“ITINERATING” IN SHANTUNG
The day was delightful, fleckless and summery as if it had been three
months later, and we should willingly have lingered longer among the
cypress-sighing shades of Mencius, had it not been beyond the power of
man to shake off the influx of childish soldiers, street urchins of all
ages, and every inquisitive male of Tsowhsien who caught sight of us in
time, that had burst through the opened gate and swirled about us like
molten scoriæ wherever we moved. My companion, I have neglected to
mention, was a robust American missionary with headquarters away down in
the southern corner of Shantung, who was kind enough to initiate me into
the devout sport of “itinerating.” From the home of Mencius we were to
strike out across country by wheelbarrow. To the man who, before the
present century began, had already grown to recognize that as his chief
means of locomotion, there was far less thrill in the thought of
wheelbarrowing than there would have been in the unusual experience of
taking a street-car; but to me it was something entirely new in the
field of travel. The passenger wheelbarrows of Shantung are of two
kinds,—small and large, city and country, short or long distance,
according to the individual choice of dividing line. In town they are
merely two cushioned, straight-backed benches on either side of the high
wooden wheel, on which six or eight crippled women may ride comfortably,
sitting sidewise. But for cross-country work a larger, sturdier breed is
used, with room for several hundredweight of baggage and a pair of the
owners thereof stretched out upon it, feet forward, like a sultan on his
divan. In town one man usually bears the whole burden; out in the
country there must be at least another tugging at a rope ahead—unless
one be wealthy enough to replace him with a donkey or an ox—besides the
fellow gasping between the back handles, with the woven strap between
them over his shoulders. For a very long trip, say twenty to thirty
miles in a day, it is considered more humane, or at least more certain,
to have a third man between the front shafts or handles which the
country variety possesses.
[Illustration:
Making two Chinese elders of a Shantung village over into
Presbyterians
]
[Illustration:
Messrs. Kung and Meng, two of the many descendants of Confucius in
Shantung flanking one of those of Mencius
]
[Illustration:
Some of the worst cases still out of bed in the American leper-home of
Tenghsien, Shantung, were still full of laughter
]
[Illustration:
Off on an “itinerating” trip with an American missionary in Shantung,
by a conveyance long in vogue there. Behind, one of the towers by
which messages were sent, by smoke or fire, to all corners of the
old Celestial Empire
]
In the good old days, only a few years ago, in fact, the usual wages for
a barrow-man in rural Shantung were five cents a day—and he saved money
on that. Now things have reached a pretty pass, for each man may expect
as much as thirty cents, though actually to demand that would almost
rank him among the profiteers, the radicals, the undesirable element of
the working-classes, and to pitch one’s demands too high in China is
likely apt to result in losing one’s job to the three hundred and
sixty-five other men who are eagerly waiting to snatch it. To be sure,
these wages are not so dreadful as they seem, for they are in “Mex,” and
nowadays the use of the wheelbarrow is included.
Perhaps it was because we generously paid this highest price that our
two men bowled along as rapidly as a “Peking cart,” and many times more
smoothly, so evenly in spite of the broken foot-path along the pretense
of a road we followed that one could read as easily as on any train. But
their best possible speed seems to be a characteristic of most of the
barrow-men of Shantung, as does a constant cheerfulness that is always
breaking out in broad smiles or laughter at the slightest provocation,
as if their joy at having another chance to exercise their magnificent
calling could not be contained. Unless the passenger is so inexperienced
and squeamish that the gasping of his human draft-animal just behind him
prickles his conscience, the wheelbarrow of the country variety comes
close to being China’s most comfortable form of land travel. It has
little of the cruel bumping and vicious jolting of a two-wheeled cart;
there is far less labor involved in reclining on an improvised divan
than in bestriding an animal; even a rubber-tired rickshaw is given to
sudden protests at the inequalities of the surface of China. Besides,
two rickshaws can rarely travel side by side, whereas the men stretched
out on either flank of a barrow-wheel may discuss religion, philosophy,
and the natural equality of man without once straining the ears or
losing a word. One might go further and praise the exclusiveness, the
sense of Cleopatran luxury, the freedom of route which makes the barrow
so much preferable to a train packed with undisciplined soldiers and as
many of the common, ticket-buying variety of unbathed Celestials as can
crowd into the space these putative defenders of the country graciously
leave unoccupied. The train makes more speed, perhaps; but what is so
out of keeping with the spirit of China as haste? The minor circumstance
that there must be mutual agreement between the two passengers on a
wheelbarrow as to when to ride and when to walk might conceivably be a
disadvantage, but there is no reason it should be if the one more given
to walking will bear in mind the plumpness of his companion and its
proper preservation. From the distance of the Western world the
impression may arise that the barrow-men must consider these fellows,
whom they wheel about like the latest pair of twins, rather weak and
sorry members of the human family. But this is merely another way of
saying that the Occidental can quickly lose his way in the labyrinth of
the Chinese mind. The reaction of the sweating coolies seemed to be,
not, “I wish this overfed pair of loafers would get off and walk a
while,” but a kind of pride at being associated with men of such wealth
and standing, mingled with the feeling, built up through many
generations, that naturally persons of finer clay should not bemean
themselves by tramping like a coolie, and topped off with the impression
that if the gentlemen call a halt and take to their feet it is because
the wheeling is not entirely satisfactory, which quickly brings in its
train the dread that one of those three hundred and sixty-five other men
eagerly waiting for such a job will get it next time.
We passed two of the “telegraph” towers of old-time China that
afternoon, square-cut stone and mud structures large as a two-story
house, from the now crumbling and grass-grown tops of which news and
orders were sent from end to end of the Middle Kingdom. Fires were the
signals by night and a dense black column of smoke from burning wolf’s
dung by day. Particularly were they used when more troops were needed at
the capital, and the story runs that one emperor who flashed forth the
call for a general mobilization just because his favorite concubine
wished to see the discomfiture on the faces of the exasperated soldiers
shortly afterward found his rôle in the hands of one of the eager
understudies. Cues are still no abnormality in China as a whole, but one
is struck by their almost universal retention in Shantung. The Manchus,
it is said, ordered cues to be worn not so much because they had worn
them for centuries themselves as in order to be able to tell a man from
a woman, if some of their rather effeminate new subjects chose to
disguise themselves, for both sexes had long hair up to that time. It
seems that when orders were given, after the overthrow of the Ch’ing
dynasty, that this badge of Manchu servitude be removed, the execution
depended largely upon the provincial and local authorities. In some
places men were given the choice between losing their pigtails or their
heads, and they had less difficulty in deciding upon the relative value
of these two adornments than might have been the case had the question
been left to an impartial committee. But the military ruler of Shantung
during the first years of the republic was a monarchist who had no use
for this new republican stuff, and who did what he could to return the
emperor to the throne; therefore the people under him dared in few cases
to remove what amounted to a badge of loyalty. Now that a decade has
passed and the making of hair-nets has become one of the principal
industries of the province, when even the boy “emperor” in Peking has
adopted the Western hair-cut, one would think that the masculine braid
would disappear. But personal beauty is a matter of taste, and the
Chinese mind is famous for the number of cogs in that section of it
devoted to the preserving of established customs—as China goes, the
wearing of a cue can scarcely be called an old one—and on the subject of
barbering the country seems at present to be about at a status quo.
It was the sixteenth day of the first moon, our March 3, the last big
holiday of the Chinese New Year’s season. Thus, though we had seen
endless streams of people, the men as nearly spotless as they would ever
be during this Year of the Pig, the women in their gayest garments,
which in most cases meant blue or red silk jackets above bright red
trousers tapering down to tiny white baby-shoes, ears and glossy oiled
hair adorned with their most precious trinkets, the children dolled up
like the principal actors in a Chinese drama—though, I say, we had seen
many thousand of these pouring into Tenghsien for one of the chief
celebrations of the year, there were no people whatever working in the
fields, which this far south were quite ready for the first spring
tilling. Besides, much of the land in this region is given over to
winter wheat, planted in October and now just beginning to tinge with
green the vast yellowish brown of the typical North China landscape.
When at length we had been wheeled, like a load of bricks, to the
gateway of Chung-Hsin-Tien, we paused and dismounted, for it is a gross
breach of Chinese etiquette to ride into or through a town where you
have friends—or to speak from a vehicle or the back of an animal to a
friend on foot. A remnant of this point of view, members of the A.E.F.
will recall, survives in American army regulations.
“Middle-Heart-Inn” was for centuries a place of great importance, being
the half-way stopping-place of all travel on the old Peking-to-Shanghai
route. Then the railroad came, a decade ago, passing it by without even
naming a station in its honor, and it sank to the large miserable
village within a long, rambling, broken mud wall which we found it.
Moreover, it had been struck by hail the autumn before and the crops
just outside its wall had suffered more severely than anywhere else in
the devastated area. One was in luck, I gathered, not to have been
caught out in that storm without an umbrella. The country people of all
that region solemnly assert that the hailstones were as large as
tea-pots, and American missionaries bravely run the risk of being
charged with perjury by asserting that they saw with their own eyes some
as big as grape-fruit. One of the stork-heron birds from the compound of
Mencius was struck dead, and several severe injuries to people were
reported.
My companion still had left a few hundred dollars from what had been
given him for distribution among famine sufferers, and our first act
after installing ourselves in the mud hut that served as a mission
station and partaking of the heavy repast which a few of the faithful
had insisted on providing—and on clashing chop-sticks with us over—was
to set out on a visiting tour among those pointed out by the chief local
Christians as in urgent need of assistance. I was struck with the
thoroughness with which my companion prepared for the coming
distribution. He refused to give any aid whatever to cases which he
could not personally inspect, and he had lived in China long enough to
know most of the tricks of the unworthy. Anywhere in the United States,
not even excluding the “poor white” and negro communities of the South,
the entire population of Chung-Hsin-Tien would have seemed at a glance
to need the assistance of charity. But in China one must be ragged and
dirty and possessionless and hungry-looking indeed to stand out visibly
from the millions always more or less in the same predicament. Hut after
hut we entered to find not a Mexican dollar’s worth of anything within
it. A bit of crumpled straw or a few rags of what had once been
cotton-padded garments served in most cases as bed, sometimes on a small
_k’ang_ that could be heated—had there been anything to heat it
with—more often on the earth floor itself. Then there might be from two
to half a dozen mud-ware jars and shallow baskets in which the family
habitually kept its possessions, and possibly one or two peasant’s
tools. That was all, in sight at least; and the people had had no
warning that a benefactor was coming. It seemed to be taken for granted
that my companion would consider every one a deceptive rascal until he
had personally proved himself to the contrary, and not only were there
no protests against our entering every hovel, but invitations to do so,
in spite of the breach in Chinese domestic customs involved.
We felt into every jar and basket, prodded into every corner and nest of
rags, to make sure that the family did not have more than the handful of
grain they admitted. In no case, I believe, was any deception
discovered, but my conscientious companion not only continued until
darkness fell that Saturday evening, but violated his religious scruples
by spending much of the Sabbath afternoon at the same task. Sometimes it
was an old man living alone, with literally nothing but a few handfuls
of chaff and the hulls of beans to feed upon. More often there was a
wife and several children to share such splendid provisions. Not a few
lived in _yin-tse_ instead of huts,—holes cut in the ground and roofed
over with sticks, straw, and mud, with a crude ladder or notched pole by
which we descended through a small opening to the dark interior. The
missionary was particularly scrupulous in entering all of these, for
they often serve as the rendezvous of gamblers, and he trusted to his
experienced eyes to make fairly sure that a cave was not this, but
actually a poor man’s dwelling. There was a similar hole in the ground,
though uncovered and with earth steps leading down to it, in the yard of
the local “mission,” for in the winter it is more comfortable to hold
school or gossip in such a place, out of reach of the wind, yet in the
sunshine, than in the dreary, unheated mud huts.
Sometimes only the woman and the children were at home, and the only
decent way to inquire of her about her husband, according to Chinese
etiquette, was to refer to him indirectly as her _wai-tou_ or _nan-ren_,
her “outside” or her “male person.” Perhaps he had gone to Manchuria,
with the millions of coolies who set out for there soon after the
Chinese New Year, their belongings in a soiled quilt roll. Compared with
densely populated Shantung, where ten villages within five square miles
is nothing unusual, the “Eastern Three Provinces” are sparsely peopled
and wages are correspondingly high. From Chefoo to Dairen the poorest
steamers cross in a day, and the railroads offer reduced rates to
migrating coolies—furnishing them open freight-cars for their journeys.
But there is more snow than work in Manchuria during the winter;
moreover, any Chinese with a proper respect for his ancestors will
return to his home among their graves at least for the beginning of the
new year, so that much time and some wages are lost in traveling to and
fro. Sometimes the “outside” was working in another part of the
province. There is, of course, no slavery in China; so long-civilized a
land would not tolerate such an institution. But many of the “gentry”
and landowners of Shantung, and of other provinces, no doubt, profit by
the excess of population by paying a man five “Mex” dollars a year and
his food for his labor, and making no provision whatever for his family.
But there was no real famine in Chung-Hsin-Tien, my companion concluded.
No one was actually starving—though how some of them kept from doing so
on their visible means of support was beyond me. Under-nourishment was
common; the only plentiful thing in town was children, especially boys,
perhaps because of the custom of even the poorest of keeping the girls
out of sight. For nature seems to take revenge on the Chinese for their
ardent desire for male offspring. How often the traveler who has the
audacity to pursue his questions far enough—for Chinese friends do not
greet one another with inquiries as to the health of their respective
families—will finally unearth the shamefaced answer, “All girls.” Some
had sold their land—a _mou_, or about the sixth of an acre, at fourteen
dollars “Mex” perhaps—to carry them over the winter, some their last
household goods that would bring a copper; one man who was so far above
the lower level as to have no hope of outside assistance answered my
joking query as to the price of the most likable of his small sons with
a quick, “Take him along!” But none had been reduced to the final
necessity of tearing down their miserable houses in order to sell the
few sticks of wood in them; hence there were deserving, but not urgent,
cases.
The native helper had filled a huge sheet of red paper with the names
and particulars of each family visited, to the dictation of my
companion, who divided them into first-, second-, and third-class cases.
The first were the most needy—the utterly possessionless, they would
have seemed to Americans at home—who would be given “full assistance,”
that is, a “Mex” dollar or two a month per person until the next harvest
began to come in. Second class were those who still had something left—a
few pounds of corn meal, a chair that might be sold, a job at a few
coppers a day—and they would be helped accordingly. To be inscribed
third was proof of comparative affluence; it meant that the family had a
goat or a pig, perhaps even a donkey; that one of their jars was still
half full of corn or millet or _kaoliang_, or that they had been caught
in the act of smoking tobacco or of having a little handful of the weed
in the house, prima facie evidence that they were really not suffering
from hunger. To these, small distributions would be made if there was
anything left over from the more needy cases. The two impressions, aside
from the definition of the word “poverty” in China, which this
canvassing left with me were, first, the unfailing cheerfulness, the
hair-trigger smile and ready laughter, of even the most miserably
destitute, and their tenacious clinging to custom in spite of
misfortunes. It seemed never to have suggested itself to the poorest
family in town that it might be well to limit the number of children it
brought into the world to share its perpetual nothing; and mothers who
did not have a pot or a whole garment to their names still somehow found
cloths with which to bind their daughters’ feet. From their point of
view of course this last effort was genuine parental sacrifice; for to
leave the girl with whole feet would mean almost certain starvation
without a husband instead of only partial starvation with one.
Itinerating missionaries in China can scarcely avoid living up to the
biblical injunction to “suffer little children to come unto” them. For
their first appearance at the edge of town is the signal for a flocking
from all directions, not merely of all the boys and as many of the girls
as are not restrained, but of a generous collection of men of all ages,
and even some of the boldest women. Chinese and Western courtesy are
diametrically opposed in some of their characteristics, and perhaps
there is no wider gulf between them than the conception of proper
behavior toward strangers. We consider it rude to stare; the Chinese
consider it almost an insult not to stare. Like the young ladies of
Spanish America, who would take it as much more than a slight on their
beauty not to be ogled so brazenly that it becomes almost indecency by
the young men lined up on either side of their promenade, so the Chinese
high official or man of wealth would be seriously hurt by a failure of
the populace to flock about him wherever he appears in public. Simple
villagers cannot of course be expected to know that Westerners do not
consider this attention so essential, and to that is added the most
inquisitive temperament among the races of mankind, a curiosity which,
though it is no exaggeration to dub it monkey-like, is probably proof of
a higher grade of intelligence than that of more stolid and indifferent
peoples. But it is a form of intelligence with which most travelers from
the West, I believe, would very willingly dispense, for to be stared at
unbrokenly hour after hour by a motionless throng becomes at times the
most exasperating of experiences.
It is not of course to the advantage of a missionary to drive off the
crowds that gather about him, for he has come to China mainly for the
purpose of addressing crowds, and every tendency toward exclusiveness is
so much set-back in his chosen work. Naturally, too, it is not fitting
in the guest of an itinerating missionary to throw cups of tea or mud
bricks in the faces of the compact mob through which may be scattered
some of his host’s converts, however strong the temptation may become.
During all our stay in Chung-Hsin-Tien, therefore, we were like kings at
a levée—if we are to believe that kings were ever so thickly attended
during the exchanging of their nighties for their breeches. There was a
gate to the mission yard, and a padlock that fitted it; but the picking
of that even from the outside seemed to be the easiest thing the town
did. Besides, the yard was invaded so closely on our heels that nothing
would have been gained by locking the gate. The door of the mud house
that usually served as church, as well as for the sleeping-room of the
local pastor and ourselves, was no barrier to the advance. Long before
the preliminary tea was poured for us there was a compact wall of
humanity drawn so tightly about us that we could barely move our elbows,
and the sea of fixedly staring faces stretched away to infinity out
through the yard. Now and then an undercurrent of discontent at
inequality of proximity surged through the multitude, to break against
our ribs or toss smaller urchins in between our legs and over our knees.
When at length it came time to open our cots and sleeping-bags, there
was still a large audience to such disrobing as we cared to do under
such conditions, and it was an hour or two afterward before the most
privileged characters had been convinced that they, too, should retire.
Nor were we by any means out of bed next morning when there appeared the
vanguard of the throng that was to wall us in all that day. It was hard
somehow to understand just why a town which often saw foreigners still
came to stand by the hour watching with the fixed eyes of a statue our
every slightest movement, be it only the tying of a shoe-lace or the
buttoning of a coat.
A large number of those about us bore famous names. Many a Chinese
village is made up almost exclusively of persons having the same surname
and the same ancestors, and Chung-Hsin-Tien, being no great distance
from the birthplace of either, contains many descendants of both
Confucius and Mencius. There was Meng the shopkeeper and Kung the cook,
both Christians, right within the mission compound, and it was easy to
find in any small crowd others bearing those illustrious names. Once I
came upon a Mencius squatting in the dirt at the corner nearest the
gate, shoveling away with worn chop-sticks a cracked bowlful of some
uninviting food, and so ignorant that he fled in dismay when I suggested
a photograph, refusing to have his soul thus taken from him. A little
farther up the street a Confucius sold peanuts in little heaps at a
copper each. Missionaries in this region say that those bearing the two
famous names are so numerous that the difficulty of making converts is
increased, because they are so proud of their ancestry that they will
seldom risk the stigma attached to changing to a “foreign” faith. Yet
there was a Confucius from this very town who was now a Presbyterian
preacher, and the two names appear rather frequently on the church
registers of southern Shantung.
Of late years at least it is not unduly easy to become an accepted
Christian there. My companion spent half that Sunday morning in putting
a dozen candidates through a long catechism, and permitted only two of
them to join the church at once, baptizing them—from a tea-cup—at the
morning service. It was fully as easy, too, to get out of the church as
to get into it; one of the hardest and most important tasks of the
missionaries is to see that backsliders are dropped from membership.
Almost before we had entered the hole in the mud wall that passed for a
city gate a rather addle-pated old man had appeared, hugging his
well-worn Bible under his arm; and as long as we remained he hovered
close about us, grinning at us upon the slightest provocation, as if to
say, “We are brethren, far above this common herd.” He was about the
first convert in the region—and one of the chief thorns in the flesh of
the itinerator. For the latter had been forced to drop him from the
church rolls years before because he had taken a concubine, and there
was still no prospect of his being granted forgiveness, even though he
had advanced the ingenious argument that he had been compelled to the
act by his mother, lest the family graveyards be left without
attendants. Yet he continued his church-going as religiously as if he
were one of the principal deacons. Perhaps it was just retribution that
he still had no son, in spite of his lapse from the tight missionary
way. I confess that I did not quite follow the reasoning which made it
quite all right to admit the concubine herself to church membership, but
I have always been dense on theological niceties.
The day was delightful, and services were held out in the yard. Perhaps
twoscore men and half as many women, not to mention a veritable flock of
children, crowded together on the narrow little benches taken from the
mud-hut church, or stood behind them. I could not but admire the
endurance of the missionary, and silently congratulate him on the
sturdiness inherited from his “Pennsylvania Dutch” ancestors. For it can
scarcely be a mere mental relaxation to talk incessantly, earnestly, and
energetically for an hour in a tongue as foreign as the southern
Shantung dialect, while Chinese urchins by the dozen, from
seatless-trousered infancy to devilish early youth, seemed to be doing
their utmost to make life about them unbearable; and when even the
adults frequently displayed habits that are not usual in our own church
gatherings. Or, if this is not enough to try any man’s strength and
patience, there was the frequent torture of listening to the horrible
imitation of our hymns perpetrated, with missionary connivance, by the
congregation. Evidently no Chinese can “hold” a tune, but he can do
almost anything else to it which a vivid imagination can picture. Why
their own “music” cannot be adapted to religious purposes to better
advantage is one of those innumerable questions which flock about the
traveler in China like mosquitos in a swamp.
Evening services of almost as strenuous a nature, and many personal
conferences on religious or financial matters, plumply filled out the
day, and early next morning, when the last clinging convert had been
shaken off without the suggestion of violence that would have planted a
little nucleus of discontent in the community, we were away again by
wheelbarrow. I am in no position to testify as to how strictly the few
Christians of Chung-Hsin-Tien lived up to their faith in every-day life,
but they, and no small number of their as unwashed and ragged
fellow-townsmen, missed mighty little of the vaudeville performance
which the appearance of a foreigner or two in almost any Chinese town
seems to be considered by the inhabitants. This time we had three
barrow-men, one of them a first-class candidate for famine relief funds,
whose insistent smile at this unexpected windfall of a job was less
surprising than the mulish endurance he somehow got out of a chaff and
bean-hull diet. Less brute strength is required, however, in the
handling of a Chinese wheelbarrow than appearances suggest. During the
afternoon I changed places for a bit with the coolie between the front
handles, and while I would not care to adopt barrowing as a profession
while some less confining source of livelihood remains to me, the thing
ran, on the level at least, more like a perambulator than the most
optimistic could have imagined. The Chinese are adepts in the art of
balancing, and the wheelbarrow, like the rickshaw and the “Peking cart,”
is so adjusted as to call for less exertion than the sight of it
suggests. Ups and downs, sand or soft earth, sheer edges of “road,” and
the passing of many similar vehicles where there is no room to pass,
however, make an all-day journey no mere excursion even to a team of
three barrow-men.
Women and children were scratching about here and there in the fields;
the men were bringing manure in two big baskets fixed on a barrow, such
as carry the night-soil of Peking out through the city gates, and were
piling it in little mounds differing from the myriad graves only in
size. The New Year season was visibly over, and the incessant
working-days had come again. Somehow the name “Shantung” had always
called up the picture of a half-wild region, in spite of the protests of
reason; I found it instead very thoroughly tamed, as befits one of the
most populous regions on the globe—tamed at least in the agricultural
sense. When it came to such afflictions as bandits, officials, and the
Yellow River there is still much taming to be done in the province of
Confucius.
We passed almost incessantly through villages. High on the tops of the
smooth, bare hills that grew up as we advanced were rings of what seemed
to be stone, refuges built at the time of the Taiping Rebellion, which
came to a standstill in this very region. They were only walls, with
perhaps still a well inside, though the suspicion was growing that
bandits were finding a new use for them. Once we passed close on the
left an isolated stony peak that is as sacred as Tai-Shan, though much
less famous. Thousands of country people climb it, especially in the New
Year season, either as their only penance excursion, or as a part of
their pilgrimage through all the holy land of China. It is a rough and
uninviting climb, but nowhere is filial devotion more generously
rewarded, if we are to believe the faithful. Therefore one may on almost
any day see the son of an ailing father, dressed only in his Chinese
trousers, holding his hands with palms together in front of him, a stick
of burning incense between them, marching to the top of the mountain
without once taking his eyes off the rising thread of smoke before him.
A crowd follows close behind, and one of these carries the clothing of
the devotee, whose father is certain to recover under this
treatment—unless one of several hundred little incidents occur to make
the penance useless.
That night, in the mission-owned mud hut of another unlaundered town, my
companion preached a long sermon full of energy to a congregation of
five, one of whom was part-witted, two often asleep, and another merely
one of our barrow-men. Only the village “doctor,” whose training
consisted of a year as coolie in a mission hospital, kept his attention
strictly on the business in hand, as should be expected of the chief,
even though somewhat fragile, pillar of Christendom in the region. There
had been an audience of goodly size for such a locality in the early
part of the evening. Not only was the hut crowded with the score it
would hold, but at least twice as many more blocked the open door or
flattened their noses against the single dirty window. But a few
rifle-shots had suddenly sounded somewhere off toward the hills. Bandits
had raided, looted, and kidnapped in this town several times during the
year just over; and though there was no sudden exodus—for the Chinese
must “save face” under all circumstances—the audience melted steadily
away until only the five remained. The itinerating missionary, however,
must never let outside influences affect even the tone of the message he
is ever seeking to deliver. Whatever his benefits to the field he is
cultivating—and a wide experience is needed to acquire any certain
knowledge on this subject—he at least still has some of the hardships of
early missionary days, which his thousands of well housed colleagues,
even in China, only know by hearsay.
Tenghsien seemed to be far enough south to be tinged with the problems
and customs of southern China. Its dialect was audibly at variance with
that of Peking, even to an ear of slight Chinese training. On the wall
of the vault-like passage through the southern city gate hung several
time-blackened wooden crates containing the shoes of former magistrates.
It is one of the politenesses of the region to stop a departing
magistrate at the gate and remove his footwear, as a way of saying, “We
hate so badly to see you leave that we will do everything within our
power to prevent your going.” How careful such an official may be to
make sure that the ceremony is not omitted in his case, even though he
has to detail the shoe-pilferers, or whether or not he slips on the
oldest footwear in his possession that morning, are of course
unauthorized peeps behind the scenery such as tend to take all the
poetry out of life. We dropped in at the local pawnshop, with which my
host was on good terms rather out of policy than necessity, but it was
nothing now but a huge compound of empty buildings, crowded together in
almost labyrinthian turmoil. The pawnshop is one of the most important
institutions in any Chinese community, with many curious little
idiosyncrasies unknown to our own displayers of the golden balls, but it
can scarcely be expected to continue to function where, between grasping
officials and bandits frequently sweeping in from the hills, neither the
ticketed articles nor the cash on hand can be kept from disappearing.
The throwing out of sick babies seemed to be a fixed habit in Tenghsien,
though one seldom hears of such cases farther north. Millions of Chinese
parents believe that if a child dies before the age of six or seven it
is because it was really no child at all, but only an evil spirit
masquerading as one; and unless it is gotten rid of in time, woe betide
the other children of the family, already born or to come. It is
preferable apparently that it be eaten by dogs, but above all it must
not die in the house. The missionaries of Tenghsien have grown to take
this custom as a matter of course. If in their movements about town they
came upon a discarded baby still alive, they did what they could to
relieve its sufferings, but they did not “register” surprise. The
Chinese merely passed by on the farther side of the street. To touch an
abandoned child would be to invite the evil spirit to your own house,
unless it proved, by getting well, to be merely a sick child, and no
Chinese is brave enough to run any such risk as that. Not long before my
arrival, the mission “Bible woman” had found a girl of two thrown out on
a pile of filth, and even she had dared do nothing more than sit and fan
the flies off it, until it died. The missionaries, however, have come to
be looked upon as immune from these evil spirits. More than one
garbage-heap baby graces the mission kindergarten, and a man of some
standing now in the town carries on his face the teeth-marks of the dog
to which he was abandoned. It is not all mere superstition either, the
missionaries assert, but dread of responsibility, hatred of initiative,
often mere selfishness, masquerading as such. Many Chinese may actually
fear that the river spirit will get them if they save a drowning person,
but many others are merely afraid of wetting their clothes.
The Western and the Chinese mind may be similar in construction, but
they certainly do not work alike. Let the missionaries take a girl for a
year’s training, for instance, or for the temporary relief of her
parents, and they are sure to be informed when the period is over that
it is their duty to care for her the rest of her life. As it is contrary
to the Chinese idea of politeness to mind one’s own business, so their
gratitude seems to be of a different brand from ours. Something akin to
that feeling is no doubt now and then felt, in otherwise unoccupied
moments, for the men and women from overseas who spend their lives
trying to instil into Chinese youth such wisdom and right living as they
themselves possess; yet rarely does the passing visitor get a hint of
anything more than superficial politeness toward the benefactors, and
the assumption that they are somehow making a fine thing, financially or
materially, out of their labors—otherwise why would they continue them?
Sometimes Tenghsien buries its children, like those of its paupers who
do not belong to the beggars’ gild, in such shallow, careless graves
that the dogs habitually dig them up again. These surly brutes sat
licking their chops here and there on the outskirts of town, among
discolored rags of what had once been cotton-padded clothing scattered
about little mussed-up holes in the ground. Lepers were treated with a
similar policy of abandonment, or “let the foreigners do something about
it if they must.” The same American woman who had the highest record for
rescuing babies from the garbage-heap had built the only leper-home in
Shantung, if not in northwest China, a mile or two outside Tenghsien. As
far as the Chinese are concerned lepers run about the country as freely
as any one else. They may not be exactly popular—for the people know the
horrors of the disease and easily recognize its symptoms—but they can
scarcely be avoided. The thirty or more men and boys, who had been
gathered together in a two-story brick building many times more splendid
than the homes any of them had known before, had that same cheerful,
seldom complaining, easily smiling demeanor of the Chinese coolie under
any misfortune. Only a few were bedridden, for the greater resistance to
disease for which the Chinese are famous seems to spare them some of the
more horrible ravages of leprosy. But on one point they were losing
their cheery patience. For months they had submitted weekly to
injections of chaulmugra oil without any visible signs of improvement.
The treatment is painful; they all admitted it, and one fat-faced boy of
fourteen was pointed out as “tearing the walls apart with his screams”
when it was administered to him. But his quick retort to the charge
seemed to be the consensus of opinion: “Oh, please let us live without
the needle and go to heaven in peace when our time comes!” Such efforts
were being made to build a similar refuge for women—who of course always
come second in China—that even the men sufferers were asked to
contribute the few coppers they could live without—and when it is
finally built, through missionary effort, it will pay taxes to the local
authorities, like many other mission institutions.
Under more auspicious circumstances I should have struck off into that
labyrinth of mountains occupying the southeastern part of Shantung. But
it might have meant a very much longer stay than I cared to make. For
years now the mountainous parts of the province have been overrun more
or less continuously by what we call bandits. The Chinese call them
“_hung-hu-tze_” (“red beards,” a term evidently originating in
Manchuria, where bearded men from the north seem to have been the first
raiders, and to have suggested a clever disguise for native rascals) or
“_tu-fei_” (which means something like “local badness coming out of the
ground”). But under any name they are a thorn in the side of their
fellow-men. In Peking, where the so-called Central Government still
decorates foreign passports with separate visés for each province, five
at a time, even though the provincial authorities rarely look at them,
conditions were admitted with a frankness which other Governments might
copy to advantage. I had been given permission to travel freely in
Shantung—“_except_ in the areas of Tungchowfu, Linchengchow, Tsaochowfu,
Yenchowfu, and the regions controlled by the Kiao Taoyin.” In other
words, one could go anywhere, so long as one kept within sprinting
distance of the two railway lines. As a matter of fact, much of the
information of the Central Government was out of date; places it
excepted were now peaceful, and others it did not mention were infested
with brigands. Yenchowfu, for instance, showed no more ominous signs
when I passed through it than any other sleepy old walled town; and the
world at large knows how safe the railways themselves were just about
this season. Had there been any good reason to run the risk, the chances
are that I could have gone anywhere in Shantung without anything serious
happening to me; on the other hand, I might have been carried off before
I got well into the foot-hills.
The mountainous sections in which the brigands were operating most
freely are merely poorer, less populous parts of the crowded province,
where there is little to be seen except smaller editions of what may be
found within easier reach elsewhere. Now and then they had entered
Tenghsien, the station of my “itinerating” companion; only recently they
had posted a warning on the mission gate in Yihsien, reached by a
branch-line a little farther south, that unless some large sum of cash
was forthcoming within a hundred days the place would be burned. The
women and children had been sent to safer stations, and outposts of
agricultural and evangelistic work had been temporarily abandoned. It
was near Lincheng, the very junction of the Yihsien line, and the next
large town south of Tenghsien, that a score of foreign passengers were
to be taken from the most important express in China a few weeks later
and carried off into these same hills. The brigands, in fact, hard
pressed for a way out of their difficulties, debated the wisdom of
taking the missionaries of Tenghsien and neighboring stations as the
lever they needed against the authorities. It is more in keeping with
justice that they finally decided to hold up the express instead and be
sure of hostages with wealth and influence enough to assure the world’s
taking notice of them, for the missionaries have lived for years in
constant danger of such a raid, while most of the passengers were well
fed individuals who had left home mainly in quest of experience.
When Tenghsien came to be altogether too closely pressed by bandits, the
authorities fell back upon a scheme to drive them away without
bloodshed. The Boxers, it will be recalled, had their origin in southern
Shantung, and the method by which they fancied they made themselves
immune to injury by their foes is still widely believed there. The
authorities therefore, or private individuals with the initiative
needed, called in some countrymen with stout faith in the efficacy of
this form of protection and paid magicians two dollars each to make them
“immune.” This is accomplished by various forms of hocus-pocus, in which
the swallowing of bits of paper with certain characters written on them,
and the wearing of similar charms, are the chief features. Not only did
the countrymen believe that this made them proof against bullets,
swords, and bayonets, but, what made the investment really useful, the
brigands also believe it. When care had been taken to have word of the
ceremonies reach the bandit camps, the “immune” persons were placed in
front of the government troops, who moved slowly but steadily out into
the hills. The outlaws knew the futility of wasting precious ammunition
on men whom it would be impossible to injure; hence they gracefully
retreated as far from town as the authorities chose to drive them. There
was, of course, the slight danger that some skeptic among the bandits
would doubt the efficacy of the charm. But the Chinese are much more
given to swallowing their popular beliefs whole than to investigating
their worth, and in the case of an unforeseen accident the evidence
would be plain, not that the hocus-pocus is ineffectual, but that it was
badly performed.
Not far below Tenghsien the railway crosses the old bed of the Yellow
River, that greatest of Chinese vagrants. As far back as history is
recorded this has changed its mind every few centuries and decided to go
somewhere else. It is not a believer in the old adage that as you make
your bed so you should lie in it, for the Hoang Ho has the custom, not
usual even among rivers, of piling up its course until it flows some
twenty feet above the surrounding country, puny mankind meanwhile
striving feverishly to confine it by dikes which cannot in the end keep
pace with the growth of silt between them. No Chinese can be expected to
be comfortable on so elevated a bed, much less a river, and when things
become altogether too unbearable the Hoang Ho suddenly abandons its
course and makes a new one overnight. The last great change of this kind
was in the middle of the past century, when, swinging on a pivot near
Kaifeng, one of China’s many old-time capitals, it struck northeastward
across Shantung to the gulf of Chihli, though it had formerly emptied
into the Yellow Sea hundreds of miles farther south, barely touching
Shantung at all. Shantung did not want it, but it had no choice in the
matter. The provinces which had been so suddenly relieved of so violent
an enemy, and at the same time presented with a large strip of land
where land is so badly needed, certainly were not going to help, nor
even permit, if it could be avoided, restoration to the old bed.
Besides, there are both historical and visible evidences that Shantung
had harbored the unwelcome visitor more than once before, that the two
mountainous parts of the province were probably once islands, and that
the Yellow River, washing back and forth between them, has built up the
level and more fertile parts of the country. Similar things happened in
many parts of the world, but in most cases the job was finished before
man appeared, whereas in China it is still going on. The result is that
man finds himself very much in the way during the process.
[Illustration:
On the way home I changed places with one of our three wheelbarrow
coolies, and found that the contrivance did not run so hard as I
might otherwise have believed
]
[Illustration:
The men who use the roads of China make no protest at their being dug
up every spring and turned into fields
]
[Illustration:
Sons are a great asset to the wheelbarrowing coolies of Shantung
]
Chinese history is full of accounts of the struggle to keep the Hoang Ho
within limits. Some emperors are famous chiefly for their struggles
against it. For centuries the “squeeze” connected with the building of
dikes, or even their maintenance, has been one of the richest
perquisites of certain official positions. Perhaps this is why the
latest task of wrestling with the Yellow River has been given to an
American firm established in China. Two years ago the river broke
through its dikes again, though this time within a hundred miles of its
mouth, and inundated what to crowded Shantung is an immense area,
destroying many villages and withdrawing the land about them from
cultivation. Several walled cities, too, were in great peril,
particularly Litsing, situated in a bend of the river, and _below_ it;
for here as in its former course to the south the stream has gradually
silted itself higher and higher, until one crossing it anywhere along
its lower reaches must climb thirty or forty feet to the top of the dike
from the land side, to descend only ten or twelve to the river. In flood
season the waters washed at the walls of Litsing, which in time they
must have undermined and broken, drowning out the city. Famine relief
funds improved the lot of those who had been driven from their homes,
some of whom built new shelters on the broad tops of the dikes, while
others scattered, particularly to Manchuria. The dead and the living
between them so crowd the land in Shantung that if one patch is taken
away there is no other room for those who live upon it. Bids were asked
for the task of retaming the river, to be paid for jointly from relief
funds and by the province; the American firm offered to do the work at
just one fourth the price asked by Chinese contractors, and having
secured itself against the common misfortune of those working for
Chinese Governments by insisting on monthly prepayments, tackled a job
that was old when Confucius was a boy.
Clumsy native boats, bringing down rock for the work, as well as coolies
and supplies, will carry one from Tzinan to the scene of operations in a
day or two; but the more hasty American way is by automobile from
Choutsun, two hours east of the capital on the Shantung railway. What is
known in China as a motor-road, that is, a raised causeway made entirely
of soft yellowish earth, which cuts up into ever deeper ruts, growing
impassable with much rain, its steep sides gradually crumbling away
until the barely two-car width is reduced to the point when passing is
impossible for much of the distance, runs northward to the river, where
cars take to the top of the dike. The workmen, strange as it may seem,
are not so numerous as the company would like, and recruiting has to be
carried on at considerable distances. The proverbial Chinese distrust of
the “outside barbarian” has something to do with this; perhaps fear of
bringing down upon their heads the wrath of the river gods for
interfering with him may deter others; naturally in this season of the
lunar New Year many had gone back to their ancestral graves. To put into
American dollars and cents the wages paid would be to give a false
impression of penuriousness on the part of the company; suffice it to
say, therefore, that they are much higher than the average of wages in
Shantung, that millet and rice and other essentials are furnished at
cost to the employees, thereby saving them from heartless exploitation
by their fellow-countrymen of the merchant class, and that reeds and
other materials are supplied for covering their lodging-places. These
are neither more nor less than holes dug in the earth; but mud
dwellings, whether above or below the ground, have been the lot of
Chinese coolies for many centuries, at least since the forests were
turned into fuel and coffins, and these have the advantage that they can
be moved in a few hours with a shovel as the work advances.
Here several thousand coolies already, with two or three times as many
to come, it is expected, are engaged in straightening out a great crook
in the river. The methods are of course those of the Orient, where many
men with shovels and baskets, swarming like trains of leaf-cutting ants
over the scene of activities, are more economical than snorting
steam-shovels and endless strings of rattling freight-cars. In the early
spring, when mountains of broken ice from up the river joined that which
had covered the flooded region during the short winter, the sight was
one worth coming many _li_ to see. But that was gone now, even in the
middle of March, and the task of taking a kink out of “China’s Sorrow”
is on the high road to completion. The plan is to teach the river the
way it should go, and then let it scour out its own channel. Western
initiative and ingenuity, however, probably can no more cure permanently
the vagrancy of the Hoang Ho than did the ancient emperors, and
corrective measures will have to be applied to the incorrigible vagabond
among rivers at least for centuries to come.