A JAUNT INTO PEACEFUL SHANSI
It is a simple matter to visit Hsi Ling, the Western Tomb, where all the
Manchu emperors not at Tung Ling are buried. A short branch of the
Peking-Hankow line sets the traveler down, four leisurely hours from the
capital, within strolling distance of the newest of them, housing the
remains of the hapless Kuang Hsü. This is quite as extensive and
sumptuous as if the imprisoned puppet had been a real ruler, but it is
still glaringly new, the trees that will some day form a forest about it
barely head-high, for it is only fifteen years since this effigy of an
emperor and the powerful Dowager who manipulated him simultaneously made
way for the present occupant of the Forbidden City. No doubt he is glad
to be so far away from the oppressive old lady at last.
Bare hills lie between the older tombs, their roofs of imperial yellow
hidden in venerable evergreen forests that seem to know nothing of
bustling modern times. Yung Cheng, third Manchu emperor of China, sent
men to choose this spot for him in 1730. When his successor, Ch’ien
Lung, came to die, however, he expressed a preference for the Eastern
Tombs, saying that if he, too, were buried in the west it might become a
habit and the first two emperors of the dynasty would remain in gloomy
solitude. He instructed his successors to alternate between the two
places, and all of them did so except Tao Kuang, who refused to be
separated from his father even in death. Five emperors, three
dowager-empresses, many _fei_, or imperial concubines—whose tombs are
blue rather than yellow, because they never had royal title—and a host
of princesses in clusters within single tombs, lie scattered through the
forests of Hsi Ling. Like all royal burial-places in China the site
backs up against the mountains, here the Hsi Shan, the Western Hills,
which stretch far to the north and south in rugged, clear-cut ranges
close behind the tombs. Delightful paths wander through the evergreen
woods, where here and there ill fed Manchus forage for firewood to keep
the kettles boiling in their dilapidated caretakers’ villages. There are
crowds of loafers guarding each tomb, as at Tung Ling, quick enough to
offer a visitor the ceremonious cup of tea under conditions, invisible
to them, which force him to decline it, but too lazy to open all the
doors even when their unsoaped palms are crossed with silver, to say
nothing of lifting a hand to repair the ravages of time or to cut the
weeds and grass that grow everywhere between the flagstones. After all,
it is better that way; any suggestion of real care would be out of
keeping with the pastoral Chinese setting, and there are sheep and goats
enough to keep the places from becoming impassable jungles.
One may spend all day roaming from forest-buried tomb to mountain-backed
mausoleum; the most mammoth solid stone monuments on turtle bases I have
ever seen in China stand side by side in the main entrance pavilion—the
exit of most visitors; and the other sides of this square are formed by
three _p’ai-lous_, any of which is almost the equal of the famous single
one at the Ming Tombs. But I prefer Tung Ling to its more accessible
alternative, if only because its caretakers see too few tourists to
acquire the manner of street-urchins.
I stopped off at Paoting, long the capital of Chihli Province and
recently the unofficial capital of North China, to see Tsao Kun. But his
secretary brought word that the problems of China had given him a
headache which had sent him to bed—it was at the height of one of the
bandit outrages against foreigners. Those who know this illiterate
sword-shaker and how much he cares about China as distinguished from his
own gains, will appreciate the unconscious humor of the answer. Before
his yamen stood viceregal poles, of cement instead of wood, a hint
perhaps of the fancied permanence of his position. Besides this
manipulator of the puppets of Peking there is nothing especially worth
seeing in Paoting. A few superficial improvements, such as a new garden
for the town to stroll and gamble in, to impress the people with their
lord’s importance and his love for them, are all that distinguish this
from any large old Chinese walled city.
The chief impression of the broad flatlands of Chihli in May is the
windlassing of water for irrigation out of wells dotting the landscape
everywhere, by a man or two with bare brown torso or by a blindfolded
mule. The railway cuts ruthlessly across graveyards, perhaps because if
it did not it could find no place to run at all; old sunken roads have
been turned into gardens, and new ones are wearing themselves down into
the pulverous soil. The narrow-gage line that strikes westward from
Shihkiachuang into Shansi climbs all morning the bed of a clear little
river harnessed for work in many little straw-built mills on the banks
or astride the channels into which the crowded people have divided it.
There is plenty of stone here. Whole towns are made entirely of it;
little fields that can produce at most a peck of wheat are held up by
stone walls at least as extensive as they. Crows and other destructive
birds are as numerous and ravenous as the human population, who paint
scarecrows crudely on the stone walls of the terraces, and hang up straw
ones that look ludicrously like Taoist priests. Perhaps these are more
effective over such evil spirits than laymen scarecrows. In the
mountains well-sweeps instead of windlasses aid the irrigators. Seen on
a level these terraced hills looked horribly dry and arid, a dreary
yellow and brown. But that is the face of the terraces; from above, the
fields are countless patches of spring green, so that the effect from
the constantly rising train was like those street-signs that change face
completely when they are seen at a new angle.
No longer ago than the time of the Mings, history says, the mountains
between Chihli and Shansi were so covered with trees that “birds could
not fly through them.” To-day there is not a sprig of wood left, and the
patient peasants till every terraced peak to the very top. Faintly the
passenger can make out to the north, through occasional openings in the
ranges close at hand, one of the five sacred mountains of China, the
Wu-t’ai-shan. The whole cluster is shaped like a maple-leaf and
resembles the Diamond Mountains of Korea, if not in scenic splendors at
least in the temples and monasteries scattered among them. For many
centuries that region has been a Buddhist sanctuary, both of the
black-robed Chinese monks and the yellow-robed lamas, even the latter
more often natives of Chihli or Shansi than Mongols or Tibetans.
Emperors used to come to Wu-t’ai-shan, and the Dalai Lama himself was
once there.
Beyond the summit of the line, one of the famous passes of China, the
narrow but efficient train snaked its way downward through many tunnels,
past busy villages and towns of stone, between long irregular rows of
cave-dwellings dug in the porous hills, with many a striking view up
terraced gorges which unwooded centuries have given fantastic
formations. On the whole it was a dreary landscape, but the train was
good. These side-lines are better than the principal railroads of China
because they are still under foreign management. Frenchmen and Belgians
operate this one to the Shansi capital, not merely by giving orders from
a central office but by riding the trains to see that these orders are
obeyed. No dead-heads escaped the sharp eyes of the European inspectors
who examined tickets at frequent intervals; the Chinese employees took
care not to honor the rules in the breach instead of in the observance.
One third-class coach had a compartment marked “Dames seules.” On the
main lines this would have been filled with anything but members of the
sex for which it was reserved; here the man who dared sit down in it was
speedily invited to move on.
A Chinese train, on the trunk-lines subject to the Ministry of
Communications, is China _in petto_,—crowded confusion in the third
class that makes up nearly all of it, the second only fairly filled, the
first almost empty, except for the pass-holders, influential loafers,
and important nonentities who congregate there. Petty anarchy reigns,
and “squeeze” rears its slimy head everywhere. The passenger is taxed
for the loading of his checked baggage, and then virtually required to
tip the porters who load it. It is common knowledge that station-masters
consider their salaries their least important source of income.
Particularly are the trains, like the country, overrun with useless
soldiers. They pack the better coaches until the legitimate traveler
often can barely find standing-room; they stretch out everywhere, like a
Chinese type of hobo, on the floors of the passageways as well as of the
compartments; they fill the so-called dining-car to impassability, lying
among their noisome bundles on the tables, the seats, the floors, even
about the kitchen stove, like sewage that has seeped in through every
opening. In theory they have their generals’ permission to travel, and
pay half-fare; in practice the soldier who has a ticket at all, let
alone one of the class in which he is traveling, is the exception. They
not only ride on their uniforms but rent these out to hucksters and
coolies who wish to make a journey. Whole flocks of railway officials in
pompous garb come through the trains, but exert themselves only against
the uninfluential. Soldiers without tickets are sometimes gently
instructed to go back into third class, but no one has the moral courage
to insist that they do so, and they ride on hour after hour, sometimes
day after day. Police with a brass wheel on their arms are in constant
evidence, yet control at the stations is almost unknown. Those getting
on, and swarms of coolies hoping for a job of carrying baggage, sweep
like a tidal wave into the trains before those getting off can escape;
the battle for places is a screaming riot. In winter a car never gets
comfortably warm before the overdressed Chinese throw open the windows.
The cheap joker who mutilated the standardized sign to read, “Passengers
are requested to report to the Traffic Manager any cases of cleanliness
that come to their notice,” replaced an impossible task by a very easy
one. The train that is on time is something to write home about, though
now and then one sticks surprisingly close to schedule.
At Peking and the principal terminals the traveler often finds every
compartment “Reserved.” Officially this cannot in most cases be done,
but any one who knows the ropes can “fix it up,” merely for a tip to the
fixer. Door after door down the corridor bears such signs as “Chi
Wan-tao and Party,” or “Reserved, Member of Parliament,” and even
foreign women may be left to stand in the passageway. Later, if the
traveler is sharp eyed enough to see one of these doors unlocked, he
will find one or two fat Chinese stretched out in the two seats which
placards announce “shall be occupied by eight persons,” and unless he is
by nature aggressive this condition may continue during the whole
twenty-four-hour journey. At the end of the overcrowded train there is
very likely to be a private car surrounded by a respectful throng of
soldiers and railway police, which one learns upon inquiry is occupied,
to give a single example, by a “minister” to some provincial city, who
is “more higher than a station-master.” A sample of the Chinese way of
doing things is the announcement in a time-table in French that has
appeared in the foreign-language newspapers daily for years that certain
“expresses” on one of the most important lines carry first-class,
sleeping-, and dining-cars, whereas the best accommodations the
unsuspecting traveler who takes this statement seriously can discover is
two or three second-class compartments with two bare wooden benches and
not a suggestion of heat. The only salvation of the civilized traveler
is the daily and biweekly expresses respectively on the two lines
between Peking and central China, on which, thanks to foreign pressure,
neither passes, uniforms, nor influence can take the place of tickets.
Even on these, rumor has it, the militarist overlords have of late found
ways to accommodate their henchmen without producing actual money.
It is a relief, therefore, to get off on one of these side-lines which
the Chinese do not yet pretend to have taken over, and which are still
run like railroads. Shansi has her soldiers, too, but they do not spend
their time riding in and out of the province. The simple expedient of
requiring every coolie baggage-carrier to pay six coppers for a
platform-ticket before he can pass the gates makes an astonishing
improvement in the life of the traveler on this sprightly Taiyüanfu
line; at the frontier two of the governor’s “model police” board the
train in spotless khaki and with soldierly bearing escort it on into the
capital.
[Illustration:
A few of the 508 Buddhas in one of the lama temples of Jehol
]
[Illustration:
The youngest, but most important—since she has borne him a son—of the
wives of a Manchu chief of one of the tomb-tending towns of Tung
Ling
]
[Illustration:
Interior of the notorious Empress Dowager’s tomb at Tung Ling, with
her cloth-covered chair of state and colors to dazzle the stoutest
eye
]
[Illustration:
The Potalá of Jehol, said to be a copy, even in details, of that of
Lhasa; the windows are false and the great building at the top is
merely a roofless one enclosing the chief temple
]
Long before the end of the journey the traveler is reminded that Shansi
is one of the world’s greatest deposits of coal, perhaps of iron. From
the train could be seen coal-mines, mere surface diggings, but producing
splendid anthracite in big chunks large as a strong man could lift. One
of these broken in two made a donkey-load, two gave a mule his quota,
and long trains of these animals picked their ways down the treeless
defiles. Here and there a string of coolies, each with a lump of coal on
his back, trailed over the steeper hills. A European who made a diligent
investigation of the question reported that the province of Shansi alone
has coal enough to supply the world for a thousand years. Thus far it
has scarcely begun to be exploited, in the real sense of the word, like
so many of the great natural resources, other than agricultural, of
China. For one thing, some of the old superstitions that made delving in
the earth so unpopular still prevail. Evil spirits guarding these hidden
treasures will wreak vengeance on the men who dare to disturb them—and,
what is worse, on the entire community. Dragons are still known to spit
death-dealing fire upon those who dig too deeply for coal; in other
words, there have been cases of fire-damp explosions. According to
popular Chinese fancy, dragons, snakes, and tortoises produce pearls,
and many of the miners themselves still think that coal will grow again
in an empty shaft within thirty years, and iron and gold in longer
periods.
We came out in mid-afternoon upon the broad plain of Shansi, “West of
the Mountains,” two or three thousand feet above sea-level and thickly
dotted everywhere with toiling peasants. Here the windlassing of water
for irrigation again seemed to be the chief occupation, and this time
there were often four men at as many handles over a single well-drum.
Yütze swarmed with travelers, for there nearly all the traffic for the
south of the province leaves the train, or enters it to return to the
capital, toward which the railroad turns as much north as westward. Less
than an hour later the twin pagodas of Taiyüanfu rose close at hand on
the ridged landscape, and we were set down well outside the walls of the
Shansi capital.
The police stopped every traveler at the city gate to ask his name, his
errand, and other pertinent questions. But there was a courteous
atmosphere about the interrogatory which made it seem the precaution of
a careful ruler rather than the espionage of a tyrant. Inside, the
streets were on the whole in better condition, modern improvements in
general more numerous, than in most provincial capitals. Yet somehow
this was not yet the model city much hearing about it had caused the
imagination to picture. The pace of life, too, was noticeably slow,
surprisingly so for the capital of one of China’s most important
provinces, almost the cradle of the Chinese race and for centuries the
home of its great bankers. What was perhaps most exasperating of all to
the passing traveler was to find the rickshaw-men the poorest in China,
so slow and so untrained for their tasks that it was almost faster and
certainly more comfortable to walk. Possibly the altitude of nearly
three thousand feet was the explanation, though not the excuse, of their
snail-like habits, and their awkwardness could be largely due to the
fact that many of them are peasants from the surrounding villages who
make rickshaw-pulling a slack-time avocation instead of a profession.
But the impression survived that they were merely outstanding examples
of the provincial leisureliness of life back here behind the mountains.
Residents did not seem to realize that their rickshaw-runners resemble
lame turtles, any more than they were aware of the incessant unnecessary
racket they create. Custom or some local ordinance has fitted the right
shaft of all Taiyüan rickshaws with a kind of automobile horn, and not
merely do the runners blow these beyond all reason when in action but
amuse themselves like the adult children they are by constant honking
while waiting or wandering for fares, so that night and day are an
unbroken charivari.
Taiyüan—its name means “great plain,” and the “fu” so often tacked on to
the names of second-grade Chinese cities is as out-of-date now as the
word “yamen,” though both survive in popular speech—and the province it
governs still retain some of the traits and customs of olden times, long
ago abandoned, if not forgotten, in other provinces. Though there is a
good modern police force, night-watchmen of the old régime go their
rounds every two hours beating a gong to warn thieves of their coming.
Surely the origin of this aged custom, whatever tradition may allege, is
rooted in the inherent timidity, not to call it cowardice, of the
Chinese. Pushed beyond a certain point they can die more easily than
Westerners; but the fear of a mere slap, the sight of a stick that would
not frighten a normal American boy, is terrifying to the great mass of
them. Naturally the night-watchman would rather warn the thieves to move
on, or to lay aside their activities until he has passed, than to come
to blows with them. A thousand Chinese staring fixedly with their little
monkey-like eyes were likely to surround the foreigner who does, or has
about him, anything suggestive of the unusual, though foreign residents
are neither rare nor new. No one has ever succeeded in sounding the
depths of Chinese curiosity. When I called inopportunely on the
fellow-countryman who was destined to become my host in Taiyüan, he left
a class of Y. M. C. A. students of university age, long used to
foreigners and their ways, in charge of one of their number while he
stepped out to have a word with me; and seven of the fifteen young men
left the class and followed him down-stairs to see what he was doing.
The foreign atmosphere of Taiyüan is almost entirely British. Such
American missionaries as work in this province are not stationed in the
capital, and England assigned the indemnity exacted for the killing of a
large group of her nationals here in Boxer days to education in the
province, as we did for the whole country. For ten years Shansi youths
were distributed among English universities and technical schools, and
now that the preparatory school in which they were groomed for the
journey has reverted to the Chinese and become the University of
Taiyüan, there are many returned students among the faculty and in
important official positions, some of them with English wives. The good
and the trivial points of British university life came back with them.
They seem to have lost, for instance, the Chinese virtue of early
rising. Taiyüan labors under the handicap of three kinds of
time,—“railway,” “gun,” and “university” time. The last is considerably
slower than either the station clock or the governor’s noon-gun, and
rumor has it that it gradually became so because the curriculum included
a number of eight-o’clock classes which certain of the most influential
faculty members could never quite reach.
Yen Hsi-shan, both military and civil governor of Shansi, is known in
China as the “model governor.” The mere fact that he has held his
position ever since the revolution, while the rest of the country has
been like a seething mass, a boiling kettle, of officials of all grades,
in which the scum has all too often come to the top, is enough to have
given him that title. But he has done more than that to warrant it.
Under his rule a number of motor roads have radiated from the capital,
and now carry a considerable motor-bus traffic. It is true that these
roads are largely due to American famine relief funds under missionary
management, and that the principal highway runs about two hundred _li_
northward exactly to the governor’s native village. But they are
unusually well kept roads for China, with guards enough to keep the
sharp-wheeled carts off them, and a species of _peon caminero_ at
regular distances whose permanent task it is to keep them in repair.
Besides, a branch of that north road goes on, as a kind of afterthought,
to a gate of the inner Great Wall, which crosses northern Shansi.
Governor Yen has done much toward the establishment of village schools,
with the accent wisely on primary and general instead of higher and
class education; he has made a certain amount of schooling compulsory
for both sexes, though even he would scarcely assert that such an
innovation is already effective throughout the province, for after all
Shansi is still China. He has actually and visibly taken the beggars off
the streets of Taiyüan; and has established a school of trades for them.
He has improved outdoor recreation facilities for the people, and has
had erected in conspicuous places about town, and in the province, long
boards bearing the thousand characters which he thinks every one should
learn to read and, if possible, to write. Bandits have been unknown in
Shansi for years; the opium which it used to grow more widely than any
other province has almost if not completely disappeared. Both these
curses of China have been chased over the provincial boundaries. Taiyüan
boasts a beginning of an opium-consumers’ refuge, with free keep and
treatment for the indigent. Just beyond it, to be sure, there is what
the Japanese call a _yoshiwara_, an officially protected restricted
district two by four blocks large, with five hundred women; but every
one of the identical courtyards within is in a condition to suggest
unusually good sanitary conditions, and a high wall surrounds the entire
district, so that no one can be in doubt as to what he is entering. The
governor, by the way, was a student in Japan for four years, and both he
and his policies bear various reminders of that fact.
[Illustration:
Behind Tung Ling the great forest reserve which once “protected” the
tombs from the evil spirits that always come from the north was
recently opened to settlers, and frontier conditions long since
forgotten in the rest of China prevail
]
[Illustration:
Much of the plowing in the newly opened tract is done in this
primitive fashion
]
[Illustration:
The face of the mammoth Buddha of Jehol, forty-three feet high and
with forty-two hands. It fills a four-story building, and is the
largest in China proper, being identical, according to the lamas,
with those of Urga and Lhasa
]
[Illustration:
A Chinese inn, with its heated _k’ang_, may not be the last word in
comfort, but it is many degrees in advance of the earth floors of
Indian huts along the Andes
]
The governor received me one Sunday morning, with his civil secretary,
the British-educated dean of the engineering department of the
university, as interpreter. It seemed almost strange to walk so
peacefully into his yamen through the same now rather tumble-down
entrance at which more than twoscore foreigners were massacred by
Boxer-influenced mobs in 1900. The governor prides himself on being a
plain man and does not believe in surrounding himself with magnificence
or formality. With the single exception of the “Christian General,” Feng
Yü-hsiang, he has retained, at least in his audiences with foreigners,
fewer of the useless, time-squandering forms of old-fashioned Chinese
etiquette than any of the high officials I have met in China. Yet the
essential Chinese courtesies were still there; there was no suggestion
of a general surrender to Western bruskness. A solid-looking man, in
physical as well as the other sense, with a somewhat genial face
sunburned with evidence of his personal attention to his outdoor
activities, met us with no appreciable delay in a semi-private part of
the yamen that was tasteful in the Chinese sense, yet which made no
efforts at magnificence in the hope of increasing the impression of the
occupant’s importance. Rather a man of plain common sense and
perseverance than of brilliancy, a brief acquaintance with the governor
suggested; and Heaven knows China needs this type just now much more
than the other. His garments were of cotton, not silk, and the
simplicity of life this symbolizes has its effect upon his subordinates,
at least in his presence. Officials having an audience with him usually
also put on cotton clothing for the occasion, lest the governor say, as
he has more than once: “Ah, I see you are making lots of money out of
your post. Now, there is a famine down in the southwest corner of the
province, and ...” He talked freely, yet certainly not boastfully, of
his various policies, plain, common-sense policies, like the man
himself, but which do not suggest themselves to the Chinese as readily
as one might expect. Later I had opportunity to compare actual results
with verbal intentions.
His laws against opium and bound feet would be better enforced, Yen
Hsi-shan’s friendly critics agree, if the officials under him were
really in favor of such reforms. One man alone cannot cure a whole
province, larger than most of our States, of the bad habits of
generations. At first the governor was very assiduous on these points.
Traffickers in, as well as growers of, the drug were fined and
imprisoned, and life made as miserable as possible for those who
persisted in consuming it. Inspectors examined the feet of women and
assessed a fine of five dollars a year against those who had not unbound
them, or who bound those of their daughters. Not a severe penalty from
the Western point of view; but this is much money to the average Chinese
countryman, and bound feet are most persistent in the rural districts.
But the governor’s _lee high_ (severity) is dying out, the people say,
and little girls with bound feet may be seen near and even in Taiyüan.
The stoutest reformer would be likely to lose heart before the unrivaled
passive resistance of the Chinese against even their own best welfare;
it needs unbroken generations of radicals to get permanent results. At
least the pigtail has virtually disappeared from Shansi!
The “model governor” comes fairly near being a practical man in the
Occidental sense. The forty automobiles in the government garages
include huge streetcar-like buses that make good use of his new roads,
and trucks that are run mainly by steam. Gasolene is expensive in
Shansi, and coal is cheap. Much of the city is taken up by what
resembles immense barracks, and the public is chased many blocks
roundabout by the long mud walls enclosing them. But if this gives the
appearance of a ruler who considers the capital his private property, it
makes possible a great normal school for all the province, where
handcrafts are given proper attention, up-to-date soldiers’ workshops,
in which everything needed by the army is made, a model prison, and
other spacious institutions on quite modern lines. Besides, there was
evidently ample room inside the city. The old wall of Taiyüan is in a
ruinous state, and any one can climb it, almost anywhere inside and with
no great difficulty from without, as if the governor realized that such
picturesque defenses are useless against modern attacks, and feels able
to cope in the open with the bandits against which city walls still
offer a certain amount of protection in many parts of China. There are
lakes and broad sheep pastures, and many acres of cultivated fields,
within the walls, and only one suburb of any size outside them, without
a single smoking chimney except those of the big extramural arsenal
standing forth against the distant low hills that half surround Taiyüan.
In fact, one whole corner of the city is used as a rifle-range, with the
ruined wall as a back-stop, and the soldiers still find plenty of room
to throw their dummy hand-grenades and practise their modified
goose-step. All this hardly means a prosperous city, were it not for the
practical activities of a good governor. His soldiers, by the way, get
six “Mex” dollars a month, which is the rate throughout most of China,
and his “snappy” model police nine; but unlike so many of his colleagues
Governor Yen actually pays his troops, which is one of the great secrets
of his success. Unpaid soldiers not only do not drive brigands over the
frontier, but they are prone to sell them ammunition and even to join
them.
It was evident that the governor’s progressive administration includes
one particular pet scheme, which he is working out as rapidly as
possible, quite ready to admit that it takes time to make changes in
China. He is gradually introducing a village military system, a kind of
National Guard on a provincial scale. Instead of having military
parasites from other provinces come to exploit the people or turn
bandits among them, he is organizing militia companies for local
protection. The chief advantages he expects are that it will thus be
easier to maintain peace and repel outside invaders, as village soldiers
will naturally do their best to protect their own homes; it should
eliminate the danger of becoming an offensive force against neighboring
provinces, since these soldiers are not riffraff and loafers recruited
wherever they can be had but ordinary citizens with proper occupations,
who will not care to sacrifice their peaceful living for the sake of a
few ambitious militarists; and it does not take them away from their
fields or their usual tasks, except for brief periods of training each
year. It is not exactly an original plan, at least to the world at
large, but self-evident things are not always so to the Chinese, and
Governor Yen may be on the track of the very thing to wipe out rapacious
militarism and its twin sister, banditry.
The mass of the people of Shansi are convinced that the governor loves
them like a father, which is a very essential thing in China even for a
virtual dictator, if he wishes to hold out. Yet Yen is a rich man, one
of the richest men in China, some say, and he was not born that way.
Only the uninformed masses think that he sacrifices everything to their
welfare. Any land with China’s pressure of population, family system,
and centuries-old, almost universal political corruption from top to
bottom would need at least a demigod of which to make a ruler who
actually thought of nothing but the public good. Yen Hsi-shan, it is
said almost openly, has kept his position so long largely by preserving
a strict neutrality even in the payment of “squeeze” toward those high
up who might have taken his job away from him. It is almost publicly
known that he gave one million two hundred thousand dollars each to
Chang Tso-lin and Tsao Kun in the “Anfu” days as “military assistance.”
But at least he has made the province he has ruled for twelve unbroken
years a better place to live in; his worst enemies do not hesitate to
admit that. Perhaps he is, as many Chinese who use their minds assert, a
great governor only as a small hill is a mountain on a flat plain; the
fact remains that he has some ideas and the will to carry them out,
ideas which, if introduced into the other provinces would put the people
of China in a much better position to solve some of those pressing
problems that seem to be driving them to national destruction. With a
score of Governors Yen the dismantled old Celestial Empire might still
be no paradise, but the anxious visitor can sweep the country almost in
vain for a glimpse of any other force that promises prompt and effectual
resistance to the misfortunes that threaten to overwhelm her entirely.
All up and down the province the happy results of good rule are
apparent. Village girls, like the boys who come to the various
barrack-institutions in the capital, are taught what they are really
likely to need in the life that in all probability lies before them, not
the often useless stuff of an ideal but imaginary life, to which even
American mission schools are somewhat prone. There are still such
adversities as famine in Shansi Province, and numbers of its men migrate
northward to Mongolia and Manchuria in search of the livelihood their
ancestral homes deny them. But even a civil and military governor
combined cannot make rain fall. More than one Tuchun of other provinces
still thinks he can, and leads his people in processions to the temples
of the god of rain, or helps them to plant that delinquent deity, in a
brand-new coat of paint as a counter-inducement, out in the blazing
sunshine, in the hope that he will think better of the cruel neglect of
his duties. One suspects, however, that Governor Yen’s more up-to-date
methods are likelier in the end to bring real results. But, alas! safety
and modern improvements are not what most beguile the random wanderer
with a strong penchant for the picturesque, and a longer stay in the
“model province” promised little to make up for the exciting things that
might still be in store for me in other parts of the country.