UP AND DOWN MANCHURIA
The change from Korea to China is not merely abrupt, it is
instantaneous. In the exact middle of the big bridge over the Yalu,
across which rickshaws trot and pedestrians of all degrees shuttle in
two constant, almost silent-footed streams on either side of rumbling
trains, stand a Japanese guard and a Chinese soldier, as strikingly
unlike as two men of the same profession and rather similar background
could well be; and they are typical of the wide differences in customs
and costumes, in all the details, if not the essentials, of life on the
two shores of the famous river. White gives way to blue denim as the
garb of crowds and individuals—for in China, as in Japan, the former is
the color of mourning. Pigtails take the place of topknots; tiny bound
feet, which the traveler perhaps has never before seen, instantly become
general among women of all ages and classes; uncovered breasts die out
as suddenly as does the silly horsehair pretense of a hat. Instead of
stallions there are geldings; wheelbarrows and oscillating
shoulder-poles replace the back-rack known as a _jiggy_; the Chinese
sense of humor, or racial cheerfulness, comes at once to the fore—there
was more laughing in an hour in Antung than in a day in Korea or a week
in Japan. One could not but be struck by the size of the Chinese as
compared even with the Koreans, to say nothing of the dwarfish Japanese,
and by their more common-sense air and dress—and at the same time by the
horrible sloughs of mud that passed for streets, the diseased beggars
wallowing up and down them, the truly putrid conditions of life in the
native city.
There is a paved and well built Japanese fore-city about the railway
station, but even this was essentially Chinese in its human aspects, in
spite of the big mat-covered arena that had been hastily thrown up to
house the paunchy second-rate Japanese wrestlers who strutted the
streets in loin-cloths and fluttering kimonos. The low and ancient
“victorias,” that rattled to and from the station, jerked rather than
drawn by an emaciated horse or two streaked with mud and perspiration,
and loaded to the gunwales often with a full dozen Chinese besides the
heartless driver, seemed strangely in keeping with the north bank of the
Yalu. All trains halt for an hour or more at Antung for the lenient
examination of baggage, so that there is time to see all this, as well
as the great log rafts floating down the river as its upper reaches are
denuded and their forests turned into Chinese coffins. Nor will it be an
unusual experience if the traveler is approached by a Japanese gendarme
asking to see his passport, to which the proper reply of course is as
gentle a reminder as is consistent with the brazen courtesy and one’s
individual temperament that China has not yet been internationally
recognized as a Japanese colony.
A few miles northward a serrated range rises close on the right, and
there are other groups of hills on the way to Mukden, two or three of
them strikingly crowned by ancient temples. But broad rolling fields of
corn and millet and _kaoliang_ are the chief impression of this ten-hour
journey. There is an atmosphere reminiscent of pioneer America in these
broad reaches of Manchuria, so unlike the little diked and flooded
paddy-fields of Korea and Japan. Only rarely is there a human being in
sight, now and then a lone man in a pigtail and blue denim hoeing corn,
or plowing with a thin red ox or a cow. The few houses are as miserable
as the huts of Korea, otherwise quite different, being plain and square,
thatched with corn- or _kaoliang_-stalks instead of the hair-smooth
rice-straw, and without a suggestion of the picturesque about them. In
the midsummer season the landscape is a deep, almost unbroken green, for
the few houses are so low that they are all but hidden among the tall
crops, and there is the slightly denser green of scrub timber on the
constant succession of fair-sized hills. Willows abound; in fact, it
would not be difficult to imagine oneself in the hillier parts of
Pennsylvania, did not the visibly splendid fertility of the country
contrast so strongly with the lack of real houses or any indication of
prosperity and comfort. At length high terraced hills become more
populous; then the country grows deadly flat, with the soya-bean, king
of Manchurian products, lording it over all other crops as one
approaches Mukden.
The Russian name for the capital of China’s “Eastern Three Provinces”
bids fair to persist in Western speech, though to the Japanese it is
Hoten and the Chinese themselves now call it Feng-tien. That constant
fight for a livelihood, for bare escape from starvation, which becomes
in time an accepted feature of life in China, is in evidence even this
far north and east, for all the spaciousness of Manchuria. There is a
swarming of rickshaws like men set on the mark ready to race to any exit
where there is the shadow of a promised fare, blocking the way if one
attempts to set out on foot, trailing the stroller until walking ceases
to be a pleasure. Carriages with a suggestion of Russian ancestry
completely surround the man who gives the slightest hint that he may at
some time want one, and escape is hardly possible without the vigorous
wielding of at least as deadly a weapon as a cane, which leaves the
average American handicapped. Both rickshaw-men and drivers are deathly
afraid of even the most insignificant Japanese bell-boy, however, and as
there is no way of alighting in Mukden except from the west without
passing through a cordon of these, assistance may be had against the
first fierce onslaught of the over-numerous means of transportation.
There are rows of “Peking carts” also, ready to crowd half a dozen hardy
and unhurried travelers beneath their blue-denim hoods, and finally, if
one chances to be as fond of local odors as of local color, there are
the horse-cars, which may conceivably strike some of the more aged
visitors from the Occident as vaguely familiar. Just how many years back
it is that these same cars jogged up and down Third Avenue in medieval
New York I have not the requisite data to say, but they spent quite a
number of them earning their livelihood in Tokyo, and there are rumors
that their jaunt into the Orient has not yet reached its termination.
There is almost nothing Chinese, except these things and those who
patronize them, about the red-brick Japanese city with its wide, often
well paved streets in diagonal patterns, its typically Japanese
monuments and its little khaki-clad gendarmes in blood-red cap-bands,
where the traveler by train usually alights in Mukden. But Feng-tien
proper is quite thoroughly Chinese, when one does at last reach it by
one of the many available but all leisurely means of transportation.
There is not merely a massive inner wall surrounding what was the
capital of the Manchus before they spread over China and took up their
headquarters in Peking, but a mud wall of careless and irregular shape
encloses the entire city, down to the last suburb hovel, less as a
protection against earthly enemies than to shut out those omnipresent
evil spirits of the fervid Chinese imagination. Inside, there is what
Spanish Americans would call _mucho movimiento_, interminable movement,
a dodging to and fro of more rickshaws than there are taxicabs in New
York, a constant passing of myriads of men and boys, even of women and
girls, these often in the fantastic Manchu head-dress, an ever moving
multitude on business, pleasure, or nothing whatever bent. Shops
offering everything from steamed bread to rolls of copper coins, from
red paper banners to pulverized deerhorns, line the way thickly, in
dense succession. Venders of anything which native Mukden is in the
habit of consuming, or of keeping unconsumed, weave their way in and out
of the throngs, the muddy side streets, the tight little alleyways,
announcing their wares by strange cries or mechanical noises that have
come to be accepted for what they purport to be. Yet for all the bustle
there is an atmosphere of Chinese calm. Shopkeepers may be eager for
trade, but they will not be hurried out of a fitting deportment merely
to please clients from the breathless West; hawkers move through the
streets and carry on their bargaining as if the commodity we know as
time had no appreciable value to them, though they keep industriously at
their allotted task of announcing and disposing of as many of their
wares as the fates decree. Above all the katydids or crickets singing in
their crude little woven-reed cages suspended before house- and
shop-door give a sense of bucolic calm that neutralizes any hint of
haste in the incessant swarming to and fro of every type of Chinese.
Hawkers of this curious breed of Chinese singing-bird wander all the
streets of Feng-tien, a score or more of the little cages at the ends of
their shoulder-poles, one or two of the green insects, resembling
“grasshoppers,” in each cage, and beside them sprigs of grass to feed
upon until their support devolves upon a purchaser. We bought one for
the diminutive member of our family, cage and all for twenty coppers,
which seemed to be about a nickel, though it goes without saying that
both as strangers and foreigners we were no doubt grossly swindled. Nor
would the captive sing for us, at least long enough to be worth the
price, during the day or two we kept him, gay and melodious as he and
his companions were in Chinese captivity. Possibly he missed the
mellifluous odors of the native city and was drooping with homesickness.
When his little alien owner set him free in the park of the Japanese
city, there was no great hope that he would enjoy his liberty long, for
Chinese urchins were slinking about with a furtive air and an alert
demeanor which boded ill for singing insects—unless, as we half
suspected, those of China prefer to hang before a shop and chant keepers
and clients into harmonious understanding.
The mere “sights” of Mukden in the tourist sense all date back at least
three hundred years. There is the Manchu palace within the real city
wall, its many structures still impressive in their roofs of imperial
yellow tiles for all the dust-covered wrecks they are fast becoming
under caretakers interested only in the size of their gratuities. An
hour’s churning by Mukden’s Russian type of carriage over what the
Chinese regard as a road is not too high a price to pay for a stroll
through the capacious grounds of the Pei-ling, or Northern Tombs, where
the second and last emperor to occupy the palaces in the city lies with
his consort under the usual artificial hillock behind elaborate
structures roofed also in imperial yellow. For though one is sure to see
as many tombs of the famous and infamous in China as cathedrals in
Europe, this is by no means the least imposing of them. It takes a bit
more courage to jolt out to Tung-ling, the Eastern Mausoleum, a
generation older and twice as far away; but there pine-clad hills and
rather gentle yet impressive scenery make up for the somewhat less
expansive tombs. Then, too, those whose interests are not entirely in
the past may wish to run out on the branch line to Fushun, where the
Japanese are taking out—by the use of economical Chinese muscle—vast
quantities of coal from an open cut that goes down into the earth in
steps, like a dry-dock prepared for some mammoth ship many times larger
than any sea has ever floated.
It was at Mukden that we first came into personal contact with the
swarms of soldiers—“coolies in uniform” might be a more exact term—with
which all China is cursed under its putative republican régime. Chang
Tso-lin, the war lord of Manchuria, had just been thwarted in his plan
to get control of Peking, and his troops in their muddy-gray cotton
uniforms were still pouring back into the city by the train-load.
Wagon-trains of ammunition, useful another year, were rumbling through
the narrow streets, hauled by dust-caked mules. Troops were stowed away
everywhere, in every big yard or semi-public compound, in unsuspected
corners, in barracks outside the town. Nowhere could one open the eyes
without seeing soldiers, lounging in unmilitary attitude before guarded
gates, lolling about the streets and bazaars with the air of conquerors
to whom nothing could be denied, drawn in endless files through the
Japanese city on their way to the railway station stretched out at ease
in rickshaws among their bed-stuffed possessions and grasping in one
hand the rifle with the butt of which the great majority of them
probably paid the perspiring coolies so incessantly trotting back and
forth with them. How much more picturesque life would be with us if our
soldiers mobilized in taxicabs, and booted the driver out of the way if
he dared to call attention to the taximeter.
Scholarly-looking little Chang Tso-lin, in his ugly French-château style
of dwelling that seems so inexcusable an intruder among the graceful
palaces of China, is an enigma, at least to those who have merely met
rather than learned to know him. How this outwardly almost insignificant
man can hold a great territory in the hollow of his hand, baffling all
the cross-currents of intrigue which sweep incessantly up and down the
“Eastern Three Provinces,” was a query worth pondering. Virtually a
bandit in his younger days, then a lieutenant in the Japanese army
during the war with Russia, Chang gathered somewhere the power to rule
which made him an autocrat over his own people and won him even among
many of the foreigners who breathe the Manchurian atmosphere the
reputation of being the “strong man” of China. His methods are drastic
and prompt; he is said to depend more on intuition, on “hunches,” than
on ordered reflection. Keys to the leg-irons of serious criminals he
kept in his own possession, so that they could not buy off in the
time-honored Chinese fashion. Just before we reached Mukden two of his
generals had been detected in the not unprecedented Chinese feat of
putting into their own pockets a few cents a day from each soldier’s
pay. Chang had them up on the carpet only after he had undeniable proof
of their guilt, and there was nothing left for them to do but to confess
and plead for mercy. A curt order to have them taken to the
execution-ground beyond the outer city wall closed the incident. On the
same day two common soldiers who had indulged in looting in outlying
districts were found in the possession of the extraordinary sum of five
hundred dollars each, and for three days their bodies were left lying
out in front of the Chinese railway station as a hint to others whose
plans might be taking similar shape. Cynics, and those foreign residents
whose pet among the “strong men” of China is some one else, lay such
personal disasters to the simple fact that Chang himself did not get his
share of the “squeeze,” but the consensus of opinion seemed to be
otherwise.
[Illustration:
Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu
from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their
crippled feet
]
[Illustration:
The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once
the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East
]
[Illustration:
A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the Russians at Port
Arthur. Hundreds of such war memorials are preserved by the Japanese
on the sites of their first victory over the white race
]
[Illustration:
The empty Manchu throne of Mukden
]
The centuries-old Chinese method of execution by the lopping off of
heads seems almost to have died out in modern militaristic China, at
least in the north, along with such punishments as the slicing or the
boxing up of those who win official displeasure. As condemned men cross
the bridge to the execution-ground at Mukden, they are politely asked
whether they wish to take morphine. Most of them “save face” by refusing
it and assuming an outward air of bravery and indifference, perhaps even
of gaiety. Sometimes as many as a score kneel on the ground together,
their arms tied behind them. A soldier, who gets two “Mex” dollars for
each man he despatches, walks down the line and kills as many as he
chooses, and when he tires of the sport another soldier quickly takes
his place. There are stories of men quarreling violently because the
first one killed more than his share. The rifle barrel is placed behind
the ear of each victim in prompt succession, the other kneeling men
gazing up the line to see when their turn is coming, sometimes even
laughing aloud at a bad shot, and as each man falls on his face from the
force of the discharge a guard yanks the body out straight and cuts off
the leg-irons. One might as well be in a barber-shop so far as any
atmosphere of life and death, as we of the West understand it, goes at
these frequent execution-parties at Feng-tien.
It must take a certain nerve-control to serve under the “war lord of
Manchuria.” Hardly an hour after the two generals so radically cured of
grafting had joined their ancestors, another general was asked to step
into an automobile and go out to the execution-grounds with two American
visitors. There was something about his manner which suggested that the
general was under some great strain, but his companions, familiar with
despotic rulers only in popular fiction, did not suspect until they
reached their destination just why it was so obviously an effort for him
to keep his attention on a subject, or even to swallow. But when he saw
that there were no armed soldiers on hand to receive him, and that he
had really been sent for no other purpose than to act as guide for the
visitors, he thawed out so thoroughly that the foreigners carried off a
false impression of the expansiveness which a Chinese gentleman displays
to casual acquaintances.
Chang himself is evidently not without certain misgivings of a personal
nature. When another American, armed with a motion-picture outfit and
full credentials, was introduced into the war lord’s residence by one of
his most trusted officials, General Chang the younger, his son and
commander-in-chief of his armies, came to look things over in person,
and even then the father cautiously examined the camera when he
appeared, and a dozen of his personal body-guard—to which, rumor has it,
no one is eligible who has not killed at least ten men—stood behind the
camera-man with rifles loosely slung in the crook of their elbows during
the filming. Yet the younger general reads, and to a certain extent
speaks, English; his wife wears over her ears the hair-puffs of the
Western “flapper”; a graduate of Columbia University is the official
interpreter, several Chinese graduates of West Point serve under him,
and the general’s favorite car comes from Michigan’s best automobile
factory—where it was fitted with machine-gun emplacements and straps to
keep the guards on the running-boards from changing their minds in times
of danger.
I passed through Mukden four times before my journeys in as many
directions from that focal point of Manchuria ended, and often had news
from there after we moved on, for the doings of Chang Tso-lin were
always of interest to the rest of China. To all intents and purposes
this forceful little Chinese had become the absolute ruler of what was
the home-land of the Manchus before they usurped the throne at Peking,
completely reversing the rôles of the two peoples as they were played in
1644. The influx of Chinese after that date, when the Great Wall ceased
to be a barrier between the overcrowded regions inside it and the vast
open spaces of the nomad herdsmen beyond, gradually turned these into
tilled fields where cultivation had hitherto been as strictly prohibited
as had Chinese immigration, and finally swamped the thinly inhabited
region entirely. The Manchus conquered China, and China began again in
her time-honored way to swallow up the conquerors, until to-day there is
no such thing as a Manchu nation, hardly a spoken remnant of the
sonorous Manchu language, no one resembling the fierce warriors and
hardy horsemen who put an end to the Ming dynasty such a little while
ago. For it is barely three centuries since the chief of the “Eastern
Tartars” commanded several learned persons of his nation to design a
system of writing Manchu, upon the model of that of the Mongols, and not
until two decades later that his successor ascended the dragon throne.
To-day one meets individuals all over China who consider themselves
Manchus, but they are hardly in any way distinguishable from the Chinese
among whom they have been completely assimilated. One may travel the
length and breadth of Manchuria now without realizing that he is not in
China “proper,” and particularly since the rise of its present Chinese
dictator it is much more fittingly known by its Chinese name of “Eastern
Three Provinces.”
Virtually, if not openly, independent under his rule, that vast fertile
region may possibly have a new future that will make it worthy of still
another name, devoid of any suggestion of dependency. Mukden has its own
foreign office; the incomes from the national salt monopoly and the
customs, from that portion of the railway to Peking which lies north of
the Great Wall, and from other similar sources flow directly into
Chang’s treasury. The latest report is that he is making a good and,
within Chinese limits, honest use of them. Mukden threatens to blossom
out soon in widened and paved streets, to increase her school
facilities, to send the old horse-cars off again on their wanderings and
become the third city of China with electric tramways. Incidentally
there is talk of a system of conscription to give Chang’s armies the
full supply of hardy young men which this great granary of them under
his command is capable of supplying, which will be a line of demarcation
indeed from the haphazard, voluntary enlistments so long and fixedly in
vogue in China “proper.” There are those who believe that provincial
autonomy in place of the tightly centralized form of government of
imperial days is not merely the visible development in modern
“republican” China but the best thing that could happen to the colossal
old empire, and these are watching with interest what they hope is the
advancement of Manchuria under its approximately independent rule. But
political changes are often swift in what was for so many centuries the
unchangeable Middle Kingdom, and which still calls itself by the old
name, so that it would be worse than boldness to prophesy whether
another year will find Chang Tso-lin the undisputed sovereign of a
progressive and well administered Northeastern China or merely another
of those innumerable eliminated politicians fattening into dotage over
their ill gotten gains in the safety-zones commonly known as foreign
concessions.
As the traveler races north or southward from Mukden by the excellent
expresses of the South Manchurian Railway, well ballasted and much of it
already double-tracked, through towns lighted by electricity and as
spick and span as Japanese rule can make them, it is hard to realize
that when the present century began the home-land of the Manchus was
almost unknown to the outside world in anything but name. Back behind
these modern railway cities bulk the old walled towns of China, and in
the never distant background the mere passenger glimpses the primitive
methods of transportation and of life in general that are in such sharp
contrast to his immediate surroundings, fitted with almost everything
that civilization has mechanically to offer. In the summer season
_kaoliang_, a species of what our own South knows as sorghum and which
bears a considerable resemblance to the Kaffir-corn widely cultivated in
Haiti, covers the earth with its deep green to the height of a
horseman’s head, often as far as the eye can see for hours at a time—and
makes magnificent hiding for bandits. The flatness of Manchuria at
Mukden and to the north is made up for by the splendid range of
mountains that follows the railway not far off on the left all the way
to Dairen, great tumbled hills in which the mere tramper or the seeker
after old temples and ancient monasteries finds himself equally
rewarded. But it was still my lot for a time longer to stick rather
closely to the lines of modern travel and to commonplace, if
comfortable, modern cities.
Dairen, which the Japanese have made of the Russian Dalny in the leased
portion of the Liaotung Peninsula that fell to them as the spoils of
war, has all the un-Chinese characteristics of such cities, to enumerate
which would merely be to describe in detail any one of a hundred great
ports and railway termini in Europe or, with certain modifications,
North America. May not therefore the broad macadamed streets, the big
brick and stone buildings, the great breakwaters, the mammoth cranes on
the docks, and all the rest of the signs of what we call progress, so
admirable but so unpicturesque, be taken for granted? We liked Port
Arthur, which the Japanese have redubbed Ryojun, better. There life was
more leisurely; old buildings constructed by the Russians, streets that
broke out every little while into grass- and even weed-grown open
spaces, the spaciousness of a place which never grew to be the large
busy city its founders planned, gave it something of the atmosphere of
an old town of England, or of our South, somewhat off the track of
present-day hasty and bustling activity. Ryojun is the seat of
government of the Japanese leased territory, while Dairen is merely its
metropolis. The old Port Arthur and the new are separated by a rivulet
emptying into the splendid landlocked port, and by some hills, of which
there are more than the eye can count rolling and piling away across all
the landscape of the region. These are by far the most conspicuous
features of Port Arthur and vicinity, for there is scarcely a knoll
among them that does not bear on its summit a monument. Whether it is
merely an unconscious manifestation of their military spirit, strong and
continual as far back as history can trace them, or a deliberate
parading of their victory over a branch of the white man’s world, the
Japanese have marked every spot where a handful of their countrymen fell
and have preserved the ruins of every fort out of which the Russian
defenders were bombarded, so that the hilly landscape of all the region
is littered with mementos to the god of war. Nor is his day over in Port
Arthur, for a garrison commander sits ever on the alert against kodaking
tourists who would profane his stone-built playthings overlooking the
bay. Both at Port Arthur and at Dairen there are beaches that might
become the international resorts the Japanese are striving to make them,
could their sponsors ever learn that the rest of the world is not so
enamoured of the dwarfish Nipponese form in the nude as they seem
themselves to be.
[Illustration:
A Manchu woman in her national head-dress, bargaining with a street
vender of Mukden for a cup of tea
]
[Illustration:
The Russian so loves a uniform, even after the land it represents has
gone to pot, that even school-boys in Vladivostok usually wear
them,—red bands, khaki, black trousers, purple epaulets
]
[Illustration:
A common sight in Harbin,—a Russian refugee, in this case a blind boy,
begging in the street of passing Chinese
]
[Illustration:
A Russian in Harbin—evidently not a Bolshevik or he would be living in
affluence in Russia
]
Northward from Mukden there are also many reminders of Japanese military
prowess, besides the railway itself. Here the line was being
double-tracked, perhaps because the diversion of shipping, by fair means
and foul, from Vladivostok to Dairen was proving too much for it. The
Chinese workmen lived in semi-caves and reed-mat huts, and left a bush
or a small tree at the top of a slim pyramid of earth here and there to
show how deep they had dug for the new grading. Dense green hills and
the unpicturesque, widely scattered huts of Manchuria broke the general
landscape of endless fields of beans closely planted, with _kaoliang_
and millet, wheat and corn, demanding their share of the broad open
country. Cattle, horses, mules, and donkeys were plentiful, and ungainly
black pigs more so. Every little while we passed a large walled town of
which we in the West know not even the name, and somewhere not far from
each of them was a new Japanese section including the railway station
and rows of trainmen’s houses, perhaps schools and a hospital. But for
all the advantages showered upon them the migrating Japanese plainly
could not compete hand to hand with the Chinese pouring up from the
crowded provinces across the Gulf of Chihli. They kept shop, ran the
railroad, filled all the higher positions in the enterprises, such as
mining, milling, and electric lighting, in which they are engaged, but
as actual producers from the soil itself, of overwhelming importance in
spacious, fertile, still rather thinly populated Manchuria, they were
visibly incapacitated.