for everywhere along the track were evidences of
the barbaric times in which they lived. Human head? in wicker cages
were common objects of the wayside, and the wolves came down from
the mountains and gnawed at the dead bodies, or attacked the sick and
wounded. Old China was a ghastly place that autumn of 1911, during the
“bloodless” revolution. Chung Pu they reached immediately after it had
been attacked by six hundred men.
“I had to kick a dog away that was gnawing at a dead body as we led
the lady into a house for the night,” said the narrator. “I could only
implore her not to look.”
But at I Chün things were worse still. They reached it just as it had
fallen into the hands of the Elder Brother Society, and they began to
think they had taken those missionaries out of the frying-pan into the
fire. I Chün is a walled city up in the mountains of Shensi, and the
only approach was by a pathway so narrow that it only allowed of one
mule litter at a time. On one side was a steep precipice, on the
other the city wall, and along that wall came racing men armed
with matchlocks, spears, and swords, yelling defiance and prepared,
apparently, to attack. The worst of it was there was no turning that
litter round. They halted, and the gate ahead of them opened, and right
in the centre of the gateway was an ancient cannon with a man standing
beside it with a lighted rope in his hand. Turn the litter and get away
in a hurry they could not. Leave it they could not. There was seemingly
no escape for them. It only wanted one of those excited men to shout
“Ta, Ta,” and the match {209}could have been applied, and the ancient gun
would have swept the pathway. Then the leader of the band of foreigners
stepped forward. He flung away his rifle, he flung away his revolver, he
flung away his knife, and he stood there before them defenceless, with
his arms raised--modem civilisation bowing for the moment before the
force of Babylon. It was a moment of supreme anxiety. Suppose the people
misunderstood his actions.
“We scarcely dared breathe,” said the storyteller. Every heart stood
still. And then they understood. The man with the lighted rope dropped
it, and they beckoned to the strangers to come inside the gates.
It required a good deal of courage to go inside those gates, to put
themselves in the power of the Elder Brother Society, and they spent an
anxious night. The town had been sacked, the streets ran blood, the
men were slain, their bodies were in the streets for the crows and the
_wonks_ to feed on, and the women--well women never count for much
in China in times of peace, and in war they are the spoil of the
victor--the Goddess of Mercy was forgotten those days in I Chün. All
night long the anxious little party kept watch and ward, and when day
dawned were thankful to be allowed to proceed on their way unmolested,
eventually reaching Hsi An Fu and rescuing all the missionaries who
wished to be rescued.
“It was exciting,” said my friend, half apologising for getting excited
over it. “It was the last of old China. Such things will never happen
again.”
Exciting! it thrilled me to hear him talk, to know such things had
happened barely a year before, to {210}know they had happened in this
country. Would they never happen again? I was not so sure of that as I
went through walled town after walled town, as I looked up at the walls
of Tsung Hua Chou. This was the correct setting. To talk in friendly,
commonplace fashion to people who lived in such towns seemed to
annihilate time, to bring the past nearer to me, to make me understand,
as I had never understood before, that the people who had lived, and
suffered, and triumphed, or lived, and suffered, and fallen, were almost
exactly the same flesh and blood as I was myself.
Back at the inn my friend the landlady brought me her little grandson to
admire. He was a jolly little unwashed chap with a shaven head, clad in
an unwashed shift, and I think I admired him to her heart's content. It
was evidently worth having been born and lived all the strenuous weary
days of her hard life to have had part in the bringing into the world
of that grandson. His little sister in the blue-cornered handkerchief,
looking on, did not count for much, and yet she had her own feelings,
for when I clambered into my cart and was just rumbling over the step I
was startled by a terrified childish outcry. Looking back, I saw that
a little serving-maid, a slave probably, was running after my cart with
the small son and heir in her arms, making believe to give away
the household treasure to the foreign woman, with grandmother and
subordinates looking smilingly on. Only the little sister, who was not
in the secret, was shrieking lustily in protest.
I had been thinking of the cities in the plain of Mesopotamia! And this
carried me back to the {211}days of my own childhood and the hills
round Ballarat! Many and many a time in my young days have I seen the
household baby offered to the “vegetable John,” and the small brothers
and sisters shrieking a terrified protest. “They would be good, and love
baby, and never be cross with him any more.” Here was I taking the place
of the smiling, bland, John Chinaman of my childhood. After all human
nature is much the same all the world over, on the sunny hills of
Ballarat, or in a walled city at the foot of the mountains in Northern
China. If we could but bridge the gulf that lies between, I expect we
should have found it just exactly the same on the banks of the Euphrates
and beneath the walls of Babylon.