RAMBLES IN THE PROVINCE OF CONFUCIUS
The chief impression of the long all-day journey from Peking to Tzinan
in early spring is of graves. All sizes of them, from mere haycocks to
veritable haystacks, take up almost more of the fields than they leave
to cultivation, so that the deadly flat landscape, drearily dry brown at
this season, looks as if it were broken out with smallpox. In Chihli
Province there had been no real snow all winter; but from about the time
we entered Shantung onward the shrinking remnants of a recent modest
fall of it varied slightly the bare yellowish monotony spread out under
a cloudless sky.
The old walled city of Teh-chow was the first place of importance over
the boundary, and there was nothing visibly different about that from a
hundred other walled cities of China. At one end of the long graveled
station platform sat an old coffin, and lying on top of it was the stone
that had marked its first grave and was needed now for the new one
somewhere else. The Chinese are coming to be more easily persuaded by
the clink of silver that their ancestors will endure removal, when a
railway or a growing mission station or an industrial plant finds it
imperative to have more room. A policeman quite as up to date as those
of Peking was driving up and down the platform two men who seemed to
have known some prosperity before this misfortune overtook them. Ropes
tied to their outside arms furnished the driver his reins, and about
their necks hung by cords big wooden placards detailing their crimes.
The officer saw to it that they forced their way into every group, so
that there could be no excuse for any one, in or outside the long
crowded train, not to recognize them as rascals, before he drove them
back to wherever they waited until the next train called them forth
again. It was an anachronism, this ancient mode of punishment amid such
modern surroundings; but what would be the effect if our own absconding
bankers and sneak-thieves were similarly paraded from suburbs to
railroad station, pausing for any one who cared to read? It would at
least make their faces more familiar to those who might benefit in
future by such knowledge. But on second thought our press serves us the
same purpose, without physical exertion to criminals or policemen.
At Teh-chow the ancient and the modern means of transportation between
the Yang Tse and Peking part company. All the way from Tientsin, the
railroad which, about a decade back, brought Shanghai within thirty-six
hours of the capital is within rifle-shot of the Grand Canal that Kublai
Khan merely _re_constructed six hundred and fifty years ago. Before we
realized that maps and modern conditions are not counterparts in the
China of to-day, we had a pleasant dream of houseboating from Peking to
the Yang Tse, when it came time for us to move southward. Intuition
should have sufficed, but we only learned from inquiry that, since the
tribute grain which once came yearly to Peking by hundreds of junks
could now come by other means, if any one still gave Peking tribute, the
Grand Canal has silted up for long distances, to say nothing of the
bandit nests through which it runs in these days of the self-styled
republic. Once the railroad meets and crosses it again, at the southern
boundary of the province; otherwise the two routes are never in
agreement below Teh-chow.
The capital of Shantung Province announces itself by its smokestacks
about the time the rumbling of the long German-built bridge across the
Yellow River awakens the traveler to the fact that the day’s ordeal is
over. Flour-mills account for most of these spirals of smoke where ten
or fifteen years ago little more than graves grew. Tzinan is an
exception to the general rule of Chinese treaty-ports, in that it was
opened to foreign trade in 1906 by desire from within rather than
pressure from without. The Germans, and after them the Japanese, have
built up a fore-city of broad, almost-paved streets, lined by modern
buildings that here and there approach the imposing, on the space turned
over to the growth of foreign enterprise by the Chinese themselves.
Japanese hospitals and schools, buildings that carry the thoughts back
to the bridge-heads on the Rhine, here and there a contribution by some
other nationality, give quite a manly air to this modern section of
Shang-Pu, with its railway stations. But if one’s mind has that queer
and no doubt reprehensible quirk which makes the picturesque more
interesting than standardized efficiency, the wheelbarrows are strong
competitors for the attention. In Peking and the north these are less
used, and not at all for passengers. In Tzinan they carry a much larger
proportion of the population than do the rickshaws. For while the latter
are numerous also, their capacity is limited, and there seems to be no
exact high-water mark to the number of persons a barrow-man can crowd
upon the two cushions flanking his high wooden wheel, with its guards
doing duty as seat-backs. Especially when the factory workers are going
to or from their mud huts, eight or ten, and even twelve, pairs of
little misshapen feet hang over the sides of these patient vehicles,
still barely bending the sturdy back of the human packhorse in the
shafts. Men ride in them, too, sometimes a pair or a group of coolies
whom it would be impossible to distinguish from the man whom they are,
one must assume, paying to do their walking for them. A wheelbarrow trip
costs but a half or two thirds as much as the same journey by rickshaw;
the mere matter of greater speed or comfort is not, of course, of any
importance to the rank-and-file Chinese; and the invariable ungreased
squeaking of the conveyance, which announces its coming as far off as
could a trolley-bell, may easily be soothing music to a people who enter
Chinese theaters without compulsion.
The main stream of squeaks ambles its way into the old native city,
doubly surrounded by two rambling walls. There the recent snow had left
what passes for streets ankle-deep in mud, except perhaps for a few
short stretches paved centuries ago with huge slabs of stone so rounded
off now that a rickshaw can scarcely make wheelbarrow speed over them,
and which at best are only somewhat less thickly covered with paste-like
slime. Foreigners who have lived there half a century say they can see
improvements in the native life of old Tzinan, but the new-comer will
have to take most of this on faith, and is not likely to carry off many
impressions essentially different from those he has had or will have
inside the walls of any well populated Chinese city. Merchants in black
lounge in skullcaps in constantly repeated little booth-shops on either
hand, outwardly indifferent to custom as they sip their tea from
handleless cups, smoke their tiny pipes with the often yard-long stems,
play chess, checkers, cards, or dice, all of an Oriental kind. Immediate
attention comes, however, when a possible client pauses in what would be
the doorway if there were a front wall, quadrupled, quintupled if the
pauser is astonishingly a foreigner. Here and there several people stand
before a counter, and two or three times as many behind it. Street
venders paddle through the mud, stridently announcing themselves.
Roofless shops on the corners, and everywhere else that there is a bit
of space to crowd in, sell steaming balls of dough, bowls of watery
chopped-up meat, China’s kind of macaroni, served with worn chop-sticks
and accompanied, perhaps, by a constant refrain designed to draw, rather
than to drive off, more customers. Beggars in costumes which could not
have possibly reached such a state without deliberate aid splash along
beside the stranger’s rickshaw at a speed to prove health and strength,
crying incessantly, “_Ta Lao Yea! Ta Lao Yea!_” “Great Old Excellency!”
in the vain hope that the Chinese compliment of granting old age where
it is still not physically due will bring perhaps even silver from the
outside barbarian who is in reality still disgustingly youthful.
Glimpses at irregular intervals down side streets that are merely poorer
examples of the same thing, with more makeshift booths and fewer large
shops, more strident venders and fewer hopeful beggars. Once or twice
the big weather-beaten gateway to a yamen, with coolies made into
soldiers by the superimposing of a faded uniform padded with cotton
leaning on their rifles and eying the passing throng with the air of bad
boys who are far too seldom spanked. Less shopkeeping and more miserable
dwelling farther out, women and girls standing or hobbling about in the
mud on their little deformed feet, everywhere a plethora of boys,
nowhere a person who could be called clean, almost everything and every
one dirty as a pigsty. Then the street shifts a block before it passes
out the farther gate—for evil spirits would make short shrift of a city
with a straight passage clear through it—and the stranger finds himself
in the outskirts, between the great and the outer wall, with a
picturesque glimpse along the former of women washing clothes in the
tree-lined moat, and ragged boys are pushing his rickshaw from behind
over a bridging hump in the stone and mud-slough road in the hope of
being tossed a copper.
[Illustration:
The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone stairway which
ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,” here seen in the upper
right-hand corner
]
[Illustration:
One of the countless beggar women who squat in the center of the
stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every pilgrim to drop at least a
“cash” into each basket
]
[Illustration:
Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan, capital of
Shantung
]
[Illustration:
A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most sacred of the
five holy peaks of China
]
With the example of decent dwellings and habits in plain sight about
them in as well as outside the walls, this plodding through filthy
streets between dismal mud dens seems to remain wholly satisfactory even
to those visibly able to improve their conditions if they chose. Rows of
modern two-story stone houses of the missionaries stand on two sides of
the city, and with all the efforts of these enigmatical men and women
from across the Pacific to jounce China out of her old ruts, it would
have been curious to find how slight effect such patent examples have on
the daily living of those in constant contact with them, even to the
extent of a little increased effort for cleanliness and convenience—if
one had not already seen China elsewhere. Just around the corner from
the well equipped hospital manned by Americans and English, the Chinese
medicine-shops continue to sell powdered fossils for curing diseased
eyes, dried frog’s liver for kidney troubles, deer horns ground up into
remedies for other ailments, and to send inquirers to native
medicine-men who know the hundred and some spots on the human body where
sickness can be let out by puncturing with a needle. The mission
university with its big campus backed by a splendid landscape and
reached by a hole cut specially for it in the main city wall continues
to look utterly incongruous in its setting of ignorance and filth. The
turnstile of a mission museum filled with graphic illustrations of
China’s errors and the simple cures for them records hundreds of
thousands of visitors from all the surrounding region and beyond during
the pilgrim season alone, yet the callers seem to carry nothing home
with them except the honor of having climbed the sacred mountain and
worshiped at the shrine of the famous sage a little farther southward.
Graphic proofs that deforestation has brought in its train devastating
floods, that it contributes to the aridity of the soil on which even the
snow, for lack of shade, evaporates before it sinks in, that it is
mainly responsible for the locusts which birds might make way with if
there were trees for birds to live in, has barely caused the planting of
a few shrubs here and there on the mountains that roll up at the edge of
the plain on which Tzinan is built—and these will be hacked down and
carried off for fuel at the first good opportunity. The people of
Shantung’s capital seem to regard as their chief civic asset the big
spring that boils up in three mounds of water in the heart of the city
and forms a great lake within the walls, through the reedy channels of
which they are poled on pleasure-barges, set with tables for their
favorite sport of eating, out to island temples where gaudy gods still
gaze down upon worshipers unable to recognize the sardonic smirks on
their color-daubed wooden faces.
South of Tzinan there are low mountains or high hills, bare except for
temples and patches of snow that glistened in the moonlight. These
culminate in fame, if not in height, in Tai-shan, most sacred of the
holy peaks of China, two hours below the provincial capital. I had
purposely timed my journey to Shantung so that I could climb Tai-shan
with the pilgrims who flock to it during the fortnight following the
Chinese New Year. Though he might have been extremely nasty at that
season, the weather god evidently approved my plans, for it would be
impossible to picture more perfect conditions for making this far-famed
excursion than that brilliant first day of March according to our
Western calendar.
Even in Peking those who should have been better informed had led me to
expect strenuous opposition to my refusal of chair-bearers. There was
nothing of the kind, though I seemed to feel an atmosphere of mingled
surprise and prophecy that I should deeply regret it before the day was
done, when I asked merely for a coolie to carry my odds and ends. The
ability of almost any foreigner in China to afford servants for all his
menial tasks gives the great mass of the Chinese the impression that he
has no physical endurance of his own, but only untold riches. The coolie
who set off with me at sunrise was well chosen, for not only was he all
that a coolie and a guide and “boy” combined should be, but he was so
quick-witted and so free from the worst crudities of the Shantung
dialect that we conversed almost freely on almost any subject in spite
of the scantiness of my Mandarin vocabulary.
The way lay first across a stony plain sloping gently upward, with the
compact mass of rocky mountains so close in the cloudless atmosphere
that one might easily have been deceived about the exertions that lay
ahead, had not common fame more than corrected any such error. Pilgrims
were already converging from both directions upon the partly stone-paved
route leading out of the north gate of Taianfu, surrounded by its
time-blackened walls, and within an hour we were all passing in a single
stream through the first great archway. _I-T’ien-Men_—“First Heaven
Gate”—the Chinese call it, and over it hangs an inscription announcing
in the brevity of Chinese characters that Confucius took this path when
he climbed Tai-shan—enough to make it the accepted one even if there
were other feasible ascents. Stone steps soon begin to hint at the
obstacle race ahead, though this early they are merely in isolated
half-dozens scattered up the gradually more sloping road floored with
big irregular stones worn smooth by uncounted millions of feet. Already
the beggars who decorate the entire ascent were raising their insistent
clamor, and shops and temples and tea-houses and itinerant venders
formed an almost unbroken wall on either side. Higher up there were
increasingly open stretches looking off across the steep tumbled gorge
we were climbing, to the swift rocky mountain-sides that shut us in.
Here and there a cluster of rugged, misshapen pines gave as dainty a
retreat as if we had been in Japan, but the general lack of cleanliness
alone distinctly informed us that we were not. These clumps were rare,
too, even on China’s most sacred mountain, otherwise almost entirely of
stone, with hardly a patch of earth big enough for the planting of a
flower-bed.
This did not make it infertile for its inhabitants, however; rather the
contrary. My coolie companion, to whom the ascent was an old, old story,
put the number of beggars that lined it at one thousand; but that
certainly was over-modest. Surely there were several times that number
from bottom to top, and just as many from top to bottom. They sat in the
center of the great stairs, so that chair-bearers passed one on either
side of them, and those who were carried up passed directly over their
heads. The top of each little cluster of stairs seemed to be the
exclusive territory of one mendicant, or, in the great majority of
cases, of one whole family of them, and not one did I see poaching even
for an instant on his fellows’ preserves. Just as often as the
half-dozen steps were surmounted a beggar was certain to be found
squatting in the middle of the topmost, his woven-reed scoop lying
invitingly beside him. Where the merely sloping stretches between these
steps were more than ten or twelve feet long other beggars were
regularly spaced along them; and higher up, where the ascent was all
stairs, there was one, or a family group, about every sixth step.
Sleeker, fatter, more contented-looking beggars I cannot recall having
seen anywhere on earth. Red-cheeked children, boys seeming to
predominate, were the chief stock in trade, though there were a few
adults who were visibly in sad states of health. During the pilgrim
season, I was told, hundreds of peasants leave their little farms in
charge of one member of the family and the rest establish themselves
somewhere along the ascent to Tai-shan, until the spring grows so warm
that their other occupation requires their presence at home again. On
one side or the other of the climb, seldom more than a few feet from
their squatting-place, each group had a makeshift dwelling,—a hut of
rocks and grass-mats, sometimes a natural grotto covered over with
whatever was available, generally only high enough for the adults on all
fours, but carpeted with mountain hay and better than the average homes
along Peking _hutungs_. Mountain water, magnificent air, a far-reaching
view across the plain below, if that means anything to them, made the
dismal mud dwellings of most Chinese, within the reeking gloom of city,
town, or compound walls, nothing to be compared with this life of
perfect leisure in such a vantage-place.
There might have been one serious drawback to all this,—like the
“horrible example” of the temperance lecturer, the exhibits could not be
kept in proper condition to make the best appeal. The whole mendicant
army on Tai-shan, except the small minority that was really ailing,
looked so well fed and well slept that only an unusually charitable or
exceedingly unobserving Westerner would have yielded to their pleas. He
might have been inclined instead to thump the well padded ribs of the
woman who here and there, at his approach, stripped suddenly naked the
plump youngster she held in her lap, hastily trying to hide its thick
warm _i-shang_ behind her—for there was still a distinct bite in the air
even on this southern slope of the mountain with a brilliant sun beating
down upon it. But the visible prosperity of the mendicants seemed to
matter little, for the Chinese pilgrims who made up the now almost
constant stream of humanity toiling skyward had evidently some
superstition that their pilgrimage would not be effective if they did
not succor all who needed it along the way, and most of them were taking
no chances on passing by a deserving case merely because it looked
better nourished and housed than they did themselves. Those who gave
confined their gifts almost exclusively to brass “cash”; but there were
many scoops an inch or two deep in these cheap coins, occasionally with
a real copper standing conspicuously out among them, though the
recipients sneaked off to their lairs now and then to hide their
gleanings. A whole scoopful of “cash” would not resemble riches to an
American “panhandler”; to Chinese of the lower class, however, the
pickings of most of the mendicants on Tai-shan, if that day was an
average, would seem almost an income of luxury.
About nine o’clock the descending peasants and coolies had also grown to
a constant stream, so that rules of the road—or, more exactly by this
time, of the stairway—had to be more or less strictly obeyed if progress
was to be made either up or down. There were no pilgrim costumes, such
as the Japanese climbing Koya-san, for instance, so commonly wear,
though frequent groups of coolies carried triangular flags bearing a few
characters, touches of color that livened somewhat the almost invariable
blue of the every-day garments of the masses. Unfailingly good-natured,
the coolie pilgrims had neither a suggestion of the rowdiness of our
popular excursions nor of the rather belligerent self-complacency of
their island neighbors to the east. Except for two little Japanese
professors from Manchuria, who conversed with me in English and German
respectively and with the Chinese by characters scrawled on scraps of
paper, I was the only foreigner making the ascent that day. The sight of
me on foot did not arouse more than the usual gaping to which any
Westerner outside the restricted orbits of his kind is subject anywhere
in China—until my coolie made one of his often repeated answers to the
question as to what had become of my chair. Even the little Japanese
climbed on foot for an hour or more, their chairs trailing behind them,
and only a few of the haughtiest and fattest Chinese declined to get out
and stretch their legs at all. But that a man not only ostensibly of the
wealthy class, but a weak “outside barbarian” into the bargain, should
be so foolish as to risk getting himself stranded by undertaking a
journey which naturally he could not finish unassisted, changed the mere
gaping to excitement. It was all very well, I gathered from such of
their remarks and gestures as I could understand, for even a foreigner
to win whatever merit was given such beings by making as much of the
journey as he could on foot, but he most certainly should have brought
along a chair to rescue him when he could no longer climb.
[Illustration:
A priest of the Temple of Confucius
]
[Illustration:
The grave of Confucius is noted for its simplicity
]
[Illustration:
The sanctum of the Temple of Confucius, with the statue and
spirit-tablet of the sage, before which millions of Chinese burn
joss-sticks annually
]
The chairs, by the way, were really not worthy of that name. Instead of
the sentry-box-like sedan used in many parts of China to this day, with
a carrier or two, or even three, in front and as many behind, these were
merely a kind of pole-and-rope hammock, mildly resembling a crude, low
rustic arm-chair, in which the carried sat facing forward with his feet
hanging over before him, grazing the heads of the incessant beggars in
the middle of the ascent, while his rarely more than two carriers walked
on either side of him, bearing the contrivance sidewise. Every little
distance, when the straps over their outside shoulders became painful,
they shifted simultaneously by swinging themselves and the chair around
with a swift, almost automatic motion, and continued to toil upward.
This was as near as the facts corresponded to the tales so often told of
the breath-taking dangers of chairing it up Tai-shan, where, according
to the most imaginative tellers, the carriers “just toss you off into
space” whenever they change positions. Ever since I first heard this
yarn I had pictured thousands of feet of sheer abyss directly beneath
the trembling chair-rider, whereas I doubt if he would at any time have
dropped more than six or eight feet, exclusive of what he might have
rolled, in the unheard-of event of the bearers’ spilling him.
A little spill would have served the riders right anyway, for most of
them were larger and better nourished than the coolies who bore them,
needed in fact just such reducing exercises as walking up Tai-shan; and
any really two-legged mortal can make the ascent considerably sooner on
foot than by chair. On this day at least the carried were decidedly the
aristocratic minority, for there was by no means one of them to each
hundred of the foot-travelers who shuttled past in two often long
unbroken lines. To win full merit for the pilgrimage, evidently, it
should be made under the pilgrim’s own steam, though there seems to be
no harm in getting a little assistance by the way. Thus most of the
women who were painfully toiling upward on their bound feet had each a
coolie walking beside her to sustain her faltering steps and give her a
boost every now and then by the hand in one of her armpits.
One by one we came to “Flying Clouds Hall,” to the “Ten Thousand Genii
Hall,” where the Emperor Kao-Tsu paused to receive homage during his
ascent in 595 A.D., to the “Horse Stopping Place,” and finally to
_Hui-Ma-Ling_, the “Horse Turning Back Peak,” where even an emperor was
forced to dismount and resort to some other means of locomotion. All
these “halls” were Chinese temples, quite commonplace except for their
location, filled with dusty, gaudy wooden gods before whom pilgrims
burned joss-sticks by the bundle, heaping the big iron urns with ashes,
and with the clamor of begging priests, beating gongs, shrieking their
demands, calling upon all passers-by to try their fortune-telling or
invest in their tissue-paper prayers. In the courtyards of many of them,
too, and on the landing outside all, were venders of tea and dough-balls
and other delicacies of the Chinese cuisine, some having permanent
establishments with home-made tables and sawhorse benches, most of them
men who carried their stock in trade on a pole over their shoulders. The
general stoniness of the mountain broke out here and there in mighty
boulders and rock-faced cliffs, on which inscriptions had been carved
centuries ago in characters sometimes the height of a man. There were
fixed resting-places at which not only chair-coolies but my own
companion insisted on stopping, though his load was next to nothing. It
had only been a lunch-basket and some extra clothing to begin with, and
at the bottom of the first cluster of stairs he had hired a boy to carry
most of that. At _Ch’ung T’ien Men_, for instance, approximately
half-way up, as its name suggests, there were two or three temples and
as many tea-houses, a terrace from which one could gloat over the ascent
that already lay below, and a view of the flat plain stretching away
interminably from the foot of the mountain; and my failure to stop there
for refreshments caused as great astonishment among the custom-shackled
throng as did my strange Western garb.
At this point the road descends rather sharply for a furlong or more
through a ravine, across which the rest of the climb stands in plainest
sight, like a stairway to the sky, a ladder rather, for it seems almost
perpendicular, and disappearing high above through the archway of a big
red structure famed throughout China as the _Nan-T’ien-Men_—the “South
Gate of Heaven.” This furlong is a relief, not only from incessant
climbing but from beggars, none of whom are so needy as to choose a
station on this damp and shaded slope. They soon began again, however,
interminable and insistent as before, at the bottom of the remaining
ascent. Some one with more taste for statistics than for scenery has
computed that there are six thousand steps on this final stairway to
Tai-shan, and no one who has made this upper half of the journey by his
own exertions will accuse him of exaggeration. But it is not, as common
repute would have it, impossible on foot, either because of the
steepness of the stairs, the precarious steps, or the danger that
beggars or carriers will push one off into space for not contributing
the orthodox amount—all of which one may hear from the lips of educated
Chinese as well as foreigners even in Peking. The stone steps are
uneven, from six inches to a foot wide, the average perhaps eight
inches, and some of them are worn to a distinct slope. When they are wet
with melting snow, as many things were that day on the upper part of the
mountain, only the foolish would set their feet down carelessly upon
them, but that could not constitute a worthy reason for intrusting one’s
health to a pair of panting coolies who would double the time of the
ascent. The beggars, I had gravely been told by a Chinese lady who had
lived abroad in several embassies, would simply not allow me to pass if
I did not contribute, and as a last resort they would take my offerings
by force, so commanding do they become on the mountain at New Year’s
time. They were certainly numerous and sturdy enough to have named their
own contributions, and there was no visible force that might have curbed
them. But they were Chinese—in other words, timid, passive, submissive,
in spite of their blustering manner. In regular succession as often as
half a dozen steps were surmounted they raised their voices in what
might have been mistaken for demands that could not be refused; but just
as often their seeming ferocity oozed quickly away into a meek and
helpless, and withal a cheerful, resignation as soon as I passed without
contributing. One or two, who were women, snatched at my coat-tail or
legs, but the hint of a menacing gesture quickly freed me from their
noisome attentions, and most of them seemed to be too well fed and
contented to rise and run beside me, wailing the “Great Old Excellency!”
so familiar in Peking and most other cities of the North. From the plain
to the Gate of Heaven the adult mendicants at least seemed to think it
exertion enough to squat beside the little fire almost every group had
built in the center of its step, and depend on voice and manner—and of
course, most valuable of all, ancient custom—for their gleanings.
Indeed, one wise old fellow had resorted to absent treatment, remaining
in his kennel across the rocky ravine nearly a hundred yards from his
scoop on the stairway, beating a gong and shouting to attract attention,
and no doubt strolling over now and then to carry home the wealth that
rained upon him, which his colleagues made no attempt to appropriate.
The “Clouds Stepping Bridge” was the last break in the sheer ascent,
which thereafter marched straight up to the southern Gate of Heaven,
dense blue from top to bottom with cautious coolies picking their way up
or down. Sometimes there was a very old man, half carried by his sons;
now and then a limp, white-faced fellow whose exertions had been too
much for him came down in the chair he had scorned to take, or could not
afford, when he set out. Even on this upper stretch of the journey the
stairway was broken by landings, and on these even the sturdiest paused
for breath more and more frequently as the red archway slowly descended
to meet us. Youths loitered about the steepest places and lent a hand to
those who looked likely to reward their efforts, unless one drove them
off with scornful gestures. Near the top a great iron chain was set in
the rock as a kind of hand-rail but was hardly needed by any whose legs
had not deserted them. When at last, a trifle more than four hours after
setting out from the railway station, I marched in through the archway,
it occurred to me that, beggars, pilgrims, and stairs aside, the climb
had been very similar to that up the steeper side of Mount Washington,
in New Hampshire, both in the amount of exertion required and the
rockiness of the landscape.
A cold wind swept across the summit, in disconcerting contrast to the
burning sunshine below the gateway, calling instantly for all the
garments my two carriers had brought for me. The climbing was not yet
done; in fact it is a good half-mile from the _Nan-T’ien-Men_ to the
Taoist temple which crowns the mountain. But this is by a winding,
leisurely road passing through several temples in which pilgrims were
performing the feats for which they had come. The courtyards of these,
neglected by the sun, were littered with heaps of dirty snow, with the
ashes of myriad sticks of incense, with the débris of firecrackers and
tissue-paper prayers, and as temples they were nothing out of the
ordinary, duplicated by hundreds all over China, but famous for their
location and the special potencies their gods derive from it. Coolies
and peasants made up at least three fourths of the throng kowtowing
here, faces touching the ground, burning incense there, lighting big
bunches of firecrackers for the edification of some sleepy-eyed god over
yonder, rubbing a glass-smooth stone monument from which some form of
blessing seems to be extracted by friction; but there were many men of
the well-to-do and the ostensibly educated classes among them. The
scarcity of women and children made each temple compound seem a congress
of adult males, and the mixture of Fourth of July boyishness and
fishwife credulity with which these men solemnly carried out their
superstitious antics would have seemed even more out of place but for
their girlish cues and their generally simple, almost childlike manners.
Out on the rock knoll before the highest temple, marked with a stone
shaft here and there and swept now by wintry winds out of keeping with
the unbroken brilliancy of the day, a few stone-cut characters announce
that “Confucius stood here and felt the smallness of the world below.” A
wide expanse unfolds on every side, with only the heavens above. One can
make out Tzinan, and faintly the Hoang Ho, then a lake of considerable
size, and the railway stretching like a hair on the glass into infinity
in either direction—a brown world rolling away in a myriad of peaks and
knobs and salients of what looks like a boiling landscape suddenly
struck solid. I have nowhere been able to find why Tai-shan is a sacred
mountain, but it was already so twenty-five hundred years before the
Christian era began; perhaps its great sanctity had its start among the
largely plain-dwelling Chinese simply because of the comprehensive view
of the world below from its summit when there is nowhere the hint of a
rag of cloud and only the haziness of great distances limits the power
of the eye.
There was a surprising change in the human element of the scene when I
descended early in the afternoon. Where there had been crowd after crowd
two hours before, in every temple courtyard, in every refreshment-shop,
where the great stairway had seemed carpeted from top to bottom with
shimmering dark-blue, there were now only scattered individuals, and
most of these were lolling or squatting inside the buildings. What had
become of the vast throng so suddenly was a mystery; as nearly as I
could make out from my guide’s answer they had gone home again. Taoist
priests in their black bonnet-caps were enjoying siestas along the stone
verandas on the sunny side of their courtyards; worshipers, in so far as
they remained at all, were sipping tea and wielding chop-sticks, or
doing nothing whatever, in the den-like places where their patronage had
been so vociferously solicited in the morning. The completest change of
all had come over the beggars. Their shallow baskets, barely sprinkled
now with “cash,” lay in constant succession in the center of the
stairway as before, but in the whole descent I doubt whether as many as
a dozen mendicants were there in person to make a vocal appeal. Perhaps
the rules of their union forbade labor at this hour—which reminds me
that the medical mission school in Tzinan can rarely get the bodies of
beggars for dissection, numerous as they are in life, because the
beggars’ gild insists on giving them honorable burial—and the corpses of
criminals, readily furnished by the Government, are useless in the study
of the brain, because the modern substitute for the headsman’s sword in
China is an officer who steps up and blows the back of the culprit’s
head off with a revolver. The general desertion of their stations
looked, however, more like the contented retirement of craftsmen whose
wants were amply satisfied by a part-day’s exertion. They sat off the
trail against sunny rocks or beneath an occasional evergreen, or about
the mouths of their huts and caves, gossiping, quarreling, scratching,
and otherwise heartily enjoying themselves, especially sleeping in their
grass-floored nests, scorning to exert themselves even to the extent of
a pleading word or glance at likely passers-by. Their untended baskets
were plea enough, if charity was still abroad—and evidently honor is no
less among beggars than among thieves, for no one seemed in the least
concerned lest some one else appropriate the coins meant for him.
We passed now and then a few descending pedestrians, and two or three
going down in chairs. Those who have tried it say that there is the
exhilaration of dancing in the descent of Tai-shan in these misnamed
contrivances, especially down this upper half of it. For though the
stairway is continuous here, it is frequently and regularly broken by
landings, and the technique of the chair-bearers, handed down perhaps
from remote antiquity, is to trot down each cluster of stairs, then
saunter slowly across the landing, perhaps shifting shoulders upon it,
before jogging suddenly down the next flight. So the descent is like a
rhythmic dropping through space, something suggestive of waltzing by
airplane, soothing or terrifying, according to the nerve adjustment of
the rider. A few belated pilgrims, mainly women on their pitiful feet,
were still laboring upward; but the way was almost clear, and two hours
below the summit found us strolling away down the last gentle slope
between old cypresses. Once, before we entered the square-walled town of
Taian, my companion dragged me aside into a temple to “see something
good see,” and one of those mixtures of rowdy and beggar which so many
Chinese priests become unlocked a kind of chapel containing an ugly
gilded statue that pretended to have human arms and legs, the latter
crossed in Buddhist repose. The story has it that a monk sat on this
table until he starved himself to death as a short cut to Nirvana, but
the thing was a mere dressed-up mummified corpse arranged to mulct
credulous coolies of their precious coppers. It was an outbreak of
barbarism worthy the Catholicism of Latin America and many times more
surprising in a land which, whatever else it has to be ashamed of, is
not particularly given to this form of savagery.
Inside the walled city, too, I came upon the first deliberate
obscenities I had so far seen in the Middle Kingdom. A great fair was in
full swing in the grounds of a temple, and among the large colored
photographs which several story-tellers inserted in the double-panel
screens they had set up to illustrate their chanted tales, were quite a
number depicting such things as women nude to the waist. A slight breach
indeed in many another land; but in China, where the subject of sex so
rarely receives public recognition, it meant almost an open parading of
immorality. But New Year’s season seems to bring a relaxation even of
morals, and especially does gambling, quite publicly and without
distinction as to age or sex, rage throughout China during that
fortnight, as it did not at scores of places within these temple
grounds. They were vast, and shaded by magnificent old trees, with a
wall as mighty as that of the city itself surrounding them, and still
with room to spare, though all the hawkers, traders, and money-changers
for many _li_ roundabout seemed to be gathered there. At one end stood a
mighty hall, famed for its four colossal wooden statues, which still did
not reach the lofty beams of the roof nor seem cramped within the walls
on which ancient frescos were still moderately well preserved. Here, as
everywhere that a wooden god is housed in this holy land of China, stood
begging priests and a receptacle heaped with “cash” and coppers flung at
it by passing pilgrims. The latter are no doubt the principal source of
income of Taianfu, yet prosperity seemed more at home there than in the
great majority of China’s smaller cities. Time was when the people knew
prosperity would depart at the building of the American Methodist
Mission just outside the walls, but both the mission and the prosperity
seem to increase rather than to languish.
When the Germans, something more than a decade ago, built that portion
of the Tientsin-Pukow Railway which runs through Shantung, they
naturally planned to have it touch Chufou, sacred to Confucius. But
their surveyors insisted that the line must cut across the long cypress
avenue between his temple and his grave, and rather than permit such a
desecration Chufou did without the railroad. Perhaps it is fitting,
anyway, that those who come to honor the great sage should bump by
“Peking cart” the twenty _li_ between the station, a short two hours
south of Tai-shan, and the town; for did not Confucius himself suffer in
some such contraption while vainly hawking his wisdom to and fro through
the land we now know as China? At least, sinologues assure us that the
cart antedates Confucius, and certainly there has been no notable
improvement in it since its first appearance, for that would be
un-Chinese. Tucked away inside by a solicitous seeker after gratuities
who had furnished several pillows by the simple method of stripping a
few hotel beds, one expects a “Peking cart” to ride rather well—until
the first jolt disabuses him. There may be roads smooth enough to make
such traveling comfortable, but they do not grow in China. How many
times one side or the other of the vehicle deliberately reached over and
severely thumped me here, there, or elsewhere during that six miles
across a fertile sea-flat plain which should have been as easy-riding as
the labyrinthian road should have been direct I have no means of
computing. I do recall, however, wishing a thousand times that the mule
who tossed with me would be a little less deliberate and have it over
with, only to thank fortune a second later when something, anything
brought him to a momentary halt.
If Confucius could return to the old town he would certainly be
disappointed—or am I imbuing him with a modern point of view to which he
could not attain even by reincarnation? Judging by the effect several
hundred centuries of his philosophy have had on his countrymen, I doubt
on second thought whether he would lose any sleep over the insignificant
fact that before he could reach his own compound he would have to wade
at least calf-deep in oozy black mud for a mile or so, between mud
hovels at which our pigs would curl their tails in wrath, stared upon by
a redundancy of people to whom his native soil seems preferred as
covering to cotton or wool. At worst he would probably quickly forget
it, once inside his own private domain, especially if the thought of the
streets and of “Peking carts” were not embittered by the necessity of
returning to the station. The wall of Chufou has a circuit of four
miles, and a third of the area within is taken up by the temple of
Confucius and the residence of his lineal descendant. One steps directly
from an unspeakable street into the vast enclosure, broken up by wall
behind wall and building behind building in the style common to Chinese
construction. First comes a forest of tile roofs, each covering a single
turtle-supported stone shaft set up by this or that Chinese emperor.
There are several rows of these, with perhaps a dozen in a row, larger
and many times better built than the home of the average living Chinese.
Above them, as through all the subdivisions of the great enclosure, rise
old cypress-trees affording the sylvan pleasures of shade, the singing
of birds, and the murmur of swaying branches. In the principal courtyard
the stump of a pagoda-tree reputed to have been planted by the sage
himself is preserved under a little glass-sided temple, a miniature of
those in the outer yard. This is popularly believed to take on new life
through another sprout as often as one dies, thus bridging all the
centuries between the planter and present-day China, and certainly a
large old tree of the same variety now leans forth from what seems to be
the same root. Beyond is an open temple of kiosk shape where Confucius
sat under a plum-tree and taught—even in winter no doubt, for he was
probably as impervious to cold and discomfort as are the Chinese of
to-day in their cotton-padded garments.
The great main temple about which all else centers has often been
described in detail, so that all who read of such things should know
that it is a hundred and thirty-five by eighty-four feet in area and
seventy-eight high, with a portico upheld by nine far-famed stone
pillars intricately carved with dragons. What seems to be less widely
known is the impressive simplicity of that great structure, especially
of the interior, dimly yet amply lighted through paper windows, and as
strikingly free from the cluttering of painted idols which crowd most
Chinese temples as is the whole enclosure from beggars and sycophant
priests. A seated statue of the sage, ten feet high, occupies an alcove
in the center of the room, facing the great doors. He wears the ancient
scholar costume, culminating in a head-dress from which our mortarboard
cap might have been derived, being a flat thing some two feet long, with
ropes strung with beads, hanging well down over his face, which greatly
resemble the warnings that our railroads hang on either side of low
bridges as a caution to their brakemen to duck their heads. Above the
alcove a slab of wood bearing four characters boldly announces Confucius
the “Master Exemplar of All Ages”; before it stands the spirit tablet,
the table on which sacrificial food is offered, and a great iron urn
filled with the ashes of countless joss-sticks. On the right and left
are the images of the “twelve disciples” of Confucius, a number which
seems to have been purposely reached, by including the “boob” among his
pupils and the commentator on his Classics who lived during the Sung
dynasty—something like adorning the tombstone of Shakspere with the name
of some professor who had edited a school edition of his works. Yet
spaciousness on either hand, and upward to the old painted beams
supporting the tile roof, is the impression likely to stay longest with
the visitor from the West.
The original temple was built on this spot in 478 B.C., and to realize
how slightly Chinese worship of the illustrious dead has changed during
all the centuries since, one has only to drop into the former home of Li
Hung-chang in Tientsin and note how similar in all its details is the
temple in which his spirit tablet is enthroned. With each renovation
there came an increase in size, until the shrine of Confucius became the
vast cypress-shaded enclosure it is to-day. Many priests are attached to
it, but they spend their time in learning the elaborate ritual and
intricate forms of ceremony used during the spring and autumn festivals,
so that regular and frequent worship, as we who live in Christian lands
understand it, is scarcely practised. At stated periods the lineal
descendant of Confucius comes to burn incense and offer food before the
statue, as every Chinese son is expected to do before the graves of his
ancestors. Pilgrims, too, come in great numbers, especially at certain
seasons; but there is nothing similar to the daily mass or the weekly
service of our churches.
Behind this main temple—which means on the cold north side of it, since
every properly constructed Chinese temple faces south—is a smaller, much
more severely simple hall containing the spirit tablet of Mrs.
Confucius, though just which one is not specified. A spirit tablet, by
the way, is a varnished or painted piece of wood a foot or two high,
narrow and thin, bearing in three carved and usually gilded characters
the posthumous name under which the deceased is honored, and set upright
in the place sacred to him. At one side are two other temples, of the
parents of Confucius, identically arranged. That is, the father is
represented by a statue, in scholar’s costume, and the mother by a mere
tablet, in a building following as meekly after that of her lord and
master as does the Chinese wife in the flesh to this day. Why not
statues of the wife and mother also, I asked the first man of learning
willing to strain his understanding to catch my mispronounced meaning,
though almost certain what the answer would be. It would be improper, he
explained, politely, as to one with the ignorance of a new-born child,
indecent, to speak plainly, to have a female statue, particularly in a
sacred place. Given the ramshackle, filthy condition of a very large
number of Chinese temples, the care with which all these were kept up
was striking. But even these were not fleckless, especially those of the
wife and the mother, where everything was covered with dust and the bare
resounding chambers had a lonely air, as if very few ever took the
trouble to come and burn incense to mere females.
I might, with a little effort or foresight, have come to Chufou properly
introduced to meet the present head of the Kung family, which is the one
we know by the name Confucius. But he is a mere boy—the prince who long
held that position having recently died—and was certain to be in no
manner different from a million other Chinese youths of the well-to-do
class. Besides, though he passes as the seventy-fourth descendant in
direct male line from the sage, he is in plain fact nothing of the sort.
For the Confucius family, like many others in China, illustrious or
commonplace, has now and then been forced to adopt a son to keep the
line unbroken; even if a generation is not entirely sterile mere
daughters are wasted effort in preserving a Chinese lineage. T’ai Tsung,
nearly fifteen centuries after the death of the sage, bestowed
posthumous honors upon the descendants of Confucius for the past
forty-four generations, and exempted those to come from taxation, a
privilege they still enjoy.
It is some two miles from the town itself to the grave of Confucius, by
a worn-out avenue of ancient and bedraggled cypresses. “Those with
letters of introduction, or persons of distinction,” explains the
nearest approach to a guide-book of this region that is to be had, “are
the only ones admitted; but others may be by tipping the guardian.” As
if any one could possibly have gotten this far afield in China without
knowing as much! The custodian was an unsoaped, one-eyed coolie who lay
in wait just inside the first ornamental gateway, before which a pair of
stone tigers, two _lin_ (sacred animals unknown to natural history), and
stone statues of two gigantic gentlemen known as Weng and Chung, stood
on guard. A tablet over this, or one of the other several entrances we
passed on the half-mile walk that remained to the grave itself,
announced it the “Tomb of the All-Accomplished and Most Saintly Prince
Wen Hsüan,” a posthumous title by which the sage would scarcely
recognize himself. There were fields to be crossed, sometimes along ways
lined by trees, a landscape covered far and wide with ordinary graves, a
small stream, finally a locked and bolted gateway through a temple-like
building, before our walk ended. But when it did it was at a last
resting-place that even the Western world would have approved, perhaps
have envied. Venerable old trees whispering with last year’s dead leaves
rose above the secluded spot, yet not so thickly as to cut off the arch
of the blue heavens or to more than filter the brilliant sunshine. Birds
flitted here and there. It was such a spot as could scarcely be found in
any Occidental cemetery, for not even the formality of granite
tombstones or graveled walks between the graves was there to mar the
sylvan charm. Stones there were, a single plain slab before each of the
three mounds, but with only three characters in the old rounded script
on each of them, and the softening hand of time, perhaps of centuries,
to bring them into harmony with the scene, they seemed as naturally in
place as did the old trees stretching their arms above them.
Cone-shaped, as is the custom in China, but many times larger than the
graves strewn by millions throughout the land, the mounds were simple
hillocks, covered now with winter-brown grass. The slightly larger one,
the characters on its stone in gold instead of red, was of the sage
himself; that on the east covered the remains of his only son, while
before the main mound rose a third that caused dispute among the several
hangers-on who had accompanied me, so that I have no certain means of
knowing whether it is that of the sage’s brother, his father, or his
grandson.
Kung Fu-tze, as he is known in his native land, was born some twelve
miles eastward from Chufou, in the village of Ni-San, now under the rule
of bandits, and has been dead only a little more than twenty-four
hundred years. In those days the small states that eventually coagulated
into what we know as China were separate principalities, of which modern
Shantung alone contained four, Confucius being a native of the one
called Lu. He was already teaching at twenty-two, and studied much
history. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that there was not much of
anything more exciting to do for a young man wading the streets of
Chufou twenty-five centuries ago; hence undue credit should not be given
this particular youth for frequenting libraries rather than pool-rooms.
A few decades of his life seem to have passed without anything
particularly worth recording; but what are a few decades in China?
Whatever else he passed this time at, there is no question that the
studious young man was doing everything in his power, short of
overstepping the easy marital laws of Lu, to beget him a son, in which
he eventually succeeded. At length he emerges again from obscurity “at
the early age of fifty-five,” as a chief city magistrate. The elections
seem to have run his way, for we behold him soon afterward the _acting_
minister of state—that unsatisfactory prefix probably being due to the
fact, if one may judge by the politics of present-day China, that his
appointment was not confirmed by Parliament. As such he “put an end to
all crime,” evidently a simple little matter in those days, perhaps
because “squeeze” was not included. But the old prince of Lu died and
the new one abandoned himself to sensual pleasures, and at length
Confucius quit the job and went on the road. Once it broke out, he seems
to have had as serious a case of wanderlust as any ordinary mortal, for
he rambled for thirteen years, looking in vain—so at least he told the
story to sympathetic listeners—for a prince who would follow his advice
and set up a model administration. The briefest reflection will remind
the most thoughtless how times have changed in this matter of reformers
since then.
If it were not improper to be critical toward so venerable an old
gentleman, one might voice the suspicion that Confucius did not suffer
severely from lack of self-confidence, for he repeatedly stated that he
would produce a faultless administration and do away with all crime
within three years in the domain of any prince who would hire him. Alas,
if only he were back, be it only in the principality of Lu! No present
member of the human race, unless perhaps a “practical politician,” will
have the cynicism to suppose that the offer of this wandering Luluite
was not eagerly competed for from the eight points of the Chinese
compass. Yet the truth is far worse than that: he found no takers
whatever! What was left for him, then, but to come back home and write a
book? In fact, during those last three years of his life in Chufou he
wrote five books, bringing himself unquestionably into the class with
almost any of our modern novelists, though he succeeded in gathering
about him only three thousand disciples. Population was scarcer in China
twenty-five hundred years ago, of course, and publicity hardly a science
at all. However, whatever he lacked in numbers he made up in quality,
for no fewer than seventy-two of this handful became “proficient in the
six departments of learning.” From these he chose ten as “master
disciples,” granting them whatever passed for sheepskins in those days
“for attainment in Virtue, Literature, Eloquence, and—and Politics!”
It is chiefly through these chosen followers, who wrote his “Discourses
and Dialogues,” that Confucius became famous—and, like Christ, greatly
misconstrued—and laid the foundation of China’s ethical and political
life. But he could scarcely have had more than an inkling of the fame
that was to accrue to him in later centuries, for his honors have been
mainly posthumous, and it was not until twelve hundred and seventeen
years after his death that he was made the “Prince of Literary
Enlightenment!” Why, then, this hectic eagerness of modern man to attain
to fame even before the sod has closed over him? I wonder, too, if the
great sage would swell with pride at his achievements if he could come
back and wander again through the grave-strewn, soiled and hungry,
wickedly overpopulated, politically chaotic China of to-day. Surely he
could not plead innocence of helping to bring about her present woes,
for one of the most famous of his dictums, which have had so much
influence on Chinese life for many centuries, runs “He who is not in
office has no concerns with plans for the administration of its duties.”
Where can be found, in so few words, the explanation of what is mainly
wrong with the ancient empire which so erroneously now calls itself a
republic?
Personally I should have preferred to Chufou the birthplace of Mencius,
some thirty miles still farther southward, for there hills rise above
the plain, growing larger beyond. Tsowhsien is a more enterprising town,
too, with an electric light plant that had just been installed by an
American company, and less of the air of making an easy living out of
pilgrims than either Taianfu or the home of Confucius. Perhaps it has to
thank the lesser fame of Mencius for this more manly attitude, for
though he is reckoned second, or at worst third, among China’s sages,
not one person in ten, even in his native province of Shantung, seemed
to know where he lived and died. Pilgrims do come to Tsowhsien, for it
is on the direct line of places of pilgrimage through this holy land of
China; but Mencius has only dozens or scores of visitors where Confucius
has thousands.
The green roof of his chief temple rises among the trees within easy
sight from the railway. If the rest of the land somewhat neglects him,
his native town bears him constantly in mind, and any street urchin can
point out the monument marking the spot where he traded his shoes for a
book, or where other typical escapades are immortalized in stone slabs,
in spite of the fact that centuries of a swarming population have left
them sad, slum-like spots. Chinese celebrities have, of course, an
advantage over those of the Occident in being kept before the attention
of posterity. Public monuments and dwelling-house museums are all very
well, but how much more certain of constant attention Shakspere or
Washington would be had they direct male descendants, overlooking an
adoption now and then, whose main business in life it would be,
generation after generation, to worship at the shrine of these
illustrious ancestors and see to it that the things sacred to their
memories grow and prosper.
The present head of the Meng family—for the name of the chief successor
of Confucius was really Meng Tse—is a man in middle life, who dwells
inside a big high-walled compound across the street from that enclosing
the temples; and he evidently bears a striking resemblance to less
fame-pursued Chinese of his class, for information reached us that he
was just then busily engaged in feasting some friends. Except that it is
considerably smaller and less imposing, the temple grounds of Mencius
are quite similar to those of his more famous forerunner. Aged cypresses
and the marks of time give it dignity and a certain charm; the statue of
the sage wears the same bead-veiled scholar’s head-dress, and a costume
as exactly similar as if it had been copied by a Chinese tailor; behind
him is the meeker temple of his consort, containing only her spirit
tablet; at one side are the smaller but almost identical shrines of his
parents. If there is anything unique about the place it must be the
birds nesting in the tall trees in the unoccupied back of the compound,
beautifully graceful white birds that resemble both cranes and herons,
yet do not seem to be exactly either. The information that they are
found nowhere else in China was disputed by some of those who heard it.