A JOURNEY TO JEHOL
The Great Wall at its greatest, thirty-odd miles northwest of Peking,
with the Ming Tombs thrown in, is well worth the journey, both by train
and foot and by airplane—the one in two days and the other in as many
hours. There is a Trappist monastery within reach of the capital, and
the Western Hills are full of interest to the tramper; in fact merely to
name the excursions which the visitor to Peking should not on any
reasonable account miss would be to draw up a long list. But there is
one of these that had a particular attraction, because it is farther
away, over a difficult road devoid of any of the aids of modern times,
so ill of repute that certainly not one foreigner in a thousand who
comes to Peking ever dreams of really attempting that journey. To cap
the climax the Wai-chiao-pu gave official notice just as I was preparing
to start that no more permissions to visit that area would be given to
foreigners, because it was overrun with bandits. Obviously the antidote
of too much comfort and civilization in Peking was the trip to Jehol.
Those who are wise make the outward journey by way of Tung Ling, the
Eastern Tombs, thereby doubling the reward. This means that the first
stage is to Tungchow, by train or almost any known form of
transportation, twelve miles east of the capital, of which it was for
centuries the “port.” For it lies on the river that joins the Grand
Canal at Tientsin, and the tribute grain from the south was transferred
here to narrower canals that brought it to the imperial granaries now
falling into ruin almost within a stone’s throw of our Peking home. I
might have been disappointed to find the donkeys that had been engaged
for me unavailable until next morning if it had not been my good fortune
to spend the intervening time with the venerable author of “Chinese
Characteristics” and “Village Life in China.” Tungchow itself has
nothing unusual to show the visitor of to-day, unless it is that rounded
corner of its half-ruined wall. This is a sign of infamy, for it means
that some one within was once guilty of the, particularly in China,
unpardonable crime of patricide. The city which merits four such corners
was by imperial law razed to the ground.
Long before dawn, early as that is on the first day of May, the three
donkeys reported for duty. They were smaller and leaner than I had
hoped, of course, but their owner and driver, deeply pock-marked and
already showing the cataract that will in time blind his remaining eye,
turned out to be all that a much more exacting traveler could have
asked, and a real companion to boot. I wish I could say as much for the
“boy” I brought with me from Peking; truth must prevail, however, at all
costs. My journey to Jehol was made at a later date than those longer
ones subsequently to be chronicled; I had already been eight months in
China, entertaining a teacher an hour a day during nearly half that
period, and it seemed high time to depend on my own meager knowledge of
Mandarin, to make this a kind of test for similar, but more extensive,
experiences to come. I had deliberately refused those applicants with a
smattering of English, therefore, and hired this single servant for his
alleged familiarity with foreign ways, particularly of the kitchen. He
might have known even less of what we understand by the word
“cleanliness,” for the depths of ignorance in that respect are
bottomless in China, and his familiarity was rather of the sort which
too indulgent missionaries produce among Chinese of his class. Were the
trip to be repeated I would depend upon _k’an-lü-di_, my companionable
“watch-donkey-er” from Tungchow, to do the swearing and bring me boiled
water at the inns, and do the rest myself. But at least the “boy” spoke
only the tongue of Peking, and from Tungchow back to the capital I had
the advantage of hearing not a word of any other except from the two
British families in Jehol itself.
We were crossing the river by chaotic poled ferry by the time the sun
was fully up, and jogging away across a floor-flat, fertile plain,
intensely cultivated yet almost desert brown, like so much of northern
China except at the height of summer, before the first of the many towns
along the way was fully astir. It was manure strewing time, and the
season when the peasants of Chihli patiently break up the too dry clods
of earth covering their little fields by beating them with the back of a
Homeric hoe or dragging a stone roller over them by boy-, man-, or
donkey-power. Others were hoeing the winter wheat, growing in rows two
feet apart, but with _kaoliang_ already sprouting like beans or radishes
between them, which it was hard to realize would be above a horseman’s
head by August. Green onions enough to have fed a modern army went
balancing by from the shoulder-poles of coolies passing in both
directions. It is as incomprehensible to the mere Westerner why
identical produce must change places all over China as it was to
understand why onions grown at least to boy’s estate would not be better
in a perpetually hungry land than these tiny bulbless ones. But the
scent of young onions was seldom absent during our first two days, on
which we ran the gauntlet every few hours of a market-town green from
end to end with them. Next in number were the coolies carrying two low
flat baskets with open-work covers through which could be seen hundreds
of fluffy, peeping chicks being peddled about the country. The rare
trees were decked out in new leaves; far as the eye could strain itself
the brown, sea-flat earth was being prodded to do its best for
countless, already sun-browned tillers.
At the unprepossessing country town where we spent the night my “boy”
came in with a horrified look on his face to report that the innkeeper
wanted sixty coppers, which is fully fifteen cents in real money, for
the two good-sized rooms, new and well papered, extraordinarily clean
for China, which the three of us occupied. A chicken, too, cost a
hundred coppers, whereas in Peking it was only seventy! I gave outward
evidence of horror at this incredible state of affairs, lest the
opposite bring the impression that the customary “squeeze” might be
doubled with impunity, and then advised payment rather than a dispute on
this, our first day out. Perhaps it was the painful price of chickens
that made the town willing to consume some of the things it does, though
I believe the same omnivorous tendency prevails throughout this
overpeopled country. The squeamish, by the way, should skip the next few
lines; but one cannot always be nice and still tell the truth about
China.
A camel bound to Peking with a train of his fellows had died just in
front of our inn. The townsman to whom the carcass had evidently been
sold made a deep cut in the throat and then with his several helpers
proceeded to dismember it. When I stepped out into the street again soon
after dark everything except the head, the tail, and the four great
padded feet, cut off at the knees, had been sold as food to the
villagers. The hide and these odds and ends were evidently to yield
their portion of nourishment also, for they were carried into a
neighboring kitchen, while two other men went on disentangling the
heaped-up intestines, carefully preserving their contents as fertilizer
and to all appearances planning to use the entrails themselves as food.
There was double excitement in the town that evening, triple, counting
the foreigner, a date to be long remembered. Down the road a little way
from the disgusting front of the inn there was a theatrical performance,
not of flesh-and-blood actors, but what might be called a shadow-show.
Stage “music” in the Chinese sense was drawing the whole town, less the
camel carvers, thither; women hurried slowly through the dust on their
crippled feet; the younger generation, with the usual Chinese redundancy
of boys, swarmed; staid old men took their own chairs—that is, wooden
saw-horses six inches wide—with them. The theater, which had been thrown
up that afternoon in a corner of the highway, was little more than a
crude platform on poles, partly walled and roofed with pieces of cloth.
But it was a complete stage, almost better than a real one, in fact, for
there was about it a certain hazy atmosphere of romance that is
impossible in the matter-of-fact presence of mere human actors. There
were even actual fights on horseback, which the real stage can only
pretend by symbols to give; thrones, city gates, battles, petitioners,
men shaking their spears and themselves with rage at one another, all
the scenes with which the theater-goer in Peking is familiar, and more,
were there. Nor was speech lacking; these shadowy personages expressed
themselves in the same classical falsetto as do Mei Lan-fang and his
colleagues.
When I had mingled for a time with the audience that crowded a whole
section of the moon-flooded roadway, interspersed with the inevitable
hawkers of everything consumable under the circumstances, I went around
behind the scenes to see how these results were achieved with such
slight apparatus. You can always look behind the scenes in China without
arousing a protest, though you may not be any the wiser for doing so. A
flock of boys were hanging about on the pole structure, wholly open at
the back, the three showmen appearing to be quite unconscious of them so
long as they did not physically cramp their elbows. These men produced
their results with a black curtain, three kerosene lamps a foot or more
back of it, and a confusion of little colored figures hanging on either
side in what might be called the wings. Wearing as bored an expression
as any property-man on a real Chinese stage, the showmen picked these
figures down as they were needed and flourished them along between the
lights and the curtain. To each figure was attached a handle long enough
to keep the hand of the holder out of sight from the audience, and as
the gaudy, flimsy little manikins dashed and pranced and waddled to and
fro, according to their individual temperaments and their momentary
emotions, the bored manipulators poured forth the story in the awful
voice of the Chinese actor. That was all; yet the whole town stood or
sat enthralled by the performance, and I could hear the falsetto far
away in the moonlight until I fell asleep.
Beyond Manchow next afternoon cultivation thinned out and bare mountains
grew up on the horizon, while round stones of all sizes became incessant
underfoot. Walking had really been easier than bestriding my little
white donkey, but I had soon found it sympathy wasted to try to make
life easier for him. Your Chinese donkeyteer does not believe in letting
his animals grow fat with ease, and never did I look around a moment
after slipping off the padded back of my hip-high mount that his owner
was not already swinging his toes along one or the other side of him.
The other two donkeys, bearing our belongings and my “boy” respectively,
had, of course, even less respite. Incredible little beasts! Subsisting
on a little of nothing and still able to jog incessantly and
indefinitely on under loads of almost their own weight, they are the
true helpmeets of the industrious, ill fed Chinese countryman.
The usual time from Tungchow to Malanyü is three days, but we had gotten
an excellent start each morning and a bit of pressure induced the
_k’an-lü-di_ to push on past what most travelers to the Eastern Tombs
make their second stopping-place. A gate in the mountains that might
almost have been cut by hand rather than by the river that even in this
dry season filled all of it except a stony bank, crowded now with cattle
and flocks of goats making their way westward, let us out at sunset upon
an enormous plain completely enclosed in an amphitheater of high hills.
Across this, through the evergreen trees that thickened farther on into
an immense forest, we saw far ahead the first tomb of Tung Ling, a
golden-yellow roof standing well above the highest tree-tops. For nearly
two hours we plodded on among venerable pines that in China at least
were thick enough to merit the name of forest, amid scents that are all
too rare in that denuded land, foot-travelers to and from the various
tomb-guarding villages growing numerous and then thinning out again
before we sighted at last the dim lights and aroused the barking dogs of
Malanyü. The yard of its best inn was noisy with eating animals,
tinkling mule-bells, and the drivers, dogs, and roosters that always
make night hideous in such a place, while the best room facing it would
hardly be mistaken in any Western land for a human habitation. But that
is what the traveler in China expects in almost any town off the
railroads where there are no foreigners to offer him hospitality. At
least, if accommodations are not princely, neither are the charges.
While the donkeys drowsed through a well earned but unexpected holiday,
I spent half the morning, with the “boy” trailing me, chasing the man
who could open the tomb doors for me. Even with two tissue-paper
documents daubed with red characters from men of standing in Peking
local permission was not easily forthcoming. First there was a hot and
dusty ten-_li_ walk to the little garrison town of Malanchen on the very
edge of intramural China, where the commander commonly reputed to be
stationed in Malanyü read and retained my letters, offered tea, and at
length sent a soldier back to the city with us with orders to run to
earth the chief keeper of the tombs. He was not easily found and he in
turn had to run to earth several subordinates, each of whom lived far up
labyrinthian alleyways in the utmost corners of town, and when at length
we shook off the throng that kicks up the dust at the heels of any
foreigner so bold as to step off the beaten path of his fellows in
China, there was still an hour’s tramp back through the thin evergreen
forest to the tombs themselves.
Though it should be funereal, Tung Ling is one of the most delightful
spots in North China, almost atoning for the wastefulness of its two
hundred square miles given over to nine tombs. The soughing of the
breeze and the singing of the few birds in the scattered but extensive
evergreen forest were joys that one almost forgets in this bare land;
for China there were comparatively few people within the enclosure,
though trail-roads wandered away in all directions among the trees, with
donkey-bells tinkling off into the distance; it was particularly a joy
to leave even the trails and walk on grass again, strolling at random on
and on, to climb the hills, though this is technically forbidden, since
the living commonalty should not look down upon the illustrious dead.
Whatever they may not have done for their subjects the Sons of Heaven
were experts in choosing their last resting-places.
There was no roaming at will, however, until I had shaken off the
procession of keepers and hangers-on whose duty, curiosity, or suspicion
did not begin to flag until well on in the afternoon. It is a serious
matter to protect an emperor and his consorts even centuries after their
death. Every one of the nine tombs of Tung Ling has a walled town in
which its guardians and their families, all Manchus, of course, live to
the number certainly of several hundred each, if not of more than a
thousand. Their support devolves upon the Chinese people, through the
Government which guarantees, even though it does not fulfil its
promises, the upkeep of the tombs, as well as of the survivors, of the
Ch’ing dynasty. Before each tomb, which is no mere mausoleum in the
Occidental sense but an enclosure many acres in extent, quite aside from
the great wooded tract surrounding it, where half a dozen great
buildings and a flock of small ones have ample elbow-room, stands a
keepers’ lodge. From this, blackened with the smoke of generations of
cooking and tea-brewing, emerge as many as a dozen idlers whose sole
duty in life is to see that no unauthorized disturbance troubles the
royal dead within. No one of these guards is intrusted with power enough
to open the tomb alone; there are things inside that would bring
pilferers several Chinese fortunes. When the authorized visitor—or, one
very strongly suspects, any other capable of clinking silver—appears,
shouts arise in the lodge and its vicinity until at length men enough
are awakened from their perpetual siestas to make entrance possible.
This requires from four to six, sometimes more, bunches of mammoth keys,
each of which is in the personal keeping of a single individual or,
since man must sleep, a pair of them. When at length the whole unshaven
group is assembled, a pair of ordinary coolies is also needed to bring a
step-ladder, since the tomb doors are trebly secured with enormous
padlocks at top and bottom in addition to the great bolts operated
through the ordinary keyholes. The keys of Chinese tombs, by the way, do
not turn; they merely push open the crude yet complicated locks. There
are often several such doors to be passed, so that the time required to
gain admission is much more than the average visitor cares to spend
inside.
Fortunately there is really nothing to be gained by having oneself let
into more than two of the nine tombs of Tung Ling. The others are so
much like these that a passing glimpse is enough. After all, it is the
great wooded amphitheater itself, backed by the magnificent sky-line of
mountains, and the exterior vista of the tombs, towering in imperial
yellow high above not only the towns of their guardians but the
enclosing forest itself, that is worth coming so far to see. Besides, by
the time one has distributed fees among all the hangers-on of two tombs,
and satisfied the flock of attendants who have insisted on coming all
the way from town with him, there is another good reason for being
content with the exteriors of the others.
The oldest and the newest are most worth admission, the beginning and
the end of the Manchu dynasty as far as Lung Ling is concerned. K’ang
Hsi, second of the Ch’ing line, has a fitting mausoleum, its approach
flanked by mammoth stone figures not unlike those of the Mings, and the
softening hand of time has added much, for it is just two centuries
since the occupant went in quest of his ancestors. But the most
magnificent of the Eastern Tombs, perhaps the finest one in all
tomb-ridden China, is more than the world at large would have awarded
the notorious old lady who lives within, for she is none other than Tsu
Hsi or Tai Ho, known to the West as _the_ Empress Dowager, moving spirit
of the Boxer uprising and the greatest single cause of the downfall of
the Manchu dynasty. Within the spirit chamber of K’ang Hsi there are
five chairs draped in imperial yellow silk, for his four concubines
stick by him even in death; but it is quite what one would expect to
find the famous Dowager alone in all her glory. For while she had a
husband once, who is also buried at Tung Ling, he was of small
importance by the time she relieved China of her earthly presence, three
years before the downfall of the Manchus, whatever he may have been as
Emperor half a century before. Even starting as a mere concubine, Tsu
Hsi needed no husband to make herself an empress in fact if not in name.
An identical tomb, which the caretakers asserted is that of her sister,
stands close beside that of Tai Ho, with a low wall between them; but in
her magnificent throne-room there is no suggestion of rivalry. Of the
richness of this interior, its walls and ceilings decorated in many
colors with innumerable figures large and tiny of the most intricate
form, great bronze dragons climbing the huge pillars; of a thousand
details, artistic withal, which mean nothing to us of the West but much
to the Chinese, words would give but little impression.
I had a note of introduction to the head-man of the Manchu village that
watches over the Dowager’s tomb. Within its brick wall the populous
hamlet was much like any other Chinese town of like size, rather overrun
with pigs and children, crumbling away here and there with poverty or
inattention, careless in sanitary matters. Few heads of many times
greater cities of the Occident, however, could have received a chance
visitor with the perfect grace, the prodigal-son cordiality quite devoid
of any hint of dissimulation, of the Manchu with whom I was soon sitting
at a little foot-high _k’ang_ table laden with Chinese dainties, sipping
tea and struggling to express in my scanty mandarin a few thoughts above
the eating and sleeping level. As luck would have it the family, which
with its ramifications seemed to number at least a hundred, with
children for every month as far back as months go, was celebrating the
birthday of the mother-in-law. In China only those who have reached a
respectful old age commemorate their individual birthdays—and they
receive many toys among their presents. Over the outer entrance to the
rambling collection of houses hung two immense flags, not the dragon
banner of the Manchus but the five-bar one of the Chinese Republic. Back
in the innermost courtyard the old lady, of a charming yet authoritative
manner which attested to long years of efficient rule over the
household, was surrounded by all the female members of the family,
decked out in their holiday best. The finest silks covered them from
neck to ankles—trousers, like bound feet, are for Chinese women—the
elaborate Manchu head-dress was made more so by immense and tiny flowers
added to it in honor of the occasion, and the faces of the young women
were painted with white and red, as formal occasions demand, until they
looked like enameled masks. Several of these were evidently the wives of
my polished host, and when I asked permission to photograph one of them
alone for the details of the gala costume there was no hesitation as to
which one it should be: though she was probably the youngest of them
all, and for that reason almost obsequious toward the others, she had
born her master a son, who must also be included in the picture. Women
and men were constantly coming to bend the knee or kowtow to the lady of
the occasion, according to their rank. The men with few exceptions wore
the complete Manchu court costume, including the inverted-bowl straw hat
covered with loose red cords, with various individual decorations. When
I at last succeeded in taking my leave without causing a sense of
discourtesy, my host insisted that my “boy” carry away for me, in honor
of the felicitous occasion, a big box of _dien-hsin_, assorted Chinese
cakes that lasted all three of us the rest of the outward journey.
There seems to be no ill feeling between the two peoples populating Tung
Ling and the vicinity, if indeed they themselves recognize any real
dividing-line. In large numbers congregated together one could see a
difference between the Manchus and the Chinese; the keepers of the
Eastern Tombs were slightly larger, stronger-looking men, a trifle less
abject in their manner, than the people about them, a kind of half-way
type between the Chinese and the Mongols. The older and poorer of them
still wore their cues; the rest had sacrificed to the republic a badge
of nationality the origin of which is lost in the prehistoric mists, as
the subjected Chinese adopted it three centuries ago at the behest of
their Manchu conquerors.
Early next morning we left the inn laboring under the impression that we
were returning to Peking, skirted the garrison town by unfrequented
paths, and were soon outside the Great Wall, one of the passes of which
Malanchen straddles and guards. I had warned my companions not to
mention the final goal of our journey, lest the newly promulgated order
be cited as an excuse for turning me back, which would also mean the
abrupt ending of their jobs. Apparently they succeeded in performing the
un-Chinese feat of keeping their mouths shut, for no one came to
interfere with my plans. The wall at Malanchen was grass-grown, smaller,
and in greater disrepair than at Nankow Pass, where most foreigners see
it, even less imposing than where it descends to the sea at Shanhaikwan.
Geographically we had passed from China proper into Inner Mongolia, and
as if to mark the change the soft level going turned almost instantly to
stony uplands that became foot-hills, swelling into veritable mountains
so suddenly that all six of us were panting for breath on all but
perpendicular slopes scarcely an hour after setting out across the plain
now far below. For centuries these mountain ranges behind Tung Ling were
an imperial reserve, densely forested and inviolate, meant to preserve
the _feng-shui_ of the Eastern Tombs, to protect them from evil
influences, which in China always come from the north. The republic,
however, opened this great uninhabited region to settlers, with the
result that here there may still be seen sights utterly unknown in the
rest of China, pioneering conditions completely out of place in that
densely populated, intensively cultivated land, and at the same time a
demonstration of what must have happened many centuries ago on an
infinitely larger scale to make North China the dust-blown, denuded area
it is to-day.
Settlers poured in from the overpopulated country to the south as air
rushes to fill a vacuum. An efficient Government would have seen that
the windfall was exploited to the best advantage; in the absence of one
it was ruthlessly looted. Precious as are trees and wood in China these
great forests hardly a hundred miles from Peking were wiped out as
wantonly as those of southern Brazil, as those of virgin Cuba lying in
the path of advancing cane-fields. Half-burned trunks littered the
hillsides; acres of fire-blackened stumps, wood that might have been
turned into lumber enough to supply several provinces felled and left to
rot or burn where it lay, men grubbing at slopes that had never before
known the hoe were things that could not be reconciled with China.
Alpine valleys filled with pink blossoms, of which cued coolies wore a
cluster behind each ear, untainted mountain streams purling down across
the trail, provided here and there with solid timber bridges instead of
mats and branches sagging under their covering of loose earth, seemed as
out of place in this part of the world as did the pungent scent of
burning woodland that carried me back to a rural childhood. It was the
most delightful day’s tramp in North China, and hardly once did I think
of evicting my one-eyed companion from the white donkey.
But it was China after all, with many of its national characteristics.
Streams of friendly, cheerful coolies climbed the defiles with their
earthly possessions, consisting of a grub-ax and a few rags, ready for
any task offered them, or in lieu of it prepared to gather a bundle of
brush and carry it to a market many miles away; they realized that
already this new land is so thickly peopled that it has no real openings
for them. To see a line of men and boys, elbow to elbow, scratching one
of these stony, thin-soiled, more than half-perpendicular hillsides,
made the crowding of population a more living problem than a shelf of
books could. There were a few pioneer shacks of split rails, but with
unlimited logs and mighty boulders everywhere this imported generation
of mountaineers built their huts mainly of mud, at best of unshaped
stones and sticks. Burnt-log stockades surrounded many of these new
homes, for you cannot break the Chinese of their habit of building walls
merely by transplanting them to where walls are entirely unneeded. The
Chinese birthright of the most laborious forms of labor still prevailed.
Plows were home-made affairs drawn by a boy, a woman, or a donkey, and
were so crude and small that the man who held them was bent double as he
shuffled along. Thousands of roughly squared timbers nearly twice the
size of a railroad-tie lay blackening and rotting along the trail, and
every little while we met a man with two of these roped to his back
picking his way down slopes rougher and steeper than any stairway
disrupted by an earthquake. Goiter was more prevalent and reached more
loathsome proportions in all this region than I have ever seen it
elsewhere. New territory, new homes, new opportunities, all was as new
as a new world, except the people, as soil- and custom-incrusted as if
they had lived here a thousand years. The thought persisted that these
beautiful mountains should have been left clothed in their magnificent
forests instead of being enslaved to what can scarcely be called
agriculture. At most they offer steep little strips of very stony
patches, and the population these support is hardly worth the trees it
has displaced. Human beings grubbing out an existence which hardly seems
worth the effort may be seen anywhere in China; such primeval forests as
have so recklessly been reduced to charred rubbish and clumps of trees
only on the most inaccessible peaks and ridges behind Tung Ling are rare
and precious there.
[Illustration:
For three thousand miles the Great Wall clambers over the mountains
between China and Mongolia
]
[Illustration:
One of the mammoth stone figures flanking the road to the Ming Tombs
of North China, each of a single piece of granite
]
[Illustration:
Another glimpse of the Great Wall
]
[Illustration:
The twin pagodas of Taiyüan, capital of Shansi Province
]
Toward the end of the afternoon a kind of cart-road grew up underfoot
and carried us over the steepest and last ridge of the day to Hsin Lung
Shan. “New Dragon Mountain” is a brand-new pioneer city in the heart of
the former reserve, Chinese in its main features, but so fresh and even
clean that one might easily have doubted its nationality. The inn itself
had not found time to convert its yard into a slough or a dust-bin or
its rooms into crumbling, musty mud dens. Imposing shops lined the
principal streets; the chief official, with whom I exchanged calls of
respect, was a man of culture as well as authority—and he seemed to have
had no special orders concerning foreigners.
Great masses of white clouds drifted through the streets when we set out
next morning along the stony river that gives Hsin Lung Shan its
setting, and were responsible for a curious illusion. The sun had
evidently just topped the mountain ridge close above the town, and the
single irregular row of trees that had survived at the crest showed one
after the other through a little rift in the moving fog that covered
everything else, so that it looked exactly as if the sun itself were
having a procession of trees across its surface. A fairly broad valley
of palpably fertile virgin soil lasted all the morning and somewhat
reconciled one to the destruction of the forests. Here it was less
stony, or better picked up, and supported rather a numerous population
in reasonable style. The mist continued to play queer pranks until it
had been burned away by what remained a blazing, despotic sun. Field
boundaries of stone, also of single logs laid end to end, warned the
road against trespassing. There were stone-heaps in great number, but no
graves to interfere with the husbandman. Four prisoners tied together
with ropes and flanked by two policemen in the usual black uniform
plodded past toward the new city, implying that this virgin region is
after all no sinless Eden. Twice that morning we met strings of camels
stepping softly westward, though how they crossed the ranges that shut
in the valley on all sides was a mystery which their surly drivers, so
unlike the simple, almost obsequious settlers, except in their avoidance
of soap and water, would not pause to answer. Many a camel-train
stalking with supercilious mien past our Peking home goes on to Jehol,
but they take the direct route worn deep with centuries of traffic. In
this May-time the beasts were ugly with the loss of great wads of hair
which made them much worse than moth-eaten, and the drivers had tied
networks of string about their necks to keep them from dropping, or
being pilfered of, this most valuable of their fur.
The valley narrowed at last and pushed us up over another high range,
the third stiff climb of the trip, from the top of which labyrinthian
views blue with haze but brilliant with sunshine spread to infinity in
both directions. But the land had evidently been reclaimed earlier here,
so that there were fewer and fewer pioneering conditions, which on the
third day died out entirely. A miserable mountain inn offered me its
principal room that evening, though it took up more than half the
building reserved for travelers, a flock of evicted coolies picking up
their soiled packs and crowding together somewhere else without the hint
of a protest. I do not know how much they paid for lodging, but it could
not have been any fortune, since the landlord was so eager to replace a
dozen of them, with prospects of more to come, by a lone foreigner whose
bill hardly amounted to twelve American cents. Woven cornstalk fences
increased as the smell of newly cleared land diminished. Twenty-four
hours of valley brought us to another steep _ling_, from the top of
which rows of blue ranges faded away on the distant horizon behind. The
population had been longer established here and was made up of born
mountaineers, simple yet self-sufficient, like mountaineers the world
over. Goiter was almost universal, and nearly every one was deeply
pitted with smallpox, so that there was rarely a good-looking face of
either sex. Round granaries made of wickerwork, of the height of a tall
man, lined with mud plaster and thatched with straw, sat in every yard.
All memories of the royal forest had disappeared by the third afternoon,
and the familiar old China, stony, bare, blowing with dust or reeking
with mud, again surrounded us, though ranges of jagged peaks kept us
fairly close company.
Rain began to fall, putting terror into the heart of my “boy,” convinced
like most Chinese, at least of the north, that he was merely a pillar of
salt—or is it sugar? But the donkey-man was made of sterner stuff. A
positive word was always enough to make him push on, and it was quite
immaterial whether the “boy” followed or flung himself over a precipice.
This time, however, the shower became a deluge that showed no signs of
abating. All the region had fled for shelter. One wrinkled coolie had
monopolized a little wayside shrine, in which he sat in the cramped
posture of the Buddha, literally in the lap of the gods, serenely
smoking his pipe until they chose to let him go on again. By the time we
were soaked through it was evident that we also must take refuge, and
give up the hope of cutting the record from Malanyü to Jehol down to
three days.
The only stopping-place available was a peasant home that offered
accommodations to passing coolies. It boasted the name of Hsiao Pai Shu,
but then, every spot in China where human beings dwell has a name, and
this one after all meant nothing more than “Little White Tree.” If it
had been called “Unworthy Human Pigsty” there would have been less
reason to quarrel with the man who named it. There was a kind of _k’ang_
in one of the three mud stables, but to have demanded that would have
been to drive even my own men out and leave nothing but the bare earth
for a score of fellow-refugees to sleep on. I won the whole race of
outside barbarians a new reputation, therefore, by setting my cot on the
ground at the foot of the _k’ang_ and leaving that free for all the
coolies who could crowd upon it. But I paid for my heroism through other
senses than those of smell and hearing, for not the slightest movement
did I make, not a possession did I withdraw from my baggage, that half a
hundred eyes did not delve into the utmost depths of my personal
privacy. No Westerner who has not himself had the experience can
conceive of the ingenuous meddling which a crowd of low-caste Chinese
can inflict upon him; but it is ingenuous after all, and those few naïve
remarks of which I caught the meaning made me deeply regret that I was
incapable of understanding the respectful chatter that constantly called
attention to my innumerable extraordinary idiosyncrasies.
At Hsi-nan-tze, still sixty _li_ from Jehol, a police soldier was sent
running for more than a mile after me to ask for my card. It was early,
and evidently the town had been slow in waking up to the fact that a
foreigner was passing through. Plainly this was an unusual occurrence,
but there was no suggestion of detaining me, either here or at the
village where we made the usual breakfast-lunch stop from ten to eleven,
in which a similar courteous request was made. A visiting-card, as I
have said before, has a weight in China out of all keeping with the ease
with which any one can have it printed. The fourth hard climb of the
trip, up a trench-like trail slippery as new ice from the rain of the
day before and almost impassable with pack-animals sprawling and sliding
under ungainly burdens, uncovered such a panorama of wrinkled blue
mountain ranges entirely around the horizon as even the perpetual
wanderer seldom sees equaled. Then we descended among bare foot-hills
and plodded the last half-day down a wide sandy and stony river valley,
with one poled ferry and several wadings across the swollen yellow
rivulet which wandered along it. Several earth-and-branch bridges had
been partly carried away and were being repaired in the same
time-honored, inadequate style; that is, the huge baskets filled with
stones that served as almost continuous pillars were having more
branches and _kaoliang_-stalks laid across them and covered with
treacherous loose earth. No other nation has the genius of the Chinese
for doing some things in the worst way. There was a continual
procession, for instance, of carts heavily loaded with grain and drawn
by five to seven mules each, the wickedly exhausted animals staggering
through the deep sand and the deeper rivulet panting as if they were in
the final throes. The Lwan Ho on which the grain is shipped to the coast
washes the edge of Jehol, and the boats could as easily tie up at the
very foot of the warehouses; but the carters’ gild required them to
anchor twenty-five _li_ down the stream! Not even our own labor-unions
could exhibit anything to outrival this sacrificing of the general good
to the selfishness of a group.
Jehol is a compact, unwalled town lying prettily up the slope of a
hollow between two foot-hills, brightened by a few spring-green trees
here and there above its low gray roofs and surrounded on all sides by
beautiful broken ranges. The region is famous for curious natural
features, the most striking of which is the “Clothes’ Beater,” a mammoth
rock looking precisely like that aid to the Chinese washerwomen who
squat at the edges of streams or mud-holes, or an Irishman’s shillalah,
standing bolt upright on its smaller, handle end, and visible more than
a day’s travel away in almost any direction. But while the scenery is
magnificent and the town busy and prosperous, the fame of Jehol is due
to the imperial summer palaces and the lama temples that grew up about
them, as did the town itself. This whole territory, originally Mongol,
was given as the dowry of a Mongol wife to a Manchu emperor of China.
K’ang Hsi, who died just two hundred years ago, was the first of the
Ch’ing dynasty to visit the region, of which he grew very fond. He
hunted throughout it, riding also on an ass—the cost of keeping which is
said to have been paid regularly out of the imperial treasury until the
revolution! Yung Cheng, who succeeded him, met here the mother of his
own successor, the famous Ch’ien Lung, who was born at Jehol. Perhaps I
should say the alleged mother, for there has always been a strong
suspicion that the brilliant Ch’ien Lung was really a Chinese boy
switched at birth for a girl born to the empress or concubine in
question. At any rate the bare, half-ruined cottage in which he is
recorded to have been born is still standing in the wooded hills beyond
the imperial summer palace.
This is enclosed within a great wall on a minor scale which clambers
over the hills as easily as it stalks across broad flatlands, several
miles in extent and still in almost perfect repair. The same can by no
means be said, however, of the former palaces inside it. Time, the
elements, and particularly the wanton hand of man have reduced them to
the saddest state among all the decaying remains of imperial China. The
simpler structures near the gates, no doubt built for minor retainers
and servants, are occupied by the “Tartar General” and his far-famed
“I-Chün” troops, semi-autonomous rulers of this “special area,” and have
been more or less kept up accordingly. But the erstwhile palaces
scattered beyond the immense half-wooded meadows behind these, to which
a soldier guide conducts the few “distinguished visitors” who have
credentials, influence, or assurance enough to pass the gates, are
synonymous with the word “dilapidation.” A single building has remained
comparatively intact, because it is made of solid bronze. Structures
that must in their heyday have equaled except in size anything in Peking
are mere tumbled ruins of rotten timbers, collapsed roofs, and broken
tiles still bearing their glorious Chinese colors. Some of the mammoth
gods with which the place seems once to have been overpopulated have
survived almost intact in more durable shelters, like the remnants of a
fallen dynasty that had their refuges carefully chosen long before the
catastrophe came. Others were less fortunate, or foresighted, and, left
out in the open by fallen roofs, they are gruesome testimonials that the
most brilliant and the most terrifying alike of Chinese gods are but
statues of mud. A striking pagoda still stands high above all else
except the higher hills within the enclosure, but only the foolhardy
climb it now, and the great cluster of temples which seem once to have
risen among the venerable evergreens about it have corrupted almost
beyond the possibility of identification. A carved stone, in the front
rank among Chinese tablets, one whole face of it covered with a Tibetan
text, is the only thing that stands erect and defiant against the forces
of destruction.
Great numbers of the magnificent old trees that once made the parks a
forest have been recklessly destroyed, but the velvety stretches of
grass survive, and on this graze the descendants of deer brought here
long before America had thought of throwing off European allegiance. No
one was agreed on the number that dot the enclosure, for statistics are
not at home in China; but the average of the guesses was about seven
hundred, of which I certainly saw half in my stroll through the grounds.
There must surely be some powerful superstition as well as mere orders
against their destruction, in a land where even dead camels are consumed
with such apparent relish. There is a shallow lake within the palace
wall, on which some of the sturdier emperors are reputed to have tried
their amateur skill at paddling and poling, but one suspects that they
spent more time on the little island with its artificial rock hillocks
and soughing pine-trees overlooking it. There is a warm spot in this
lake which never freezes over, it is said, whence the name Jehol, which
means “Hot River,” and, thanks to the often inexplicable Romanization of
Chinese which has come down to us from an earlier generation of foreign
residents, is pronounced “Jay-hole” by tourists and uncorrected
bookworms; others do their best to approximate two guttural Chinese
noises which might somewhat better have been spelled “Ruh-Hur.”
The dozen or more great temples scattered along the valley across the
river from the palace grounds are still occupied by a few lamas and are
in a somewhat better state of preservation. Ch’ien Lung built most of
them, beginning just beneath his birthplace and stretching on into the
hills, whence delightful views of Jehol and all its region may be had
for the climbing. The emperors who summered out here beyond the Great
Wall were Manchus, kin to the race of Kublai Khan, and the temples are
not Chinese but Mongol, which means a world of difference in spite of
many similarities. Lamas who still claim to be Mongol, and who certainly
are not purely Chinese either in features or manner, dawdle through
their useless lives in them, making out as best they can without the
imperial aid that disappeared with the revolution, including such sums
as they can wheedle or bluff out of the baker’s half-dozen of foreign
visitors a year, including anything, in fact, this side of actual work.
In their halcyon days these temples must have been more than impressive;
they are still that in their decline. In the “Temple of the 508 Buddhas”
that number of life-size wooden images gilded to look like well aged
golden statues stretch away down dark aisle after dim musty passageway
to approximate infinity. There are fat and merry, thin and esthetic,
sour and licentious, imposing and silly Buddhas among these 508
yellow-robed figures seated with their spirit-tablets and incense-bowls
before them; every vice and virtue, every mental, moral, and physical
characteristic of the human race is depicted here as exactly as the art
and the breadth of experience with mankind of the Oriental artificers
made possible. There is a temple filled with similar figures near
Peking, but it is small compared with that of Jehol. Mammoth gold
dragons gambol up and down the golden roof of another sanctuary; one
entire building is taken up by a gigantic female Buddha riding a
dog-like monster; figures that would terrify a nervous child out of its
wits glare out from many a half-lighted interior; a man whose tastes and
training ran that way could easily find material for a whole fat volume
on Tibetan-Mongol art and lamaism within this stretch of a mile or two
along the Lwan Ho. The tallest of the temples contains a standing Buddha
several stories high, with forty-two hands, each bearing a different
gift—whether for mankind as a whole or merely for the lamas was not
clear. The figure, said to be made of a single tree-trunk, is larger
than that which so often startles tourists at the Lama Temple in Peking,
and it is identical, according to the reasonably intelligent chief
guardian, with those of Urga and Lhasa. The face is of the same maidenly
simplicity as that in the Mongol capital, but the edifice was much less
filled to semi-suffocation with the almost gruesome paraphernalia which
makes the ascent of Ganden like a peep into the barbaric heart of the
Tibetan-Mongol religion.
The climax, however, of the sights about Jehol, at least to the average
Westerner, is the Potalá, said to be an exact copy, on a smaller scale,
of that great heap of buildings in Lhasa which so few white men have
seen. It stands just over the river from the palace grounds, a striking
feature in a notable landscape. There must be a dozen structures in all,
so close one above another as to seem, until one is among them, joined
together into one mammoth pile covering a whole hillock. In general
color they are pinkish, except where the plaster has fallen off, with
the huge square structure at the top a dull, weather-worn red. This is
in appearance five stories high, with as many large superimposed shrines
and long rows of false windows on the face of it; and, the visitor finds
at last, when a dozen lamas with as many bunches of medieval keys have
escorted him to the summit of the long climb, it is roofless, a mere
wall surrounding the most sacred of the temples. Within, if the seekers
after _cumshaw_ who constantly surrounded and kept their eyes upon me
are truthful, two services a day have been held without a break since
Ch’ien Lung built the Potalá a century and a half ago. Two of the older,
half-dignified lamas claimed to have been in Lhasa, and they asserted
that even in its minor decorations this was an exact replica of the
chief temple of the Dalai Lama, pointing out the spots where he stood or
sat during ceremonies in the original. The holy of holies, which opened
at the gleam of small silver, may indeed be the equal, except in size,
to anything in Lhasa; with its remarkable tapestries, its enamel pagoda,
golden Buddhas of every size, and all the sacred paraphernalia of
lamaism, there is an impressiveness about it that is in keeping with
what the imagination pictures the mysterious Tibetan capital to be.
Two emperors of China died at Jehol, and the court fled here when the
Allies entered Peking in 1860, as that of the Dowager and her favorite
eunuch did to Sian-fu in 1900. Hsien Feng, half-forgotten husband of
that notorious old virago of Boxer days, was the second _Hoang-ti_ to
die here, just as our Civil War was beginning, and no emperor has ever
come to Jehol since the son who succeeded him at four years of age fled
a place of such sad memories and evil spirits. Thus the once favorite
summer home of the Manchu emperors, tossed aside like a plaything of a
petulant child with too many toys, has fallen into the decay in which
the rare visitor of to-day finds it.
If there is one thing more than another that arouses my ire it is to be
mistaken for a person of importance; yet that is exactly what happened
to me in Jehol. Perhaps any foreigner so far off the foreign trail,
particularly after he and his kind had been specifically warned to keep
away, would have been considered somebody, but to make matters worse I
had been officially requested, just as I was leaving Peking, to allow
myself to be called a special investigator of the antiopium league. I
should not be expected, it was explained, to do anything more than bear
the title; no one would dare actually to investigate the mountain
recesses beyond Jehol in which every one knows the stuff is grown, let
alone a new-comer who could not tell a poppy-sprout from a radish. But
the League of Nations wanted to be told that a foreigner had been sent
to visit each suspected district, and as no one else seemed to be going
that way my name would fill the dotted line as well as any other.
[Illustration:
The three _p’ai-lous_ of Hsi Ling, the Western Tombs
]
[Illustration:
In Shansi four men often work at as many windlasses over a single well
to irrigate the fields
]
[Illustration:
Prisoners grinding grain in the “model prison” of Taiyüan
]
That would have been the end of the matter if Peking had not notified
Jehol that the honorable investigator was coming. When I arrived,
therefore, long after my mind had purged itself of any thought of my
putative official capacity, I was startled to find that Jehol insisted
on taking me seriously, even in the face of the scantiness of my
wardrobe and the donkeyness of my escort. A day or two before, the
official Chinese investigator also had come, by the direct route, with a
fat English-speaking secretary and suitable retinue, in _chaotze_ gay
with red pompoms between mules important with jingling bells. He would
remain a month or so, though also taking care not to be caught by the
inhospitable poppy-growing peasants or their military beneficiaries and
protectors up in the hills. We could both make our reports just as well
without risking our lives, without ever coming to China, for that
matter, so far as any real results through the League of Nations is
concerned, so long as one of the nations bulking largest in that league
continues to supply China with opium from her principal colony by a
roundabout, oval-eyed route, though every poppy-plant in the erstwhile
Middle Kingdom were uprooted.
But there is centuries-old precedent for feasting all “censors” or
special investigators sent out from Peking, and this serious part of the
affair Jehol did not overlook. My distinguished Chinese colleague and I
had already met across the board before blood-red invitations a foot
long confirmed the verbal rumor that we were to be honored with a feast
by the “Tartar General” himself. Delightful little Mi Ta-shuai, with his
chin-tickling mustache-ends and the inherent good nature that bubbles
out even through his formal demeanor, is no more a Tartar than I am a
Turk; he is an exact picture of a Chinese mandarin of the T’ang dynasty,
in somewhat modernized garb. But the ruler of the special extramural
district of Jehol has borne that title for centuries, just as his troops
continue to be considered the native _I-Chün_, though they come chiefly
now from Anhwei and Honan. Three of the four brand-new rickshaws that
had just introduced that innovation into Jehol delivered the three male
foreigners in town at the gate of honor of the former summer palace,
more jolted than seriously hurt after all, and the eight or ten most
distinguished Chinese officials joined us in one of the score of long
low buildings through which the entrance to almost any yamen of
importance stretches on and on, like a half-lighted tunnel.
The feast—but why go into unnecessary details? A Chinese feast is just
what the name implies, with variations of no importance according to the
latitude and the ability of the feaster’s cooks to give it such hints of
foreign ways as their master may be able to specify. Suffice it to say
that we gathered soon after four in the afternoon and were gone again by
seven, that much more food was carried out again than was consumed by a
company that did not rise needing a bedtime snack, and that I had no
assistance whatever from the other two representatives of the Western
world in replying to the toasts that were incessantly poured into our
slender glasses, though they hailed respectively from Ireland and
Scotland. There were several men worth talking with in the general’s
suite, too, and all in all my official capacity was more endurable than
it might have been suspected as we jolted homeward between unbroken
lines of peering yellow faces eager for a closer glimpse of Jehol’s
distinguished foreign guest.
The “Tartar General” insisted on sending two mounted troopers of the
_I-Chün_ with me on the way back to Peking. There was something in the
bandit stories, it seemed, and though they were operating well to the
north, the scent of a possible foreign hostage might give their legs
double speed. No doubt the general knew as well as I that two lone
Chinese soldiers, even of his unusually soldierly _I-Chün_, would be
more likely to add two rifles to the arsenal of any respectable gang of
brigands than to protect me from them, and he certainly knew that such
escorts expect to live on the traveler’s bounty for at least twice as
many days as they accompany him; but it would have been unseemly, of
course, to let a special agent of the League of Nations, nebulous as
that body may be to the mind of a Chinese militarist, depart without
suitable honors.
The best way back to Peking would have been to float down the Lwan Ho,
with its striking cliffs and gorges, to the railway, well north of
Tientsin. But low waters made this trip uncertain, and boatmen were too
busy with grain to give a lone traveler much attention. I turned
regretfully back, therefore, along the direct main route, worn with
centuries of travel, by the feet of man and his beasts, though never
aided by his hands. The scent of lilacs, white and of the more usual
color, filled the air as we left the city. Inconspicuous on the white
donkey or on foot beside the troopers astride good horses and beneath
their big straw hats, I scarcely caught the eye of travelers drowsing in
the mule-litters that passed so often, to say nothing of attracting
bandits out of the north. We crossed two passes and forded the Lwan Ho
on the first day and on the morning of the second sighted a high cragged
range stretching from infinity to infinity across the horizon ahead,
with little unnatural-looking promontories, like knobs on a casting,
dotting it at frequent intervals. They were the towers of the Great
Wall, it turned out, climbing like a chamois from one lofty peak to
another, but it was blazing noon before we passed through it at the
much-walled town of Kupehkow. Coolies carrying down to Jehol brushwood
and even roots had passed us all the first day; naked children were
everywhere; men, and once or twice, unless my eyes deceived me, women,
stripped to the waist toiled in the dry fields, sometimes waded
knee-deep in the liquid mud of little patches that in another month
would be pale green with rice. Graves grew numerous again inside the
Great Wall; half-ruined _yentai_, “smoke-platforms” from the tops of
which news was sent from the capital in olden days, towered above us at
regular intervals; the peddlers of fluffy chicks and coolies carrying
green onions to market once more appeared; and the caricature of a road
became almost a procession of travelers in both directions.
It was an atrocious road nearly all the way, plodding along sandy, stony
river-beds except where it clambered laboriously over another mountain
ridge, the sun beating ruthlessly down upon us from its rising to its
setting. Babies with shaved heads apparently impervious to its rays
rooted in the dirt with the black pigs, or stood on sturdy legs suckling
even more soil-incrusted mothers. There ought to be very few weeds in
China; the whole family is incessantly after them, just as every usable
form of filth is promptly gathered. The most common sight in China is of
men and boys, sometimes women and girls, wandering the roads and trails
with a fork or shovel with which to toss the droppings of animals into a
basket over their shoulders, whence it will later be spread on the
fields. Each night we put into an inn-yard, where the best available
room was quickly assigned me; my cot and a foot-high table were set on
the oiled cloth with which I covered the _k’ang_, and after as nearly a
bath as can be had in a basin of hot water there was nothing left to do
but to wait patiently for whatever supper my not too adaptable “boy”
chose to serve me. The escort had reduced itself to one soldier at the
first relief, and at noon on the third day it disappeared entirely. At
length the stony sand changed to the fertile plain of Peking, though the
road was nothing to boast of up to the last, and while rain and two
splittings of my little party at forks of the route all but spoiled my
schedule, the afternoon of the fourth day saw us filing through one of
the eastern gates of the Tartar City.