EASTWARD TO TSINGTAO
A splendid task for some scholar of unlimited patience and a
mathematical turn of mind would be to count the graves in China and
compute how many sadly needed acres they withdraw from cultivation. He
might offer a thesis on the subject, in exchange for the right to wear
the letters “Ph.D.” Unfortunately he could not complete the task in a
mere lifetime, or just a century or two, but the undertaking might be
handed down, Chinese fashion, from father to son, until data were
forthcoming that might in time make an impression even on the Celestial
mind. This worshiping of ancestors is all very well, if only the living
could also be given a fair deal. The constant sight of undernourished
multitudes grubbing out a scant escape from starvation in the
interstices between the sacred mounds of earth littering almost every
Chinese landscape recalls the story of Bridget tearfully refusing Pat a
taste before he died of the roasting pork that smelled so good to him,
because it was all needed for the wake.
Reflections of this simple nature were inclined to crowd out all other
impressions during another of my cross-country jaunts in Shantung, this
time northward to an ancient city still popularly called Loa-An. For the
way led through Lin-tze, also walled, aged, and dreaming of the past,
which in the days of Confucius was in the heart of the kingdom of Chi,
as the home of the sage was in that of the neighboring one of Lu. For
miles about it, therefore, the princes of Chi lie buried, not under the
mere cones of earth of ordinary ancestors, but beneath hillocks and
hills, and what sometimes seem across the floor-flat country to be
almost mountains. Some are still so respected that the groves of mainly
evergreen trees about them, beautifying the usual bare nudity of Chinese
graves, have survived to this day, and one or two are guarded at a
respectful distance by a standing stone giant who recalls those of Egypt
or of the southern shores of Lake Titicaca. Then there are many lesser
lights, such as always cluster about a court, and innumerable areas are
sacred to other ancient families, the mounds graduated in size and state
of repair from the principal one of the collection at the back to the
small ones so far out in front that the peasants dare to cultivate close
about them. Remnants of tissue-paper “money” donated to the dead all
over China at the New Year still fluttered from the peak of many a
mound, some of which dated so far back, perhaps, that live servants and
domestic animals were buried in them, instead of the flimsy paper
substitutes for these that are burned at modern funerals, along with
papier-mâché automobiles containing a pair of painted chauffeurs and a
concubine or two; but more than anything else, even of the sense of
antiquity, one was impressed by the endlessness, the uncountability of
the grave-mounds of all sizes.
Draft-animals, if only a cow or a donkey, or the two hitched together,
were drawing crude but effective plows and what American farmers call a
“drag,” on which the driver stands, raising clouds of dust behind him.
But the dodging of graves seemed to be the most serious task of all, far
as we rode northward, and one could fancy the undernourished peasants,
suddenly struck with Western seeing in place of blind custom, deciding
that it is high time these aged mounds are leveled off, or at least
planted over. Possibly that miracle will some day come to pass, and
China will by a turn of her hand increase her productive land by several
provinces, without extending her boundaries or robbing her neighbors of
an acre.
This time I used still another of Shantung’s many modes of locomotion,—a
bicycle. It has its advantages in a flat country where the roads are
often narrow paths, and where a vehicle that cannot be lifted about by
hand now and then is limited in its range. But when it chances that a
raging head wind blows both going and coming, and the contrivance
between one’s aching legs emanates from a Chicago mail-order house,
there are certain things to envy the traveler by wheelbarrow. In a way
the season was poorly chosen, too, for though the day was cloudless and
warm, plowing was on, and while the Chinese peasant leaves unmolested
the graves that dot his little field, he often plows up the road. Thus a
route which at best was an alternating between the bottom of a ditch
deep in dust and a precariously narrow and by no means continuous path
often on the sheer edge of it, frequently became a trackless field,
plowed by draft-animals or chopped up with the clumsy, sledge-heavy
adz-hoe still used in China. Rye and barley, and above all peanuts, were
to be the principal crops wherever winter wheat was not already showing
its tender green. One does not at first thought closely associate the
two, but peanuts and missionaries are likely to lie side by side on the
floor of the Chinese coolie’s mental granary. The Chinese had a peanut
before the missionaries came, and still cultivate it to a certain
extent. But it is so tiny and dry that it looks more like the end of a
pea-pod, with a pea or two left in it, that has survived several winters
in a very dry place—and the taste does not dispel this illusion.
American missionaries brought the much more profitable variety from
Georgia in an effort to improve the conditions of Shantung, and to-day
the American peanuts grown in China probably run into millions of
bushels, dotting every market-place and producing oil enough to supply
the world with peanut-butter.
Loa-An is no longer officially known by that name, and thereby hangs a
typically Chinese tale. Soon after the establishment of what passes in
the outside world for a republic, it was decreed that deeds of
land-holdings must be registered again, though this had been done quite
recently under the Manchus. The registry fee was to be a dollar and
twenty cents, of which 70 per cent was to go to the Government and the
rest to the local magistrate. Now, a dollar and twenty cents, even in
“Mex,” is a lot of money to a Shantung peasant, with the tiny parcel of
land which the custom of dividing among the sons of each generation has
left him, and a decade ago it was still more so. Moreover, the
magistrate should have known that in China government decrees are not
necessarily meant to be carried out, at least beyond the point of
individual discretion. But he was of the aggressive type of official,
sadly needed perhaps but not always successful in China, and his
insistence on having the order obeyed to the letter reached the point
where he helped to carry it out in person. The wrath of the country-side
increased. One day when the magistrate was some forty _li_ out of town
in the interest of thorough collections and an honest return of them
from his constables, a band of peasants fell upon him and chopped him to
death with their hoe-hooks.
Soldiers were hurried to Loa-An, where they oppressed the population for
months in the time-honored Chinese way, and finally lopped off eight
heads. None of these had been the leading spirits in the assassination,
nor perhaps had any real part in it at all, but they had been the
easiest to catch; and, their duty ended, according to Chinese lights,
the soldiers withdrew. But the Government saw fit to inflict a heinous
punishment on the city of Loa-An itself, for the crime of permitting
such a crime within its district. Loa-An means “Rejoicing and Peace,” as
nearly as it can be translated; it was ordered henceforth to call itself
Gwang-Rao. Does this mean “Bunch of Rascals,” or something of the sort,
as we of the West might suppose? It does not; it means FarReaching
Forgiveness, for, as I have already had occasion to remark, the Chinese
mind may have been originally built on the same specifications as our
own, but its manner of functioning has grown quite different during the
many centuries that separate us. For one thing, it refuses to jar itself
by sudden readjustments, and Gwang-Rao is still spoken of as Lao-An in
ninety cases out of a hundred.
As is so often the case throughout China, much of the population and the
business of Lao-An have gathered outside the city walls, where there are
certain advantages which the American suburbanite will understand.
Inside, there is that atmosphere of an old ladies’ home which one feels
in an aged New England village off the trail of modern progress—though
certainly in outward appearance there are no two things more dissimilar
than a New England village and a Chinese walled town. An immense pond or
lake takes up a whole corner of the enclosure, licking away at the inner
base of the crumbling wall. In its prime this was almost majestic,
higher than anything within it, broad enough for a “Peking cart” to
drive comfortably upon it, the crenelated parapets armed with small
cannon of curious casting which now lie rusting away wherever chance has
rolled them. There are other open spaces within the walls, some
cultivated, some merely idle, but the town itself is compact enough,
with one long trough of dust or mud as a main street, lined by
baked-earth houses of one form or another, enlivened only by an
occasional hawker marking his leisurely progress by some Chinese species
of noise, or a long unlaundered family group enjoying the brilliant
sunshine of early spring.
Outside it is different,—movement, crowding, an uproar of wide-open
shops and transient venders, all noisily contending for patronage,
dwellings that are almost imposing in their milieu, and, in the
outskirts, a large Presbyterian school and mission under an unusually
trusted Chinese pastor. His board beds may not have been the last word
in comfort, but they were many times nearer that than a passing guest
could have found in all the rest of the district. The auditing,
counseling, and moral sustenance for which the white-haired missionary I
had accompanied made his annual visit to Lao-An, with a brief service by
the honored visitor and a few moments in the unheated school-rooms,
where full outdoor garb was in order, left us time to go to prison
before we faced the head wind again. It was typical probably of most
local limbos in Shantung, unless the weekly services which the pastor
had been allowed to give there for a year now had remodeled the moral
outlook of the prisoners as completely as he believed: cells that were
larger than the average inmate had at home, and not overcrowded, by
Chinese standards, tolerable food and plenty of sunshine, a certain
semi-freedom at times in the yards, and in contrast iron fetters about
the neck, waist, and ankles in most cases, with clanking chains
connecting them. The prisoners got five coppers a day to feed
themselves—more than a whole American cent! Yet they lived well,
according to the pastor, and could save money. Three coppers paid for a
catty (a pound and a third) of millet, and the grain hong saw to it that
they got good measure. What average Shantung countryman is sure of a
catty of millet a day? Besides, they were paid for their work. The young
and spry could earn as much as ten coppers daily making hair-nets, and
the older ones, with their more clumsy fingers, half as much weaving
_dee-tze_—girdles, I suppose we would call them, though the Chinese use
twice as many of them about their ankles as around their waists. Then
Loa-An gets great quantities of a rush the size of a lead-pencil from
nearer the mouth of the Yellow River, and from these are fashioned
baskets and scoops, and shallow basins for the feeding of animals,
buckets for use at wells, winnowing pans, and, strangest of all, a thick
winter shoe that looks like an infant Roman galley.
All the romance of hair-nets is not limited to the tresses they confine.
Shantung, and to a lesser degree some neighboring provinces, has known
some of it. Until Europe went mad, hair-nets were made mainly in France.
America, callous upstart, continued to demand them even though the guns
were thundering. Some of the materials had always come from China,
though the French were much given to the use of horsehair; now it
occurred to some genius that the Chinese might be taught to make them on
the spot. A small town in Shantung became the center of the new
industry; later it gravitated naturally to Chefoo. Every one took to
turning discarded cues and combings into nets; children learned to tie
them; coolies forced their clumsy fingers to it when nothing else
offered; in mission churches women pinned the things to one another’s
backs and went on tying the little knots while they listened to the
sermon. The making of hair-nets kept many from starvation in famine
days, even though the wholesalers took advantage of the situation and
paid the hungry toilers as little as possible. Even in the best of times
the workers make no fortune. They are paid by the gross of nets; women
and children working at odd times can earn from five to ten coppers a
day; those who are skilled and put in all their time at it make from
thirty-five to fifty coppers—ten to thirteen cents gold—when the nets
are selling at their highest, five to seven dollars “Mex” a gross. Just
now they were down to half that, and with a great oversupply of nets on
the market and fashion turning toward the double-strand net, the makers
were getting hardly three American cents a dozen.
Many wholesalers, on the other hand, have quickly gotten rich out of
hair-nets. There is a barber, for instance, who is known to have laid up
ten thousand dollars in three or four years, a great fortune in China
even to men far above the lowly barber caste. But the newly rich are not
so kindly treated where class lines are still rather sharply drawn and
precedent especially tenacious. His envious neighbors overwhelmed their
former hair-cutter with lawsuits, the most common and effective form of
Chinese community persecution; though he turned his money into land he
can neither live on nor rent it, so virulent is the prejudice against
him. With the coming of hair-nets the bicycle trade boomed. This was the
only quick way of getting about the country, and the buyers could carry
thousands of nets back with them. The Germans of Tsingtao had good
_Fahrräder_ to offer at reasonable prices, and made the most of their
opportunity. Then came a slump in the trade, hints of the reasons for
which in time reached the wholesalers, if not the makers. American girls
had taken to bobbing their hair! But this fad had begun to die out
again, and already the people of overcrowded Shantung were feeling the
effect of this in fuller bowls of rice.
In wandering about Shantung I was constantly coming across coolies who
had been to France. One could generally tell them at a glance, from some
remnant of uniform, or their way of wearing what they had chosen when
that wore out, perhaps by a certain air of something that was not
exactly what we popularly dub “freshness,” yet which was more or less
distantly related to it. Besides, they seldom waited long on the chance
of recognition, but greeted the foreigner with the self-confidence of
familiarity and proceeded to impress their fellow-countrymen who had
been denied their advantages, and who never failed to gather about in as
great a circle as the community afforded.
The British and, to some extent, the French, took large numbers of
coolies overseas for work behind the lines, mainly from Shantung and
southern China. Some three hundred thousand went from this northern
province, at first slowly and with misgivings, then more eagerly, as
propaganda and the reports of those who had gone ahead filtered out
through the villages. The French made some arrangement whereby their
recruits seem to have been much lower paid, yet to have come home more
contented, than those with the British. The latter offered them ten
Chinese dollars a month in France and an equal amount to their families
at home, with of course transportation, food, and clothing. This was so
high that at first the coolies would not believe it; these wily
foreigners must have something else up their sleeves, they told one
another, putting them out in front of the soldiers perhaps, for it was a
rare coolie who had ever earned half the amount so glibly offered. But
the incredible turned out to be true. Several towns were designated as
district headquarters; foreign residents, usually missionaries, were
asked to take charge in them, and once a month the nearest of kin of the
absent workmen came in and got their ten dollars, in coin. At Weihsien
ninety thousand were paid monthly for several years, for the coolies of
the labor battalions were not returned until 1920, after the carrying of
troops had been completed. Up to that time the Chinese with the British
had been quite satisfied. But when they came to draw what they had saved
during their years abroad there was an uproar. In the contract made with
them “Mex” dollars were specified; there was no mention of francs. But
in France they were of course paid in the money of the country, and the
amounts they chose to lay aside were credited to them in francs. By the
time they came to draw their savings the franc had crashed. Being from
China they should have been wiser on the vagaries of exchange than the
American “doughboy”; but they insisted that the British had promised to
pay them in the dollars of their home-land, and raised such a hullabaloo
that the matter reached the honor of being discussed in Parliament,
though that was its loftiest attainment. The resentment at what was
considered a raw deal by tricky foreigners has somewhat died out in
Shantung now, and many a man would willingly go abroad for the British
again; but the few wise or lucky coolies who turned their francs back
into dollars as they saved them, and then meddled with the exchange in
those glorious days when the gold dollar went down to about eighty cents
“Mex,” are still the envy of their comrades. In an almost entirely
illiterate throng, thousands of miles from home and all its
exchange-shops and customs, and filled from childhood with suspicion of
their fellow-men, it is easy to guess about how many took advantage of
this opportunity.
One suspects that it was from the highest point of honor attained by
this painful subject that there originated an attempt to soften the
resentment that only resulted in increasing it. Legislative bodies the
world over have a reputation for bone-headedness. One day word was sent
out over Shantung and beyond that if coolies who had been to France for
the British would report back to the centers where they had been
discharged and paid they would learn something to their advantage. Aha,
_ting hao!_ they are going to give us all the money they promised after
all, said the coolies, and began to flock in from all directions, often
from considerable distances. Some came overland all the way from
Tientsin, not being able to afford the railroad. When they arrived they
were each given a nice brass medal to hang about their necks, with a
likeness of their grateful ex-employer, King Georgie, on one side and
words of similar sentiment on the other. Any one with thirty cents’
worth of understanding of the psychology of the Chinese coolie could
have told the thoughtful originators of this idea that an extra
_cumshaw_ of a dollar or two would have won his everlasting gratitude
far more than a medal graced with the vapid faces of all the kings of
Christendom—and probably have cost less money. But textbooks on
psychology, particularly of far-off “heathen” lands, are not required in
a politician’s education. At first some of the coolies thought the
things were gold, and raced to the exchange-shops accordingly. When
these reported that the gaudy gifts were not even coin at all, men
drifted out to mission compounds to inquire what they were good for....
“Is it worth anything?” “Well, I’ll give it to you for fifteen coppers.”
Coppers, by the way, are the general medium of exchange in Shantung.
Silver dollars pass, though silver fractions of them do not, and
bank-notes even of the province have only a limited acceptance. Except
in large towns or transactions, every one pays in coppers, the division
being the _diao_. In olden days this meant a thousand “cash” on a
string. Now it means forty-nine coppers in most regions. How this
decided change came about is only another of the queer stories with
which monetary matters bristle in China. One day the Manchu dynasty
decided it could get plenty of money to pay its grumbling troops merely
by decreeing that thenceforth a _diao_ would be five hundred, not a
thousand, “cash.” Every one would be compelled to accept the new rating,
on penalty of severe punishment, and the surplus five hundred “cash”
would accrue to the Government. As late as the beginning of the present
century the brass “cash” was the only money used in the interior of
Shantung; in those days my missionary friends had taken an extra
wheelbarrow with them to carry their change. Then in 1902 the copper
began to be minted. Ten “cash” make a copper; fifty coppers therefore
should make a modern _diao_; but in most places one of them goes to some
one, identity unknown but strongly suspected, as the inevitable
“squeeze” of all Chinese transactions.
Probably a majority of the third-class tickets sold on the
Tientsin-Pukow line in Shantung are paid for from clothfuls of coppers
handed in at the window, the cloth and any excess coins being returned
with the ticket. The foreigner who produces a silver dollar when only a
few cents are needed will be deluged with a shower of huge coppers
sufficient to fill an overcoat pocket. The general run of prices and
wages in Shantung is suggested by some of those paid by my missionary
companion. Master masons were receiving fifty-four coppers a day, their
helpers thirty-six—a copper being approximately half a farthing or the
fourth of an American cent. In the good old days of a decade or more
back they were satisfied with fifteen and ten respectively, though the
copper was then worth 50 per cent more than at present. Country pastors
are paid twenty Chinese dollars a month, those in towns all the way from
that to forty, “Bible women” eight dollars, “evangelists” (unordained
preachers who also work on their farms) receive eleven, teachers from
eighteen to forty, and native doctors fifty.
At Weihsien “Peking carts” are the almost exclusive means of
transportation, though forty miles west a similar town has only
wheelbarrows. This important half-way station between Tzinan and
Tsingtao lies in the heart of what was thirty centuries ago the kingdom
of Wei, and the landscape on either side of it is littered with
monuments and graves. Shantung is much given to elaborately carved stone
_p’ai-lous_, or _p’ai-fangs_, as they are more often called in that
province, and these imposing memorial arches to virtuous widows or
officials more or less willingly honored naturally outlast the mainly
wooden ones in Peking and vicinity. Stone horses completely saddled and
bridled, stirrups hanging ready for instant use, stood with other less
familiar animals before some of the graves, awaiting their riders these
many centuries; and groves of evergreens, some of them overtopped by the
four reddish upright poles bearing a kind of ship’s crow’s-nest which
means that the principal deceased of the group some time in the bygone
ages passed the examinations for the highest rank of Chinese scholar,
were a little more frequent about them than is general in northern
China, though there were still far too many of the one and too few of
the other.
Weihsien is really two distinct cities, each surrounded by a massive
stone wall, with a sandy-bedded river between them. But the farther one
was not walled until the days of the Taiping Rebellion, and it is still
regarded as a suburb of the other. Thanks to spring rain and
water-carriers, the streets of both were rivers of mud in which a
mule-cart was almost indispensable even for the shortest distance, and
an ordeal into the bargain. Weihsien had indeed recently imported her
first rickshaws, but all three of them were without rubber tires or
experienced runners, which made the first jaunts in them by a few of the
town dandies an experience to be remembered rather than to be repeated
or recommended, and the fear was expressed that these evidences of
modern progress would be withdrawn for lack of appreciation. However,
the new autobus line to Chefoo starts from Weihsien, and motor-cars have
become almost familiar sights to those who have come out to see them at
the edge of the suburb, beyond which they cannot penetrate. There should
long since have been a branch railway to Chefoo. Ocean communication
with that important silk and hair-net center is irregular and
uncertain—except from Dairen over in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. But
so long as they held the Shantung Railway the Japanese would not permit
this extension, lest Chefoo become a serious rival to their beloved
Dairen. So the usual raised dirt highway has been built, with frequent
guarded barriers to keep others off it, and along this the few still
movable contrivances of all sizes and makes which were bought
second-hand from the Japanese before they evacuated Shantung stagger in
a daily service scheduled to make the journey in a day and a half, with
the brick bed of a Chinese inn to break it. The line is under railway
management, but one glimpse of the once gasolene-driven wrecks that
litter the yard at Weihsien should convince the most foolhardy that to
ride behind a Chinese chauffeur is more risky than behind the worst
locomotive driver in the Orient. Chefoo, by the way, is unknown to the
Chinese; they call it Yentai. Just what misunderstanding on the part of
early sailors led to the name by which it is known to all foreigners,
including the Japanese, seems never to have been fully cleared up.
When Tzinan was voluntarily opened to trade in 1906, Weihsien, as well
as Choutsun farther west, was also designated as a “port”; but though
the Chinese laid out “foreign settlements” in them no one came to
settle. A stray German or two is all that the city has to offer in this
line, except the missionaries. The Catholics have an imposing church
building just outside the walls, and there is an important mission
school established by one of the pioneers among American Presbyterians
in China, far outside the town, where the bitter hostility of those
earlier days drove him. When the school was first founded, pupils had to
be paid to attend; to-day there are waiting lists at fifty-eight dollars
a year—a great deal of money, let it be kept in mind, in Shantung—of
which twenty-five dollars pays a year’s board. Millet or _kaoliang_ in a
kind of gruel seemed to be the chief diet. Then there was the pickled
tuber resembling a turnip that is constantly munched all over Shantung,
and which does away with any desire to salt the other food. There were
flocks of timid high-school girls in their neat trousers, though
missionary influence tends to introduce the skirt, which is surely
mistaken zeal for mere change. The trousers are more convenient, more
becoming, and certainly many times more modest than the unstable garb of
our modern maidens of the West. Formerly many Shantung women of the
better class, influenced perhaps by the Manchus, who once had walled
towns of bannermen in all this region, wore a skirt over their trousers
when they appeared in public, and older missionary ladies can still
remember the polite greeting when they reached the home of a Chinese
hostess: “Well, take off your skirt and stay a while.”
The large church of the Weihsien mission was well filled at Thursday
evening prayer-meeting and packed at the principal Sunday service.
Chinese pastors officiated on both occasions. Though the weather was
still distinctly cold, no provision for heating the building was made,
and one could only guess what it must be in midwinter. Gradually the
stone floor congealed the feet and removed them completely from the
realms of sensation, but the Chinese, in their full outdoor garb, caps
and all, seemed to be as comfortable as they ever have any need to be.
Uncovering the head had become so nearly a dead letter that even the two
or three American missionaries in their overcoats usually kept their
hats on, even when they rose to pray in fluent Chinese. The feminine
portion of the congregation occupied the back part of the church, the
boys the front and center, graduating back to youths and men behind and
on either side; when prayers were offered all rose to their feet instead
of kneeling, and the less said of the bold and stentorian “singing” of
hymns the better.
A few weeks before my visit the Shantung Railway had been turned over to
the Chinese, in accordance with the agreement reached at the Washington
Conference. But to go back to the beginning: you will recall that two
German missionaries were killed in Shantung in 1897 and that Germany
quickly made this a pretext for demanding the lease of Kiaochow Bay, and
the concession for a railroad from there to the capital of the province.
Though it was a generation since the Chinese Government had been able to
still popular uproar against such diabolic contrivances only by buying
out the first railway in China, running a few miles out of Shanghai, and
shipping it over to Formosa, there was bitter opposition to this one,
ostensibly from the superstitious masses, though it is known now that
officials and some of the gentry urged the people on. In fact, the
building of the Shantung Railway was very largely responsible for the
“Boxer” uprising, which had its beginning, as I have said before, in
mountainous southern Shantung. The exasperation was partly due to pure
superstition, partly to real grievances which the Germans unwittingly
perpetrated. They cut through the hill south of Weihsien which had
brought the town all its good luck for centuries, and thereby destroyed
its beneficence. This matter of _feng-shui_, of placating the spirits of
wind and water, is of the highest importance, and there seems to be no
fixed rule in dealing with them. For instance, there is another peak,
west of Weihsien, through the top of which a slot quite like a railway
cutting was gashed centuries ago at great labor, in order to neutralize
the _bad_ luck it brought the town. When they first came the Germans had
to depend upon interpreters, and these of course were true Chinese. They
would stroll out when they were off duty, or when no one was watching,
and drive a survey stake in the top of a grave, perhaps miles from the
projected route of the railroad; and a day or two later they would offer
to get the stake removed and leave the grave unmolested if the
descendants could raise money enough to “bribe the Germans.” When a
railroad is surveyed its proposed turns are marked as sharp angles first
and the curve is traced inside this later. The interpreters collected
handsomely also from farmers for getting the Germans to remove stakes on
the points of these angles—where the railroad had never thought of
trespassing. In spite of both passive and active opposition the Germans
pushed the line rapidly inland; many Chinese Christians free from the
popular superstitions or sustained by the missionaries took contracts to
prepare the way by sections, and early in the present century
locomotives snorted into Tzinanfu.
The line still bears many marks of its original nationality. It is a
direct descendant of the railways of Germany—excellently built, with
stone ballast in exact military alignment along flanking paths of
exactly such a width, iron ties of the reversed trough shape, light
rails and fourteen-ton bridges—European rolling stock is not heavy by
our standards—well-built stations, service buildings, and grade-markers,
still here and there bearing a German name, in spite of eight years of
Japanese occupancy, the whole railway still lined for much of its length
by the quick-growing acacia-trees which the Germans expected to furnish
supports for their mines. Now that the Chinese have returned, one
frequently runs across a station-master who speaks German but no
English.
It is said that there was more graft under the Germans than under their
successors. German inspectors were conspicuous; Japanese ones blended
more or less into the general racial landscape. In German days
unrecorded telegrams sped along from station to station, “Inspector
coming to-day,” and certain customs were temporarily suspended. On other
days passengers often got on without tickets, crossed the hand of the
Chinese guard with silver, and the latter gave the high sign to the
gateman at the disembarking station, dividing the spoils with him at the
first convenient opportunity. Whatever their other faults, the Japanese
know how to run a railroad, and under them this sort of thing is reputed
to have disappeared. Their influence was still distinctly in evidence.
The people are said to have liked the Germans better than their
successors because, among other things, they were not so strict—which
speaks loudly indeed for Japanese sternness. Part of this strictness was
the insistence on order instead of the free-for-all methods so loved by
the Chinese. The Germans allowed huckstering at the trains; the Japanese
licensed and curbed it. They introduced the innovation of standing in
line for tickets, instead of the riot in vogue on all purely Chinese
railways. It is said that it took the butt of many a rifle and the flat
of many a sword to convince the coolies that they should drop back to
the end of a cue when there was plenty of room at the front, but as they
became more familiar with the language the Japanese, like the Germans
before them, got their results with less violence. Foreigners,
especially their somewhat kindred island neighbors, can discipline the
Chinese as they never could themselves. The weakest thing in China is
discipline, and there is not moral fiber enough in the country—or there
is too much gentleness in the Chinese temperament, whichever way you
choose to put it—to cure such things from within.
[Illustration:
A private carriage, Shantung style
]
[Illustration:
Shackled prisoners of Lao-an making hair nets for the American market
]
[Illustration:
School-girls in the American mission school at Weihsien, Shantung
]
[Illustration:
The governor’s mansion at Tsingtao, among hills carefully reforested
by the Germans, followed by the Japanese, has now been returned to
the Chinese after a quarter of a century of foreign rule
]
Foreign residents, including some missionaries, were already complaining
of a deterioration of the Shantung Railway under Chinese management. To
one who had just come from the other railways of China this seemed
rather exaggerated cynicism, for it certainly was superior to those
others in many ways, though possibly these were relics of German and
Japanese times, which were gradually dying out under the new régime. The
almost praiseworthy cleanliness of at least the higher class cars may
have been merely a memento of earlier days; also perhaps the brief,
businesslike stops at stations. There were “red-caps” instead of the
tidal wave of ragged ruffians who fight pitched battles for one’s
baggage elsewhere; and the platforms were free from loafers, stragglers,
beggars, and false passengers among whom the actual traveler is so
completely swallowed up at the average Chinese station that he often
despairs of getting on board at all. But with more than half the new
personnel in the higher grades graduates of American colleges, some of
them with real railroad experience, it hardly seems that the line can go
entirely to rack and ruin, nor that it is being made the complete pawn
of hungry politicians utterly devoid of ability which some rumors have
it.
Until the line is paid for, five to fifteen years hence, there will be a
Japanese traffic manager and chief accountant. But there has been sent
down to Tsingtao from the Ministry of Communications in Peking an
English-speaking superintendent who is notably fitted for the post, and
one is struck by the above-the-average of the personnel all along the
line. All its telegrams, by the way, are sent in English, which is a
hardship on station-masters who spent years learning German. But for
telegraphic purposes Chinese characters have to be reduced to numbers
which often run into four, if not five, figures, and it is much simpler
to wire “Hold six at Fangtze” than to beat out on the keys “5674 8762
9085 4356,” and run the added risk of the code-book being misplaced at
either end. It can scarcely be expected that the change from Japanese to
Chinese management will be made without a hitch; for one thing, men had
to be brought from all the five government railways of China, on all of
which, having been first built and operated under different
nationalities, rules and practices vary. We would scarcely expect the
theoretical “All-American” football team to display perfect team-work if
suddenly brought together for a game. Then there is the usual percentage
of bone-headedness to be reckoned. On the eve of the Chinese New Year an
engineer eager to spend that day at home, but having no orders which
gave him a right of way, coupled his locomotive in front of another
drawing a freight-train and double-headed westward. Now the folly of
running thirty-five-ton American locomotives across fourteen-ton bridges
is bad enough; when two of them dash madly out upon one it is not
strange if something serious happens. What was left of the two fine big
engines still lay on either side of the central pier when we crept
across a temporary bridge nearly a month later; but that particular
driver will probably prove of much more use to the line as an example to
his fellows than he ever was at a throttle.
Foreigners in general, as is widely known, have long been called by
Chinese in ugly moods “_yang gwei_,” which we have more or less
correctly translated as “foreign devil.” This particular “_yang_” really
means ocean, and a “_gwei_” is a spirit of the dead, quite possibly,
though not necessarily, a devil in the Western sense. Thus small Chinese
are not so far amiss as they sound to the uninformed when they run after
foreigners shouting, “Yang Gwei! Yang Gwei! Give me money!” For the
spirit of the dead is sometimes benevolent, and even small urchins would
scarcely expect charity in return for knowingly uncomplimentary titles.
But there is no doubt what the people of Shantung mean by their popular
expression for the Japanese, “_hsiao gwei_,” or “little devil.” Nor need
one inquire often or listen hard to get hints of why there is much
actual hatred of the efficient islanders, quite aside from the
theoretical dislike built up by rumor and propaganda. When the Japanese
held it one could not buy tickets on the Shantung Railway with Chinese
money; there were exchange-shops on the road to all stations of
importance, where it took a “Mex” dollar, and sometimes some coppers in
addition, to buy a yen, though the honest exchange was always
considerably in favor of the dollar. Shippers may not have had to bribe
the station-master to get a car for which they had already paid the
official fees, as often happens on Chinese railroads, but they might be
perfectly sure that Japanese shippers would always get cars first. It is
against Chinese law to melt up current money; the Japanese bought and
melted all the brass “cash” in Shantung. There has been much outcry from
them in recent years about race equality, yet the Japanese look down
upon the Chinese far more than any Californian does upon the sons of
Nippon, more than any American does upon our negroes; and apparently the
more military and brutal part of the occupation in Shantung was always
on the lookout for opportunities to show this supposed superiority
forcibly. It may be that the better class, or the non-militaristic
party, or the Japanese people in general, thoroughly agreed with the
terms of the Washington agreement and were glad to prove the national
good will by evacuating Shantung; but if so they should have made
greater efforts to curb the spirit of bad boys driven out of the
playground which prevailed on the spot. Before they left, the
disgruntled among the Japanese occupants slashed up the velvet
seat-cushions of first-class coaches, just as the Germans did in the
cars they were forced to turn over to the Allies; they carried off
indispensable fittings; they left cars and locomotives as far as
possible from where they were most needed; during the last months they
avoided making even imperative repairs. They deliberately flooded the
mines at Fangtze; they turned on the faucets in buildings belonging to
the railroad, so that they were swimming-pools by the time the Chinese
occupants appeared; they carried away, ruined, or wantonly destroyed
furnishings, walls, windows; out at the agricultural experiment station
on the flanks of Lao-shan they carefully mixed into one useless mess the
several kinds of cotton-seed that were to be planted in the spring. An
American-trained expert who drifted into my compartment as we neared
Tsingtao asserted that more than a dozen bridges had already been found
with serious cracks in them filled with putty and painted over. In
Japanese days, even those unfriendly to them admit, trains were so
exactly on time that clocks could be set by them. The new superintendent
explained the growing tendency to be late as due to these wanton
hamperings and the necessity of crawling across bridges in bad
condition, or too light for the present rolling-stock, and he was
preparing a slower schedule to be used until the line had been
strengthened throughout. This English-speaking, straightforward official
would probably strike any fair-minded observer as an unusually
trustworthy Chinese, but he did not mention also the difficulties of
making his people believe in the importance of keeping to any exact
schedule.
Gradually, as it approaches Kiaochow Bay, the train picks up more and
more Japanese, the women and children, and a few of the men, in their
chilly national dress, with scraping wooden _getas_ and blue noses. The
country continues flat and fertile, given over mainly to graves, as far
as the old walled town of Kiaochow, forty-five miles by rail from
Tsingtao just across the bay. Though this ancient city was well within
the hundred _li_ periphery beyond high tide that was leased to the
Germans, it remained under Chinese rule, much like the cities of Colon
and Panama within the Canal Zone. Then hills grow up on the horizon, and
soon rise to a labyrinth of low mountains, the most striking of them
across the bay, distant ones to the southeast capped with snow. Wild
geese and bustards within easy reach tempt the sportsman. The train more
than half encircles the big bay, close on the left, visibly a
magnificent harbor, even though larger ships must wait at the entrance
for high tide. Bit by bit the many little things which mark a Chinese
landscape die out; factories, warehouses, big modern buildings, many of
them still flying the rising sun, grow more continuous on either hand,
and by the time one’s journey is ended, whether he descend at the Harbor
Station or at the terminal, there is little left to remind him that he
is still in China.
In the days of the Germans Tsingtao was generally admitted to be the
model city of the Far East. The Japanese have greatly extended and in
certain ways improved it. There could scarcely be a greater contrast
within one country than that between this modern European city, with
broad macadamized streets and ample sidewalks, block after block of two-
and three-story buildings of brick and stone, rolling away over a series
of small hills which subside at last along waterfronts that would not be
out of place on the Mediterranean, and the flat, low, heavily walled,
dismal collections of baked-mud hovels, broken by narrow, reeking lanes,
which are typical of China. For even the Japanese have built in their
conception of the European model, rather than in the frail style of
their home-land, so that one may wander through street after street and
get few hints of the Orient except the people who pass to and fro in
them. Least Chinese of all, perhaps, are the splendid motor-roads
darting off into the country in all directions, and the wide-spread
growth of trees upon the hills as far as the eye can see.
It is said that Germans are gradually returning now to Tsingtao, but the
little cloven-footed people from the east are much more in evidence. The
largely Japanese shops are a trifle mean and small in comparison with
the general scheme of things, and boldly demand Japanese money still, as
though there had been no change in the status of Tsingtao merely because
their troops and officials have sailed away. On the other hand, one
might travel far to see another institution as splendid as the Japanese
Middle School out among the hills below the governor’s residence, and
many another of their establishments is equally as near what it should
be. By the terms of the treaty the Japanese are permitted to retain
their educational, mission, and similar institutions, and naturally
their nationals retain full rights of residence and commerce. Other
residents charge them with a certain underhandedness in stretching these
rights, and point to block after block of big new residences that have
never been occupied, asserting they were built merely that the Japanese
might hold that much more land.
The coming of the Japanese in 1914 seems to have brought much the same
advantages and misfortunes which they carried to Korea and Manchuria.
Under the Germans life had been comfortable, a trifle strict perhaps,
sharply divided by caste lines that made it impossible for the wife of
an officer to meet the wife of a merchant; but the fact is that the
German penetration into Shantung was more of a commercial than of a
military nature. Though there are still mighty guns pointing seaward
above the concrete underground forts which they dug in the surrounding
hills, and which show vivid evidences of the Japanese bombardment,
Tsingtao was never a Port Arthur or a Gibraltar. The Germans strove
rather for the good will of the Chinese, that they might above all sell
them more goods. Yet their national efficiency never failed them, and
reforms which they felt essential were carried through with as nice a
balance as could be preserved between complacency and insistence. There
was the matter of squeaking wheelbarrows, for instance. No barrow-man of
Shantung would feel that his apparatus was functioning properly unless
it emitted a constant screech that can be heard at least a furlong away;
to have it cease would give him much the same sensation as the motorist
has when he hears a knocking under the hood of his engine. But the
incessant screaking got on the nerves of the Germans in general and on
those of the governor’s wife in particular. Sein Excellenz, her husband,
gave orders that, beginning on the morning of September 16, wheelbarrows
should no longer squeak within German leased territory. Old residents,
American missionaries among them, held their sides; who ever heard of
changing a time-honored custom of the Chinese, especially by a mere
proclamation? But the Germans did more than command; they sent out
inconspicuous propaganda, giving reasons, appealing to common sense and
good will. On the morning of the sixteenth a missionary group was
sitting at breakfast, vaguely conscious that something had happened,
that things were not exactly what they hitherto always had been. One of
them finally stepped to the window, then raised her hands to her ears.
The others quickly followed suit. Had they all suddenly gone deaf? The
same endless line of wheelbarrows was trundling along the street
outside, but not the smallest infant of a squeak was sounding; they
passed as silently as a company of wheelbarrowing ghosts; and to this
day Shantung’s principal means of transportation is mute within the
territory just returned to China after a quarter of a century of alien
adoption.
The methods of the Japanese were quite as coercive, without the
softening propaganda. The military party was in full control, and not
even Western missionaries were permitted for a moment to forget it. The
Japanese closed the American Presbyterian mission school on the charge
of “spreading propaganda”; and they continued to collect taxes on it
during all the years they used it as a police station. They built
several blocks of semi-official brothels under the very eaves of the
native church established by this same mission, and by the terms of the
treaty of evacuation these are allowed to remain, for Japanese
“enterprises” in Tsingtao must not be molested. If it were an isolated
case, one might believe that the site was chosen merely for its
convenient situation; but the _yoshiwaras_ of Korea and Manchuria also
show a strong tendency to elbow mission property and American residences
with what looks much like the cynicism of the military clique. Japanese
gendarmes and soldiers pursued mission “Bible women” until in many cases
they had to give up their labors; they made it unsafe for Chinese
school-girls to remain in the mission dormitories; they showed the same
barbarian disrespect for privacy which one so often heard charged
against them in Korea. Let the wife of a missionary neglect to lock the
kitchen door, even at noon, and she would probably find a pair of
Japanese gendarmes standing in her bedroom when she looked up. They
never gave any reasons for their intrusions; they merely implied by
their attitude that they were the rulers of Tsingtao and that it was no
one’s business where they went, or when. The Japanese—or the Germans
either, for that matter—would not allow American physicians to practise
within the territory, not even to attend fellow-Americans who were of
the same mission or might be in the same house with them. The
missionaries, and even their wives, were summoned to court on every
possible pretext, and allowed to stand two or three hours among beggars
and prostitutes before they were called upon to stand at attention
before the haughty judge and testify. The American consul never
officially admitted the right of the Japanese to bring Americans before
their courts, contending that they enjoyed extraterritoriality in
Tsingtao quite as well as in the rest of China; but for some reason he
personally advised his countrymen to obey Japanese summonses. Multiply
these few and restricted cases of petty persecution by some very large
number and it will be clearer why the residents of the Kiaochow
territory, except the Japanese themselves, were so pleased to see the
rising sun replaced one morning in December by the five-color banner of
China, even though they are ready to admit that many excellent things
came from Japan.
From the distance of Peking we had heard that Tsingtao was virtually in
the hands of bandits; on the ground, there proved to be no truth in this
rumor. Things had been really much worse in that respect under Japanese
occupation, though they need not have been. There seems to be little
doubt that the Japanese tolerated bandits in Shantung, perhaps helped to
recruit them and sold them arms. Scores of little hints to this effect
reached the ears of even the least suspicious residents of the occupied
zone. They appear to be able to cite indefinitely cases similar to that
of the mission cook, trustworthy beyond all question, who was approached
by a Japanese with the promise of an easy life and a large income if he
would turn bandit. Guns could be rented, I was assured, from Japanese
gendarmes at two dollars a night by any one who wished to create a
little disorder; the bandits were often allowed to wear red hat-bands
(the distinguishing mark of Japanese soldiers and gendarmes everywhere)
and to take refuge in railway or other Japanese property where Chinese
soldiers could not pursue them. Whether or not they were actually in the
pay of the nation to whom disorder in China is always an advantage,
there is little room for doubt that they were unofficially aided and
abetted.
The military part of the occupation left Shantung in an angry mood; the
Japanese hoped to the last that complications would arise that would
give them an excuse to remain, and they were not beyond doing their bit
to create them. It is the old story of the two opposing factors in the
political life of Japan, which her apologists make the most of when they
have to explain actions strangely at variance with professions. The
ministers of war and the navy are responsible directly to the mikado,
not to the premier, as in other lands; hence the Foreign Office may be
openly flouted by the military clique. Moreover, these ministers must be
a general and an admiral respectively; in other words, there is not the
soothing effect of civilian control over the war-dogs which is quite
general elsewhere. A bulldog is an excellent defense, but it is an
unwise home which allows the bulldog to take command of things.
Conditions became fantastic during the last few weeks of Japanese
occupation. The bandits had their headquarters only twenty miles from
Tsingtao, by excellent motor-road, up in the foot-hills of the beautiful
Lao-Shan range. They raided the neighborhood at will, and went to town
to see the movies whenever the spirit moved them. All they had to do was
to stroll down to the Japanese police-box at the edge of the leased
territory and telephone a garage in Tsingtao to send them a car. They
rode or strutted through the streets like the proverbial walking
arsenal; what was worse, they wore uniforms which made them
indistinguishable from Chinese soldiers. Once they invited the Chamber
of Commerce to ask them to dinner, the Japanese knowing so well about it
in advance that they had their secret police among the first arrivals,
and instructed that body that the payment of one hundred thousand
dollars, the appointment of their chief as garrison commander and of one
thousand of their number as a police force, were essential to the
immunity of Tsingtao from their devastations. Then they picked up the
local deputy of the provincial Tuchun and the president of the Chamber
of Commerce as hostages and motored back to their headquarters with
them.
In the end, apparently, they were given a certain sum of money and more
or less official standing, as is the custom in China, the land of
compromise. But by the time I reached Tsingtao they had been moved to
Fangtze, far outside the former leasehold, and the city was well policed
by the men in black uniforms and white leggings with which Peking is so
familiar. Hand-picked and trained by a European, these constitute one of
the best bodies in China, and they had been scattered along the entire
line of the Shantung Railway, poorly equipped at first, but armed now,
one and all, with brand-new rifles from China’s government arsenals. The
ordinary cotton-clad, ill disciplined Chinese soldier was very little in
evidence. Now and then a group of them try to board the trains without
tickets to the great detriment of this line also; but station-masters
have a way of appealing to their good nature, if not to their
patriotism, with the strong argument that unless the line pays for
itself within five years the Japanese will come back, and then....
Bismarck Strasse became Ryojun Machi and in its turn will no doubt be
this or that Ta Chieh, perhaps without even the concession of naming it
in Roman letters which the Japanese granted to the West. The contrast
between the blue sea and the clean red roofs may grow more and more dim
under slack Chinese rule, and Tsingtao may sink back into the slough
from which Germany rescued it. But it is not likely, for the Chinese are
on their metal. True, there is already the curse of useless politicians
and military pressure in the highest offices, but a Yale graduate in
forestry is in charge of continuing the good work of the Germans and the
Japanese in spreading the gospel of reforestation, and other branches of
the new Government are in equally competent and progressive hands. There
is great need in China for officials to take up economics as a part of
government, especially to establish some continuity of plan which will
carry on in spite of the disruptions of political changes; and
ready-made Tsingtao is an excellent place for them to begin to practise.
The people may reassert their centuries of training and pilfer all the
trees, as some were already beginning to carry off the brushwood
contrary to rules, as they cut even the trees about their graves when
hard pressed, for only their Confucianism stands guard over the few
groves that are left in the land. Or they may, as some of the
enthusiastic young officials of the former leased territory announce,
make Tsingtao more important than either Tientsin or Shanghai, by
pushing new railways back into the interior beyond Tzinan and draining
even the Yang Tze of its natural carrying-power. More likely the future
will be somewhere between these two extremes, with a certain Chinese
indifference to small comforts and strict cleanliness somewhat marring
in the eyes of the West a port which in the main will retain much that
it has learned during its quarter of a century of sterner foreign
tutelage.