THROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA
The changes which burst suddenly upon the traveler at Changchun would be
startling if he were not almost certain to be prepared for them. Unless
his memory is short or his age brief he can scarcely be unaware of the
fact that the Treaty of Portsmouth on our own New England coast made
Changchun the meeting-place of that portion of the Chinese Eastern
Railway which remained to the Russians after their trouncing, and that
long section of it which their conquerors have made over into the South
Manchurian Railway. One steps from what is essentially an American
express-train upon the station platform, and from that into an
express-train that is European down to its most insignificant details.
Cars of the “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits” offer him the
comfort of their separate compartments, brilliantly lighted by frosted
bulbs, furnished even with thermometers, roomy with the five-foot gage
of Russian railways, on which trains use the right- rather than the
left-hand track. The heavy-stacked engine is as different from the one
across the platform still panting from its race northward as the densely
bearded Russian trainmen are from the alert little brown men of the same
calling. Suddenly there were Russians everywhere, and by no means all of
them were of a type to make one unduly proud of the white race; some
indeed were roustabouts and station hangers-on living by petty graft
upon uninformed travelers, such as the latter are never subjected to on
the Japanese railways of Manchuria. There was such a mixture of Chinese,
Japanese, and Russians at Changchun that one could only surmise who was
really in control. It was a Russian who asked me for my passport—and who
raised his hat, bowed low, and retired with an almost subservient “Thank
you” when I answered that I was American. Booted and spurred Russians in
khaki, in woolen trousers and cotton smocks, in the best they could do
in the way of an individual uniform, their waists compressed to maidenly
slenderness by tight belts, strutted the platforms in long swords with
an air that said plainly that they would far rather die than have to
work and not be able to strut about in uniform, boots, spurs, and sword.
European civilians of both sexes, tow-headed women and children, mere
Russian farmers, leaned on station barriers or made their way to and
from the third-class coaches. One type in particular was very
familiar,—the half-subservient, half-cocky, always vulgar Russian Jew,
much assured of himself now, since the new turn things have taken in
Russia, but still more or less openly despised by the non-Jewish
Russians. In our car was one of the most offensive of these fellows,
head of the opium ring of Harbin, who acted as if he had purchased the
earth from its original owners and was making it a personal plaything.
The train made incredibly long stops at every station, but excellent
speed between them, though it burned wood and thereby saved us from soot
and cinders. I had a sense of being in an utterly foreign land, many
times more so than among the Japanese. For one thing station names were
in Chinese and Russian, equally illegible to those of us who recognize a
word only in Roman letters, while from Yokohama to Changchun even the
most insignificant stopping-place announces itself in English. Hitherto
at least the head trainman was almost certain to have a smattering of my
tongue; at worst I could produce a few short but highly valuable phrases
of Japanese; but these black-bearded fellows were separated from me by
an utterly impenetrable linguistic wall. They might quite as well have
been Hottentots or Zulus as far as any possibility of communicating with
them either by spoken or written word went. Perhaps it was mainly this
sense of strangeness that made the air seem surcharged with something
ominous, something akin to hopeless political conditions.
But through it all the endless plains of corn and beans, millet and
wheat, beautiful in their deep green, spread as far as the eye could
reach in every direction, hour after hour, all afternoon long. The
plodding Chinese peasant, who is the mudsill of all the struggles of
rival empires to control this vast rich territory, was still toiling
here and there when the sun touched the flat western horizon. But at
frequent intervals Russian boys in soldierly caps came running out of
yellow brick farm-houses surrounded by a kind of Chinese wall. Many more
of them lived in villages, some of which might have been lifted bodily
out of European Russia. At these, Chinese and tow-headed venders
appeared on the off side of stations, until they were chased away by
policemen, offering live chickens, ducks, eggs by the basketful. A
wonderful land, Manchuria, whether for cultivating or merely for the
grazing of stock; no wonder crowded Japan covets this broad, half-wasted
region, yet she has already shown that she would exploit rather than
people it.
Rain was pouring when we reached Harbin, and seemed to have been for
weeks. At least never in all my wanderings have I floundered through
worse sloughs of mud than in the _droshke_ which lost itself in the inky
blackness and the downpour in what looked for a time like a vain attempt
to get me from the station to a hotel. By morning light there seemed no
particular reason for this, for though every street was covered at least
with slime, there were enough of them roughly stone-paved to carry all
the _droshkes_ with which Harbin swarms. Perhaps it was merely an
example of the impracticability of the Russians, of which I was to hear
so many more before I moved on.
At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself
back in Europe. Unless his geography is proof against such deceptions,
he might easily believe that he had crossed the line into Russia and
brought up in one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture,
customs, inhabitants are all on the Russian model. Instead of rickshaws
there are two types of carriages,—the _droshke_, of barouche effect,
drawn in most cases by two horses, the shaft animal under a great arched
pole and the off one with its head tied down to a level with its knees
and twisted well to the outside, thanks to some time-honored Russian
idea of style or efficiency; then there is the _amerikanka_. The
“American woman,” as foreign residents facetiously translate the word,
is a two-wheeled cart with a plain open box on top, on a corner of which
sits the driver, apparently wholly inured to the jouncing with every
step of the horse and every unevenness of the road which the passenger
or two beside him seldom gives evidence of enjoying. But the
_amerikanka_ is ridiculously cheap by Western standards, and the Russian
who manipulates it is almost sure to be cheery and pleasant, filled with
naïve tales of what is and what he believes is going on inside Russia
proper, if one chances to have a companion who can act as interpreter,
and in any case a relief merely as a Caucasian after months among
squint-eyed Orientals. Already, however, the motor-buses which probably
have by this time driven most of the leisurely Russian wielders of
horse-whips out of business had begun to appear on the streets of
Harbin.
The houses have double windows, with a space of two or three feet
between the panes of glass; and great cylindrical stoves built into the
walls from floor to ceiling, preferably in a corner where they can bulge
into two, and even four, rooms, are almost as universal as in Russia. In
a July heat which left one drenched after a short stroll, even by
moonlight, and which made the briefest interview in any of Harbin’s
dungeon-like, double-walled offices a kind of “third degree,” it was
hard to believe these evidences of long winters during which, barely
four months thence, it would often be forty below zero and the wearing
of furs indispensable. To its residents and to most of its visitors
Harbin, all Manchuria in fact, is a land of snow and ice and bitter
gales; to me, who happened to be there in the very climax of the brief
summer, it will always bring back memories of a climate compared to
which that of the tropics is mild and invigorating. Nor can I remember
meeting in all Japan such battalions of flies as helped to make life
miserable in summer-time Harbin, with its brief nights and its
interminable days.
I know at last why one’s hat is always snatched from him when he enters
a Russian-Jewish restaurant in New York. In Russia, and equally in
Harbin, it is an inexcusable discourtesy to go into an office, even for
the briefest instant, wearing, or carrying, hat or overcoat. There are
always flunkies waiting to take them away from you outside the door, and
obviously they expect to be remembered when you leave. I am overcome
with grief to think that, in my appalling ignorance, I so long fancied
one of the least beloved customs of our metropolis a mere scheme to
extort tips, instead of a transplanted refinement from urbane Russia.
Equally Russian is the Harbin practice of shaking hands with the entire
personnel, from proprietor to errand-boy, of any shop one enters,
however slight the purchase one has in view. Indeed, the more genuinely
well bred shake hands all around again before they leave.
Several gaudy blue, green, and gold churches of the Russian Orthodox
faith rise in fantastic domes and puffed-out, cross-surmounted spires
above the general level of Harbin, and religious ceremonies imported
direct from pre-Bolshevik Moscow may be seen any day in the week.
Funerals, for instance, were of more than daily occurrence. Most often
they were those of impoverished refugees, and were brief and
inconspicuous; but there were frequent processions of the elaborate,
typically Russian character. I passed two such within half an hour one
noonday. The first was of the wife of the Russian station-master. He had
discharged a Chinese employee for negligence and “squeeze,” and the
latter had returned to kill him, his bullet accidentally striking the
wife instead. The second was of the head of the Harbin _Gymnasium_, or
upper school, once a colonel and a man of great wealth in Russia, now so
impoverished that his wife and children, on foot behind the hearse, as
is the Russian custom, were almost in rags and virtually barefoot.
Mummers in fantastic costumes, including long, light-colored robes,
walked before and on either side of the deceased, who were carried in
canopied vehicles gay beyond anything western Europe or the New World
has to offer the dead, even the horses draped from ears to fetlocks in
flowing white coverlets fancifully embroidered. But the most surprising,
not to say repulsive, Russian feature of the ceremony was the public
display of the corpse. In each case the heavy lid of the coffin was laid
diagonally off to one side, and during all the miles from church to
cemetery, with several stops for the burning of incense and priestly
blessings on the way, the yellow face of the departed rolled from side
to side as the open hearse jolted over the stony pavements.
It is an old saying that to scratch a Russian is to find a Tartar, but I
had taken this to be a mere figure of speech until I came to Harbin and
northern Manchuria, where the European and the Asiatic Orientals live
side by side. The Chinese and the Russians, one quickly realized there,
understand each other better than we of the real West can ever hope to
understand either. They have the same complicated Oriental way of
thinking, a similar point of view in such matters as “squeeze,” not very
dissimilar business methods. In a Russian department-store of Harbin the
purchaser gets two checks, one of which he pays at the desk under the
personal eye of the owner or manager, getting the other stamped and
presenting it, not to the clerk who served him, but to another so far
away that collusion between them would be difficult, before he is
finally handed his purchase. The mere loss of time on both sides no more
worries the Russian than it would the Chinese. At every turn I found
myself startled to recognize as another Russian trait what I had fancied
was characteristic merely of eastern Asia. Every important house in
Harbin had its private policeman, usually a Russian ex-soldier, and
wherever one attempted to enter a gate watchmen and domestic hangers-on
sprang up from all sides as thickly as at the entrance to a Chinese
residence or _yamen_. Perhaps the greatest surprise was the discovery
that the Russian uses the abacus or swan-pan for doing his arithmetic,
just like the people of Japan, Korea, and China, except that with him
the contrivance is much larger, as if his heavier fingers needed wooden
balls worthy of their strength. Mental arithmetic seemed to be as
impossible to him as to a Chinese shopkeeper or to the subjects of the
mikado. On my first visit to a dining-car on the C. E. R., it being two
or three hours before dinner-time, I had merely a glass of tea and some
Russian form of pastry. The bill of fare announced these as costing 15
and 45 _sen_ respectively—Japanese money is most widely used now in the
Russianized zone of Manchuria. The ikon-faced man at his desk in a
corner of the car, his mammoth black beard looking like a wig that had
fallen from its place on his utterly hairless head, solemnly picked up
his counting-board, rattled the balls back and forth for a full minute,
and finally wrote down with an air of intellectual triumph the total of
the two items on my check before him. No Westerner can ever hope to
sandwich himself in between two peoples who prefer the abacus to pencil
and paper for their arithmetical problems.
Yet the Russians are white men, and thereby hang certain problems that
are sure to thrust themselves upon the visitor to northern Manchuria in
the present days of Russian upheaval. It was a distinct pleasure to find
myself again where Westerners were not incessantly stared at, even
though it was useless to attempt to speak a word with men and women who
would have looked perfectly at home on the streets of any large American
city. But it was quite otherwise suddenly to realize that some of the
weaknesses of our Western civilization are much more conspicuous, or at
least more public, than similar flaws in Oriental society. Neither China
nor Japan are model lands in many respects, but during all the time I
had spent in the Far East I had not seen a fraction of the open
indecency, the unashamed vulgarity, the deliberate flaunting of sexual
wares that raged in the several conspicuous café singing-halls of
Harbin. It was almost a shock even to see white women again in any
number; to find them dressing and behaving as no Japanese geisha, no
singsong-girl of Korea or China, would ever think of doing outside her
semi-domestic circle, was more impressive, more suggestive of the vices
of our civilization, than the average of us would have called to his
attention during a lifetime of Western residence. The contrast, added to
a little knowledge of the point of view of the Oriental as to the proper
place of the sex appeal in life, made such things stand out with the
vividness of electric sign-boards. As Westerners we might understand
that Harbin, under undefined economic conditions and somewhat chaotic
government, with overturned Russia pouring its vices and its hungers
down into it, was not a normal sample of the West; to the occasional
fat, smug Chinese visitors to these blatant places, and through them to
thousands of their race, such parading of our vices could do more to
give a false impression of Western life and the Western character than a
thousand decent Occidentals, working for years to no other purpose,
could correct.
Two decades ago, while I was wandering across Asia during the
Japanese-Russian War, an English-speaking Hindu expressed to me his
great astonishment that the white world should permit the yellow race to
show its superiority over even what seemed just then the most widely
disliked branch of the Caucasian family. He realized what at least the
untraveled bulk of the Occident does not to this day, that every sign of
weakness in any white nation, almost in any white individual, is
immediately applied by the average Oriental mind to the whole white
race. The effect of Japan’s victory over Russia, working like a leaven
through the masses of Asia for a score of years, was quite apparent in
certain general changes of attitude toward Westerners, some of them
fortunate, many of them quite the contrary. Now, with the second
catastrophe of Russia flooding Asia with new examples of Caucasian
weaknesses, of white men reduced to a lower level than Asia had ever
before seen them, one could not but feel that it behooves the Western
world in general to look to the impression Russians in China are making
for the Caucasian family as a whole, and to know what their treatment is
at the hands of the Chinese. For while we may recognize the Russian as
essentially an Oriental, really more closely allied to the Chinese than
to ourselves, the latter thinks of him entirely as a Westerner, typical
in his faults and his weaknesses of that other side of the earth toward
which the Oriental attitude is of growing importance. I do not know
whether or not the continued supremacy of the white race is best for the
world at large; but I have rather strong personal opinions on that
subject, and those who are like-minded would do well to look into the
question of the present-day conditions of Russians in China, where at
least the respect on which much of that supremacy depends is being
gradually eaten away.
Along all the principal thoroughfares of Harbin squatted scores of white
beggars, women and children among them, appealing to Chinese as well as
to European passers-by. In the market-places of this and of other towns
along the C. E. R. I saw many a Russian covered with filth, sores, and a
few tattered rags, a noisome receptacle of some kind in his hands,
wandering from stall to stall pleading with the sardonic Chinese keepers
to give him a half-rotten tomato or a putrid piece of meat. Barefooted
refugee children roamed the streets, picking up whatever they could
find, including some of the nastiest of Chinese habits. Former officers
of the czar, and wives who were once the grace of any drawing-room,
speaking French with a faultless accent, lived in miserable pens with
only ragged cloth partitions between them and their teeming neighbors,
eating the poorest of Chinese coolie food, some of them unable to go out
unless they went barefoot. In the so-called thieves’ market every
conceivable kind of junk, from useful kitchen utensils to useless
bric-à-brac of Russian ancestry, was offered for sale; any morning one
might see several hundred Russian men and women shuttling to and fro
there, trying to sell an odd pair of boots, an all but worn-out garment,
a child’s toy, for the price of a handful of potatoes or a measure of
_kaoliang_, or attempting to exchange something they had at last found
they could do without for something their fellow refugees still had that
seemed to them indispensable.
The few Americans in Harbin at least were doing what they could to
relieve the needy Russians. But it was an even more complicated task
than we of the West would suppose, for here again the essential
Orientalism of the victims came out. Young men with fine faces, on which
the signs of semi-starvation were in plain evidence, would come
imploring any kind of assistance, any position that would give them
enough to buy bread. “Why,” they would cry, as if they were going the
utmost limit in describing their horrible state, “I will even work with
my hands!” But this was merely bluff; nothing could make your typical
Russian of the class which Bolshevism chased out of the country debase
himself to any such degree as that, starve, beg, or steal though he
must. With a plethora of hungry, yet still sturdy, Russians of both
sexes all about them, it was almost impossible for the American
residents to get servants, unless they took Chinese from the native
city. They could get innumerable teachers of Russian, almost none of
whom had any conception of how to teach, nor the persistence, patience,
and punctuality which that calling requires; but when it came to washing
dishes and mopping floors chances went begging in the very houses which
were being bombarded with frantic appeals for help against incipient
starvation. It was not merely that these former well-to-do did not know
how to work; they would do anything rather than learn.
Fifteen boys who worked their way across Siberia and were found jobs by
the Y. M. C. A. secretary of Harbin all ran away very shortly afterward,
taking with them money or clothing, or both, belonging to their
employers. One went home all the way across Siberia again to find his
mother, discovered no trace of her, was caught by the “Red” army, and
finally turned up in Harbin once more with frozen feet and looking like
an old man, though he was only seventeen. This same secretary had
countless appeals for help and at the same time a job of pumping water
at his own house, but he was never able to make the two meet. Time after
time he offered some hungry young Russian this task, which meant less
than two hours’ work a day, at any time of the day that the worker might
choose, the salary to be all the food he could eat and $7.50 “Mex” a
month—a very liberal offer in China, even for high-priced Harbin.
Invariably each applicant for aid bowed low at this offer, assured the
secretary that he had saved his life, thanked him in the deepest Russian
manner possible, which might include the kissing of the benefactor’s
hands—and invariably never turned up again. One case was so obviously
deserving that the secretary dug a good suit of clothes out of the
bottom of his trunk, had it dry-cleaned, and gave it to the poor fellow,
along with the pumping job, from which he discharged the Chinese boy who
had recently been filling it very satisfactorily—and the next day, when
his water ran out, he found that the man and the suit had gone to
Vladivostok.
American representatives of such organizations as the Red Cross, who
were spending money and energy for the betterment of Russian refugees in
Harbin, Kirin, and other towns of northern Manchuria, could not get a
man among all the big sturdy fellows they were feeding to build a brick
stove, to patch a roof, or to dig a trench for their own benefit;
Chinese laborers had to be called in to do all such “work with the
hands.” Indeed, the refugees expected their benefactors to hire servants
to sweep out and keep in order the buildings that had been found for
them. There were some well-to-do Russians in Harbin—more C. E. R.
officials than there were positions for them to fill lived there in
style, and a few families had escaped from Russia early enough to have
been able to bring much of their wealth with them, not to mention others
who had long been in business in Manchuria. But these were the last
people in Harbin to help their unfortunate compatriots. They might
flaunt their own comfort and extravagance in the lean faces of the
unfortunate; they were even known to “squeeze” some of the poor devils
among the refugees of the working-class who found and accepted work; but
they were as Oriental as the Chinese in looking callously on while their
own people starved about them, or were succored by men from across the
sea.
For a time the Y. M. C. A. secretary helped young Russians to immigrate
to the United States under the guise of students, there being some
special ruling for these in spite of the new immigration restrictions;
but so many of them turned out to be men who had helped to start the
revolution in Russia and hoped to do the same in America that the plan
proved to be unwise. Those who succeeded in finding tasks to the liking
of the hand-sparing fugitives had their own troubles. “Hire a Russian
and you have to hire another man to watch him,” was the consensus of
opinion among all who had had that experience. Russian ideas of honesty
were frankly Oriental; moreover they were idealists, dreamers, with no
business sense, no conception of economics or economies, no “go,” not a
practical trait in their whole make-up, unless they had some German,
Swedish, or French blood in their veins, which the few enterprising ones
in Harbin did. For all that they were a most likable people, childlike
in their manners as well as their irresponsibility, with nothing of the
surliness of the Japanese, nor of the Chinese love of ridicule. They
gave one the feeling that they were not fitted to cope with the
practical every-day world, that they should not be wandering about it
without guardians and advisers. One soon ceased to wonder that the trade
of Harbin was almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews and the
Chinese; a few days in northern Manchuria were enough to explain why the
Jews are so powerful and so hated in Russia, why it has been considered
necessary to curb them, almost enough to make clear the incredible
success of Bolshevism over common sense.
Distinctly a chip of the degenerate old régime was Harbin, inhabited
mainly by people whom nothing would drive to manual labor but who were
quite ready to spread intrigue and false propaganda against the new
rulers in their native land. The Bolsheviks, it seems generally
admitted, are at least sincere, wildly impractical as they are in their
ideas of human society; these refugees of Harbin, one felt, would be
just as bad as ever if once they got back into power, would have learned
nothing whatever, thanks to their incapability, their temperamental
ineptitude, from their bitter experiences. “Propaganda aside,” said
foreign residents who were in a position to know, and who certainly were
not friendly to the new order in Russia, “if the bulk of the Russian
people were able to vote between the old régime and the present one they
would choose the latter as the least of two evils”; and any one who has
made even a brief stay in the Russian metropolis of China would probably
be inclined to agree with that statement.
The night life of Harbin, even passing over the vicious part of it, was
in great contrast to that of Japan and the adjoining lands I had so far
visited. Whatever else they might have to do without, the Russian exiles
plainly did not propose to deny themselves the gay times, the mingling
together in social concourse, the rivalry of dress and public
squandering of money, the joys of good music, which had been so
important a part of their life at home. Countless anecdotes floated
about Harbin of refugees dressing like lords though they had not a crust
left at home, of selling necessary things, even of spending money that
had been given to keep them from starvation, to get raiment in which
they were not ashamed to appear in the frequent social gatherings. In
the park of the Railway Club, to which members and their families were
admitted free and passing strangers at a goodly price of admission,
there was an immense crowd on the evening I spent there, as there is
almost any night of the week, so purely European a crowd that it took a
distinct mental exertion to realize that one was still in China. Yet in
all the big audience that stood and strolled about the huge shell-shaped
sounding-board, from within the mouth of which a large orchestra gave an
all-Tchaikowsky program that would have been loudly applauded by music
lovers anywhere, there was scarcely a visible sign of straitened
circumstances, to say nothing of poverty. Ladies as well gowned as at
the Paris races strolled with men faultlessly garbed, by European
standards, who swung their “sticks” with the haughty grace of
aristocrats to whom the lack of an adequate income had never so much as
occurred. Men and women sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the club
paid their checks and tipped their waiters with as lavish an air as if
the World War had never happened. Not a few men were in a kind of
combination smock and uniform, with collars buttoning high about the
neck; but these looked as much like an exuberance of fashion as like
subterfuges to save shirts or cover the lack of them, just as their
tightly belted waists were more of a fad than an open admission of the
meagerness of their suppers.
It was like such a concert in a Spanish-American plaza, yet in many ways
different. The hearers stood during the numbers and walked between them,
reversing the usual practice south of the Rio Grande. There was endless
hand-shaking; beards were not conspicuously numerous and even mustaches
were little in fashion, at least among the younger men, but closely
clipped, even shaved, heads seemed to be as much the style as among the
modern Chinese, who, now that they are doing away with the pigtail, are
doing so with such a vengeance that their scalps show white through the
bristles. Short hair was not uncommon among the women, too, though less
as a fashion, it was said, than because so many had had typhus during
their fugitive days. It was strange to see the women all wearing hats,
quite aside from the fact that they were almost all new ones; it was
strange to see women openly treated with respect, for that matter, and
walking arm in arm with their men; strangest of all was the queer
feeling of mingling again with thousands of white people, after months
of never having seen more than a dozen of them together. Not a few of
the girls and young women were more than good-looking, in form as well
as face, a fact which many of them seemed to take care not to conceal,
for some of the newest dresses were startlingly thin, and rolled
stockings barely covering the ankle were almost the rule among the
younger set. But Russians do not appear to be prudish about the display
of the human form; during July and August great numbers of both sexes,
quite of the decent class, bathe together perfectly naked in the muddy
water of Harbin’s uninspiring river.
I was introduced to princesses in simple but very appropriate garb, to
people with strange and with sad stories, to men who had run away from
Russia and left their wives to follow—if they could—to women who had
performed incredible feats and suffered unbelievable hardships to escape
from the blighted land or to join such unworthy husbands, and who in
some cases still retained their striking beauty and in many their
Russian charm. Yet numerous as were the fine faces in the crowd, it
hardly needed the experience of foreign residents to call attention to
the fact that in so many instances these looked proud and impractical
and—well, inefficient in the matter-of-fact things of life. Now and then
there passed through the throng that made respectful way for them old
generals still wearing their uniforms, blazing from shoulder to shoulder
with decorations, and the same haughty expression of men expecting
instant obedience as in their bygone days of power and emoluments. I
could not quite get the point of view on some Russian prejudices. Not
one of that race with whom I spoke during my journey through northern
Manchuria lost an opportunity to curse the Jews, whom they always spoke
of as synonymous with the new régime in their native land. Yet the
leader of this orchestra was a Jew, and he not only got wild applause at
the end of almost every number, even from men who left off vilifying his
people just long enough to add to it in the heartiest fashion, but when
he raised his baton to start the first number the almost entirely
Russian orchestra had given him a “rouser” instead, a sudden burst of
music entirely different from what they were about to play, which is
considered in Russian musical circles the highest honor that can be paid
a musical director.
Harbin consists of four towns, each with its individual name. There is
the old one where the Russians first settled when they built the Chinese
Eastern Railway, now almost deserted but for tillers of the surrounding
fields, a makeshift home for orphan refugees, and the like. In Pristan,
popularly called “Jew-town,” most of the business is carried on, as well
as the far-famed singing-halls. Up the hill from this and separated from
it by an open space in which Chinese executions take place is the more
commodious railroad town, with important offices, the better-class
residences, the garish Russian Orthodox churches which rise like
unnaturally gorgeous flowers above the rather drab general level.
Lastly, there is Fu-chia-tien, the Chinese city, a mile or more away
from the others, as completely Chinese as if there had never been a
Russian within a thousand versts of the place. There are many rickshaws
in Fu-chia-tien, but not one in all the other three towns, and rarely
indeed does a foreigner ride in one, though they are more comfortable on
the horrible streets than the _droshke_, and certainly more so than the
excruciating “American women.” The severed heads of bandits hung in
cages on several street corners in Chinese Harbin, and many other such
touching little details showed that the town clung strictly to its own
ways in spite of the many foreign examples so close at hand.
Until the debacle of the czarist régime in Russia, the three Russian
towns of Harbin were entirely under their own rule. Even now, since they
have formally taken over the jurisdiction of them, the Chinese still let
the Russians largely alone in their municipal affairs, but they are more
and more prone to “butt in” and gratuitously assert their authority,
just as they have in the Chinese Eastern Railway. This now has a Chinese
as well as a Russian president and the whole category of Chinese
officials down to the last clerk, in addition to Russian duplicates of
the same in the greatly over-staffed offices. Some say the Russian
railway officials are deliberately selling out to the Chinese; others
claim that they are running this important link in world communication
into wreckage and bankruptcy while they and the Bolsheviks quarrel, on
paper and at a distance, as to whether it belongs to the Russian
Government or merely to the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Meanwhile it staggers
along under its top-heavy double staff, paying salaries to Chinese who
do nothing and to many Russians who do not do much. The latter, old
officials cut off for years now from higher authority, avow that they
are merely administering the line for the benefit of the czarist régime
that appointed them, until such time as this shall recover its rightful
place in the world, but in practice they act as if the C. E. R. were the
private property of the little clique of reactionary Russians who hold
the power and wealth of Harbin. How public-spirited these are is
suggested by such actions as their refusing to transport, except at full
rates, food and clothing furnished by the Red Cross for the relief of
their compatriots in the various towns of northern Manchuria.
At Versailles in 1919 and again at the Washington Conference two years
later the Chinese delegates demanded the abrogation of extraterritorial
jurisdiction in China, as a derogation of her sovereign status as a
nation. The request was denied, but at the second gathering it was
decided to appoint a commission to examine on the spot the assertion of
the delegates that the administration of justice in the former Celestial
Empire has so far improved that foreign jurisdiction may safely be
abolished. Since then certain occurrences in China which have not been
testimonials in her favor have caused the commission indefinitely to
postpone its coming; but in the meanwhile there is considerable evidence
at hand in the treatment of the Russians by the Chinese since the former
were deprived of their extraterritorial status.
It is probably not necessary to explain that extraterritoriality, as it
is familiarly called, consists, briefly, in the right—or is it
privilege?—of foreigners in China to be tried only by their own consuls
or judges, under the laws of their own countries. Eighty years ago,
closely following the Treaty of Nanking, which ended one of her “opium
wars” with China, England forced this concession upon the Chinese
Government, the Americans and the French quickly followed suit, and soon
there were very few foreign residents indeed who were not protected by
treaty from Chinese courts and prisons. This state of affairs remained
unbroken until about the time of the Washington Conference, when China
took advantage of conditions in Russia to repudiate her treaty with the
czarist Government, and the many thousands of Russians in China suddenly
found themselves on a par, legally, with the Chinese themselves. A new
treaty between China and Germany, in which the latter either
inadvertently or purposely left out any mention of extraterritoriality,
and lack of treaties with some of the other countries on which China
declared war at the behest of the Allies has left Germans, Austrians,
Bulgarians, and some other nationalities in the same boat with the
Russians.
Since then life has not been quite the same in Harbin and the other
Russian towns of northern Manchuria. On one hand the change has caused
some just retribution. In the olden days Russians kicked the Chinese
about almost at will; now when a Chinese carriage driver in Harbin gets
a good excuse and opportunity, Russian heads are likely to suffer.
Russian railway-men used to throw Chinese passengers back into third
class or out on the platform, if they felt in the mood, even though they
held first-class tickets; now the minions of Chang Tso-lin suddenly levy
a new tax and Chinese soldiers go out and “beat up” Russian farmers to
such an extent in some cases that ships lie waiting for cargo in Dairen
while crops rot in the fields. Unfortunately things do not often stop
with mere retribution. The Chinese along the C. E. R. seem sometimes to
go out of their way to be insolent toward any Westerner, to jostle and
to annoy him without cause; taxes have been levied on the property of
foreigners other than Russian, and men arrested in spite of treaties of
extraterritoriality still in existence. An Italian woman who complained
that her purse had been stolen by a Chinese pickpocket was taken to jail
along with the thief, as openly as was a Russian who tried to get back
his fur coat, and the latter at least was imprisoned for weeks. You
cannot expect the garden variety of Chinese soldier or policeman to
recognize a difference in foreigners, and in a town where 98 per cent of
these are Russians we others have to watch our steps. Perhaps this
inability of their Chinese comrades to distinguish between foreigners
without and those still with extraterritorial status is the reason that
there are Russian police in Harbin, splashing through its mud in their
heavy boots as if they still had the czar’s authority behind them—until
the passing of some supercilious Chinese official causes them to snap to
attention and salute.
[Illustration:
The grain of the _kaoliang_, one of the most important crops of North
China. It grows from ten to fifteen feet high and makes the finest
of hiding-places for bandits
]
[Illustration:
A daily sight in Vladivostok,—a group of youths suspected of opinions
contrary to those of the Government, rounded up and trotted off to
prison
]
[Illustration:
A refugee Russian priest, of whom there were many in Harbin
]
[Illustration:
Types of this kind swarm along the Chinese Eastern Railway of
Manchuria, many of them volunteers in the Chinese army or railway
police
]
Many examples of Chinese oppression of the Russians were common
knowledge in Harbin, some of them more serious than others. A young
Russian member of the Y. M. C. A. who was putting the shot in a park of
the residence town was arrested by the Chinese on the charge of having a
bomb in his possession. He spent some hours in jail, finally to be
released on bail, the police confiscating what the judge agreed with
them was an explosive agent of destruction. The association secretary
had to threaten to refer the matter to the American consul before the
“bomb” was returned, and when I left Harbin the charge against the
“bomb-thrower” had not been dismissed. Then there was the sad case of
another member aspiring to athletic prowess, who, in throwing the
javelin, hit a dog, though that was complicated by the fact that the
injured animal was of Japanese nationality, which made the affair much
more serious. Chang and his retainers may have a justifiable scorn for
those of us whose governments so habitually turn the other cheek of late
in cases of Chinese aggression, but there are several thousand good
reasons, all splendidly armed and equipped and right on the spot, why he
should respect Japan’s wishes, even if his former lieutenancy and
certain allegations of secret allegiances still frequently heard have no
weight with him.
These instances, I admit, are not such as nations should go to war over,
but they are just as good examples as are many far more serious ones,
which any foreign resident of Harbin can cite, of how misunderstandings
alone, if there were the very best will and desire to be just, would
make it impossible for foreigners to get justice in China once their
extraterritorial privileges were taken away from them. Nor was it a
particularly agreeable sight to see a line of Russian men and women
waiting for hours, if not for days, the good pleasure of haughty Chinese
officials and their gutter-snipe-like underlings in order to get
passports to go to another town, or out of the country. The court-room I
visited in Harbin was an ordinary brick and plaster building, but
chasers of evil spirits climbed its eaves, and dragons sat on the roof,
their antennæ waving in the wind. Many Russians were gathered, including
a huge lawyer in robes who suggested _Gulliver_ in fear of his life when
he bowed and smirked before the diminutive almond-eyed officials. In
theory court opened at ten, but there had been fireworks in the Chinese
town the night before and his honor was still being patiently awaited at
noon. Out in front of the court was a string of bill-boards on which
cases were posted in tissue-paper sheets covered with Chinese
characters, reminding one that an interpreter to explain what the police
had against one would be indispensable under lost extraterritoriality.
The judge did come at last, a boyish-looking fellow who sat in splendid,
not to say haughty, isolation in his high chair, singsonging something
now and then in a half-audible falsetto, and still more often hawking
and spitting on the floor, though there were signs all over the
court-room forbidding it. On the desk before him was one tissue-paper
_bordereau_, as the French, who use similar loosely bound collections of
papers, would call it; but there were no signs of law-books, and the
judge seemed to get his precedents, and his opinions, too, one
suspected, from the not too immaculate clerks and hangers-on who
frequently came up to whisper in his ear. Meanwhile a gray-bearded
Russian was standing respectfully before him at the rail, droning on and
on in his own tongue some sort of complaint, testimony, or defense. The
case was not a very serious one, it seemed, there being a mere matter of
two or three hundred dollars “Mex” involved; but without going any
farther into details, let me put it briefly that, though there was in
evidence all the machinery of justice which a visiting commission would
wish to see, I should very much have regretted the necessity of
expecting justice from this soggy-eyed Celestial youth, bending his ear
to this and that whisper from his unkempt, shifty-looking attendants.
I visited also the big prison down in Pristan, built by the Russians but
now taken over by the Chinese. There were two hundred and seventy-seven
Russian prisoners and one German in it, a dozen of them women, among
whom was a Jewish member of that sex who had lived for years in “Noo
Yoik,” and spoke her fluent English accordingly. The same rules governed
the prison as under the Russians, but orders from higher up now came
from Chinese, and inmates put their hope, in cases where they had any
left, in Chinese courts and officials. Some of the guards were still
Russian, but the majority were not, and the sight of white men, clanking
with enormous chains, chased about the yard while they cleaned out
toilets and did similar menial tasks, by Chinese jailers who openly
enjoyed their discomfiture, would not have added to the joy of white
nations. Nearly all the prisoners, however, were in groups of six to a
dozen in large cells that could be dimly seen through a small slit in
each door. Living conditions were those of the old type of Russian
prisons, with immense locks, and very thick walls that made the July
heat furnace-like; the food was mainly _kaoliang_ and other cheap,
coarse grains; there were no shops, or regular work of any kind, and
only half an hour’s exercise a day in the open air was allowed, even “in
principle.” There were, of course, desperate criminals among the rather
pasty-faced but generally big brawny men who peered out the door-slits
with expressions uncannily like caged lions and tigers, and from these
China must protect herself and those who dwell within her borders. But
my American missionary companion, who had lived for some time in Harbin
and spoke Russian, knew personally of several men for whose innocence
the whole Caucasian community could vouch, who were there merely out of
Chinese spite and whose trials had been, or would be, if they ever took
place, worse than travesties on justice. The worst hardship of all,
according to the misguided lady from “Noo Yoik,” was that no one had the
least inkling, nor any possible way of finding out, when the Chinese
might deign to bring a prisoner to court and air the charges against
him.
Terms up to forty years were inflicted, but “long-timers” had the
privilege, at least in theory, of being transferred to the “model
prison” in Peking. Thus far no Russians had been executed, “because of
the impression this might make among foreign nations,” according to an
official Chinese statement. Of course once those nations give up their
extraterritorial rights it will not so much matter what impression is
made. Not long after our visit, however, when a thin and
effeminate-looking little Russian charged with half a dozen murders in
the pursuance of his calling as highway robber, and with whom I talked
“high-brow stuff” in his tiny private cell, walked calmly out of the
court-room and killed two or three of the policemen who pursued him, the
announcement was made that in his case at least, if he were ever
retaken, this policy would be rescinded. There is little doubt that this
particular “bad man” should be done away with; but when Chinese soldiers
get to shooting white men as one of their regular duties, what little
prestige our race retains in China will soon evaporate. For what those
many untraveled Westerners who feel that China should have complete
sovereignty within her borders do not realize is the primitive mentality
of the Chinese masses, which includes the soldiers, in such matters as
the natural fights of others and the assumption of a low estate in those
who are not outwardly honored and protected.
Though it is trespassing on the future to mention it here, I visited,
months later, that “model prison” of Peking. It is just that, a well
built, splendidly arranged penitentiary on the most modern, wheel-shaped
lines, out in the southwest corner of the Chinese city. The new section
recently built for foreigners—which had room for four times as many
inmates as had so far been collected—was quite all it should be, with
hot and cold baths, reasonable provisions for heating in winter, a
kitchen of its own where foreign food was prepared. The workshops of the
entire institution were large, airy, and light; there was a Russian as
well as a Chinese chapel in which Taoist, Confucianist, Mohammedan,
Christian, even Y. M. C. A. speakers appeared on Sundays; the régime of
the place was considerate and enlightened; as a prison, in fact, it
should make such a place as Sing Sing faint with shame. I saw other
“model prisons” in China, notably that in the capital of Shansi, which
has never had a representative from the outside world except a Turk who
was caught peddling opium pills. But these few praiseworthy institutions
in the more enlightened centers, and toward which the eyes of an
investigating commission would, of course, be carefully directed, are as
nothing compared to the unspeakable holes all over China into which
prisoners are thrown, and where foreigners also would have the privilege
of moldering away while provincial authorities slept, if
extraterritoriality were abolished.
There is no Chinese code of laws; the fate of most prisoners depends on
the often poor judgment, the mood of the moment, the devious political
machinations, of the judge himself, not to mention wide-spread bribery
and Oriental intricacies of which even old residents have only an
inkling. Two separate codes, for foreigners and Chinese, would certainly
have to be introduced before extraterritoriality could be surrendered.
You cannot justly shoot or lop off the head of a Westerner for stealing
a suit of clothes or a sack of grain, however necessary such drastic
measures may be among a people desperate with habitual semi-starvation
and so inured to hardships that ordinary punishments mean nothing, any
more than you can justly arrest a foreign merchant because his overcoat
has been stolen, and keep him in jail for weeks as a witness. In Chinese
jurisprudence torture is a recognized procedure, and false confessions
forced thereby are considered legal proof of guilt. Every prisoner is
presumed to be guilty, and must prove his innocence, rather than be
convicted by the prosecution, no strange point of view to Latin races,
but a topsyturvy one to Anglo-Saxons. Not the least disagreeable of
Chinese practices is the “doctrine of responsibility,” which means that
in any group, be it village, family, crew, or, if the present status
were changed, assemblage of foreigners, some one must be punished for
the misdeeds of any individual member of it, so that a perfectly
innocent head may be lopped off to save the trouble of hunting out the
real criminal. Even though the Chinese were to do their best to treat
foreign prisoners justly, the very differences in point of view, in
customs, in diet even, would make it impossible. The East and the West
are so unlike that an American could die of Chinese food and living
conditions while his jailers were priding themselves, in their ignorance
of other lands, on giving him the best the world affords. Of course
Japan is an example of the abolishing of extraterritoriality; but even
there the foreigner by no means gets Western justice, and for all the
virtues and likable qualities of the Celestial and the often
disagreeable traits of the Nipponese, government in Japan is ideal
compared to the corrupt, chaotic travesty on it which rules China.
[Illustration:
One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray, with green domes
and golden crosses, with much gaudy trimming
]
[Illustration:
A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down upon
]
[Illustration:
Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks in the
“thieves’” market of Harbin—when they catch any one who can afford
to be blacked
]
[Illustration:
Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok, selling
second-hand hardware of every description, suggest why the factories
and trains of Bolshevik Russia have difficulty in running
]
I traveled from end to end of the Chinese Eastern Railway, including the
extension of it from Pogranichnaya to Vladivostok, through what was
once, like Korea, Chinese territory. Endless steppes, flat as a floor,
covered as far as the eye could see with coarse grass, here and there
being hayed, was the general aspect north of the Sungari. Great herds of
cattle and sheep, carts drawn by six or eight horses over roads which in
the rainy season could not have been passable at all, millions of acres
of potential wheat-fields, a great granary of everything, including
sturdy youths for Chang Tso-lin’s armies, formed the outstanding
features of Hai-lung-chiang, northernmost and largest of China’s
provinces. South-bound freight-trains were not only crowded with Chinese
soldiers, gambling amid the chaotic messiness that surrounded them in
their roofed cars, but the uncovered flat-cars loaded with their
paraphernalia, with car-wheels and rusted machinery, were crowded with
Russian women and children sleeping on makeshift nests in sunshine or
heavy rain. There were cattle-cars with barefooted Russian men tending
them, little European box-cars fitted up as homes, sometimes with a
still aristocratic-looking young woman suckling a babe in the center of
it, impertinent Chinese soldiers looking on. There is no way of
computing how many pretty Russian girls, with nothing to live on but the
sale of their charms, there were along the C. E. R. from Manchuli to
Vladivostok, like the little end of the funnel down through which the
miseries of Russia had been oozing for years.
For all the rumors of degeneration of that line, however, the through
express was an excellent train, though even more leisurely than that on
the branch from Harbin southward, halting interminably at every station,
apparently to let the crew talk to the girls who decorated every
platform. It had all the comforts of compartment-divided sleeping-cars,
with Russian attendants; the dining-car, with its ikon and its abacus,
had a boarding-house table the entire length of it, and comely young
Russian waitresses, who rolled their socks.
When I awoke in the morning beyond Tsitsihar, the landscape was silvery
with white birches. Large and often pretty towns appeared every now and
then among the low green hills or on the broad prairies of this most
arctic of the “Eastern Three Provinces,” decidedly Russian towns, with
wide unpaved streets, discordantly colored half-Oriental churches of the
Greek Orthodox faith rising high above all else, against backgrounds
that gave above all a sense of vast, wide-open spaces. The Russians have
about twelve square miles at each station, and a strip of territory on
either side of the railway, where they can rent land for about eighty
years, as against only eighteen for foreigners in the rest of China,
where none but Chinese can own land, with certain exceptions in favor of
missionaries. There were far more Russians than Chinese at the stations
of these frontier towns, reminiscent of those of the Dakotas, where
every one came down to see the daily train go through. Most of the
peasant women were barefoot; in town the girls all rolled their
stockings, or went without them entirely. But huge bearskin coats and
big fur caps hung out on lines, airing. Hot water was furnished at all
the important stations, and bushels of eggs, all manner of food,
especially just at this season most magnificent raspberries, were for
sale by robust Russian women, often in a substantial booth built for the
purpose. But long lines of Chinese soldiers with drawn bayonets still
slouched along every platform, besides no end of Russians in uniforms of
every swaggering description, as if the dregs of a dozen routed armies
had been scattered along the line. Many of these strutting fellows wore
swords, and some carried firearms, members evidently of some sort of
local or railway police, as the unarmed majority were probably men who
had no other garments left. The constant swashbuckling, the incessant
parading of deadly weapons, got on the nerves; quite aside from the
decided economic loss of so many men withdrawn from production, there
was an ominous something about these thousands of young fellows, who had
not been old enough to get into the war, now strutting about in its
aftermath as if looking for a chance to make up for lost opportunities.
The Russians saluted all Chinese officials, even those in civilian
dress, raising their hats to them obsequiously if they themselves were
not in uniform. At one station a drunken Russian went around forcing
Chinese ragamuffins to shake hands with him.
All northern Manchuria was much troubled by bandits, _hung-hu-tze_, or
“red beards,” they were called, who had devastated far and wide, even
attacking the trains and station towns. There were at least a few
renegade Russians among some of the bands. The public shooting of
_hung-hu-tze_, in an open space between Pristan and the railway town,
was one of the frequent sights of Harbin. But the real curse of
Manchuria, as we were to find it of almost all China, were the soldiers.
The bandits often paid for what they took, but the soldiers looted
openly and carried off their plunder by the train-load within plain
sight of every one. When they wished to move, away from the railroad,
they forced farmers to let their crops go to waste and furnish them
transportation for ten-day journeys, feeding the drivers and their
animals along the way, but leaving them to find their way home as best
they could. If there were no other carts to be had at the end of the ten
days, the old ones must go on, twenty, thirty days, and even more. One
man I heard of had been away a year, and still could not get back. A few
hundred hand-picked, well paid soldiers, perhaps with a few Russians
among them to give them starch, could, according to competent opinion,
put a stop to banditry in Manchuria. But such coolies in uniform as
swarm up and down the C. E. R. accomplish nothing to that end, even when
they are not in actual collusion with the bandits. The _hung-hu-tze_
rout whole barracks of them, and prey on the Chinese and the Russian
population alike. Yet the Government clings to the fiction that they
afford sufficient protection, and will not allow the Russians to go
armed, unless they hold some kind of military position under the
Chinese. Soldiers and bandits alike abuse all the inhabitants of
northern Manchuria, except the Japanese, who have their own troops on
the spot.
Manchuli, on the edge of Siberia and almost on the fiftieth parallel, is
a large, prairie-like town of much more Russian than Chinese aspect.
Many of its houses are built of logs, yet are not unhomelike; sod hovels
like caves half below and half above ground shelter some of the
population, among which were many down-and-outs. Cossacks in their big
caps, with curiously liquid eyes, roam the wide, if dusty, streets.
Russians and Chinese sit joking together; both ride the small sturdy
horses of the region; many of the Chinese wear the long, soft, black
boots so general among their neighbors, but there seemed to be very few
mixtures of the two races. Sturdy fellows indeed were these bearded
Caucasian farmers from the north and west, but for that matter the
far-northern Chinese, with enough to eat and room to live in, are big
and strong, too, real pioneers, used to a different environment than are
their overcrowded compatriots farther south, in touch with and more
sympathetic toward European civilization. Now and again one of the
Chinese spoke to me in Russian and, when I could not answer, announced
to his companions that I was a _yang gwei_, though without any thought
of insult in the term, Russians evidently being so numerous and familiar
that they are no longer ranked as “foreign devils.” A market-place of
scores of makeshift shanties was stocked with enough second-hand
hardware to supply half Manchuria. Like those in Harbin and, I found
later, Vladivostok, these marts were crammed with everything from
railroad equipment to hinges, from factory machinery to crooked nails,
all more or less rusted, broken, and out of order. It was as if every
Russian who had fled before the “Reds” had torn loose and brought with
him anything he could lay his hands on, and here was another explanation
of why the factories and trains of Soviet Russia have difficulty in
running.
From Manchuli one can easily look across into Bolshevik territory; but
that was not China, and the traveler must turn back somewhere. An
ancient engine and the most rattletrap collection of cars that ever
masqueraded under the name of train was preparing to set out for Chita,
wretched-looking women and gaunt, hungry babies among the passengers who
occupied the dirty, miserably dilapidated compartments that were lighted
only by the candles travelers brought with them. Even those of us for
whom hardships have a certain zest could hardly regret that the way lay
back the comfortable way we had come.
From Mukden on to Peking one has a feeling of being in the real China at
last. Silver dollars take the place of convenient bank-notes; the
chaotic rough and tumble of Chinese crowds unchecked by foreign
discipline pervades stations and trains, both swarming with unsoldierly
men and boys in faded, ill fitting, gray cotton uniforms, who pack even
the dining-car to impassability; here and there a bullet-hole through
wall or window of the stuffy coupés into which the half-breed
American-European cars, with certain curious native characteristics, are
divided reminds one of recent history in the once Celestial Empire.
Endless fields, enormous seas, of _kaoliang_, enough to hide all the
bandits in China, flank the way. For that matter the towns as well as
brigands hide in it, for the slightly oval-roofed houses of stone and
baked mud are barely as high as this tall grain, and as the roofs
themselves are often covered with grass, places of considerable size
easily escape the eye entirely. In other seasons it is quite different,
for once they are denuded the fields are mere wind-swept stretches of
bare earth protesting against the habitual scarcity of moisture in North
China by sending frequent swirling clouds of dust to envelop any one and
anything within reach. Walled towns far from the stations that serve
them, iron-riveted cart-wheels hub-deep in the “roads” through which
rural transportation laboriously flounders its way, Chinese in long
cloaks, almost universally denim-blue in color, naked children and
ragged, diseased adults begging abjectly wherever the train halts, were
but a few of the details that somehow we had always associated with
China. Even the towns hidden in the grain seemed to be overrun with
soldiers, yet about all pretentious properties were big stone walls that
suggested bandits in perpetuity. All these things we saw hazily, through
a veil, as it were, for some pseudo-genius has had the unhappy thought
of lining nearly all the railways of China with willow-trees, which
flash constantly past with exasperating persistence, combining with the
inadequate little windows of the stuffy compartments still further to
reduce the visibility.
At Shanhaikwan, where the Great Wall clambers down to the sea at last,
weary with its three thousand miles over the mountains, soldiers were
much less numerous than in towns not so important to the north and south
of it. For the warring factions had declared a neutral zone on either
side of the colossal ancient rampart, which had become again, after
nearly three centuries of no real importance, the dividing-line between
what threatens to be an independent Manchuria and China proper. On the
beach at Shanhaikwan, or neighboring Pei-tai-ho, where half the foreign
residents of North China spend the summer, with turbaned Hindus, white
and black soldiers of France, an Italian gunboat, and other reminders of
their protective home governments to discount rumors of being in danger,
the heat was still too scorching to make an immediate entry into still
hotter Peking inviting, though August was well on the wane. Even a week
later, when much of the landscape was flooded with the brief rainy
season, a cool breath of air night or day was as rare as a Chinese field
without a grave. Within the Great Wall, beyond which seems to be
considered outer darkness for such purposes, these bare, untended
mounds, without even the grass which beautifies those of Korea, dotted
the country like spatters of raindrops on a placid yellow sea. As we
neared Taku, at the mouth of the river that gives Tientsin its
importance and all but washes the walls of Peking, higher, newer conical
heaps of earth suggested that many men of importance, or wealth, had
recently been buried there. But these turned out to be salt-fields,
where the surface soil of a great sea-flooded region is thrown up in
mounds and rectangular heaps which gradually wash down from earthy brown
to the white piles that are sacred to the government salt monopoly.
The traveler who lets his friends rush him about the foreign concession
of Tientsin by trolley or automobile will get an impression of a
comfortable Western community in an Oriental land, but he will carry off
very little idea of the real China, or even of the real Tientsin, which
is a swarming Chinese city, none the less so for having had its wall
reduced to a street of boulevard width as a punishment for the Boxer
uprising. To those for whom commerce and modern efficiency are
everything of importance, the Concession at Tientsin is of more
consequence than a whole province of interior China, but I found myself
more interested in any one of the ten Mohammedan mosques within the
native city, or in the former home of Li Hung-chang, now a tomb in which
he is worshiped by his descendants quite like any other prominent bygone
Chinese from Confucius to Yuan Shih-kai, than in the whole length of
Victoria Road.
A foreign concession in China, while it serves its purpose of making
life more livable and business more possible to the foreign merchants
who inhabit it, is altogether too convenient a refuge for the Chinese
crooks who choose to make it one. How many of China’s ex-ministers of
finance or of communications, how many former office-holders of every
graft-collecting grade, have retired to the protection of foreign
jurisdiction at Tientsin alone, living in luxury on their loot of
office, and how much of this might have been recovered by the Chinese
people to whom it rightfully belongs were there no such safety-zones of
easy access, is suggested by the magnificent establishments many of
these rogues maintain there. Yet the gaunt human horses who toil past
them tugging at heavy carts piled high with imports and exports get
barely six cents a day in our money, which they wolf in scanty,
unwholesome food copper by copper as fast as their tally-sticks amount
to one. As mere passers-by we could not but be thankful that, after a
brief following of the example of other nations, the United States
decided that concessions on Chinese soil were not in keeping with our
national policy. The Russians and the Germans and the Austrians have
lost theirs now, as they have their extraterritoriality, and it would
not be strange if this recovery of sovereignty taken from them for the
misdeeds of the Boxers gives hope to the people of China of chasing us
all out before the century has grown much older. Where a bare score of
Italians can hold a large tract of Chinese territory under their
jurisdiction, trafficking in arms and munitions from it with the various
factions that are doing their best to make China a continual
battle-field, and selling at almost any price they wish to ask what is
virtually the protection of their flag to Chinese rascals, it is not to
be wondered at if enmity toward “foreign devils” in general does not
show rapid strides toward oblivion. Jealousies among the various
nationalities which still keep their holdings also make a queer story.
Thus as many police forces and fire departments are maintained as there
are concessions, and one miserable little bridge connects the principal
foreign quarter with the rest of China, when getting together would make
really efficient substitutions. Tientsin is perhaps a pleasant
dwelling-place for those who like it, but we left it without regret one
morning soon after our arrival and by noon were rumbling along under the
massive walls of Peking, which was to be our home for the unprecedented
length of nine months that will not soon be forgotten.