IN BANDIT-RIDDEN HONAN
One of our military attachés at Peking purposed to see China’s Far West
before the cycle of duties called him home to a regiment, and he
consented to have company. At least if it chanced to please the bandits
who were just then using that means to coerce the incoherent Government
to add us to their growing collection of foreign hostages, there would
be some advantage in companionship.
The major had business in Honan before I could leave Peking, and took
the newly captured cook with him, leaving the “boy,” Chang, who
maltreated considerable English and was to be our most important link
with the outside world, to wait with me for the next biweekly express.
Below the junction for Shansi, where daylight overtook us, the landscape
was still as flat as about Peking; but there were more trees, bushy as
the mango, though thinner of foliage, many trees, indeed, for China.
Though it was already late October, the leaves had hardly begun to turn,
and that brilliant sunshine and utter cloudlessness which is one of the
greatest charms of dry, denuded North China so many days each year made
it seem still almost midsummer. The broad, fenceless fields swarmed with
people, mainly engaged, as far as a passing glimpse could tell, in
picking cotton and threshing peanuts. The cotton was in some places so
thin that even the frugal Chinese apparently did not find it worth
gathering, while the best of it, on plants scarcely knee-high, was
nothing to exhibit at a fair. Women gone cotton-picking had the
advantage of trousers, but this was more than offset by the bound feet
on which they hobbled from bush to bush. In contrast to those long
two-bushel bags the negroes drag behind them through the fertile
cotton-fields of our South, a kind of newsboy’s sack at the waist, or a
pocketed apron, seemed to be quite large enough here.
It was hard to distinguish the many heaps of peanuts from the still more
numerous graves. With enough of this baseball and circus delicacy within
one sweep of the eye to satisfy a ravenous city on the Fourth of July,
there came back to mind the touching story of the fond American mother
who sent her dear son in China a box of peanuts for Christmas, so that
he might for a little while be reminded of home. Even small children
were helping to pull them, and to pile the nuts in grave-like mounds of
careless cone shape. Of the graves themselves there was literally no
end, until the landscape for long stretches seemed to grow nothing else.
Yet the land was a veritable market-garden, so great is the individual
care of Chinese fields in all their processes. Here and there, in place
of the far more common tilling by hand, was a plow, drawn by two or
three mules; but naturally you cannot plow to advantage if you must
dodge grandfather’s grave every trip across a short field, after that
great-grandfather’s, and then that of the father before him, back to
more than remote generations. If only the old gentlemen would consent to
lie in a row, or even in a companionable cluster, or to be laid away in
a real graveyard where the little cones of earth might perhaps be kept
green even in China, instead of being rare, rain-gashed heaps of dried
mud as hallowed as a pile of peanuts!
Yet sometimes there is a hint of reverence, rather than of mere
superstition, about a collection of half a dozen of these untended
mounds drifting through the centuries with no other evidence of care
than the slender shade of a single tree bent over them, like some
faithful old servant still respectfully waiting to do their bidding. A
suggestion of this comes now and then even to the disapproving
foreigner, aghast at the wicked wastefulness of China’s burial methods;
and certainly the peasant himself, the only one after all whom it
greatly concerns, develops no spirit of criticism, no thought of revolt.
A plow being in most cases inconvenient among his ancestral mounds, he
digs away about them by hand year after year, generation after
generation, as those same ancestors did century after century. Naked to
the waist even in these late autumn days, his body burned to the hue of
old polished mahogany, he never disturbs them, and rarely if ever mends
them.
There were still reminders of the summer’s crops,—sweet potatoes,
onions, lettuce, cabbages, carrots; but there was little if any evidence
of the house-high _kaoliang_ that stretches for unbroken miles across
more northern China, all the north, indeed, of this province of Chihli.
Country-women hobbling slowly and painfully about on their crippled feet
were everywhere, even the most ugly, weather-beaten, and work-worn of
them boasting this fancied form of beauty. Blindfolded donkeys and mules
marched patiently round and round hither and yon across the landscape,
some about ancient well-curbs, lifting by great wooden wheels water for
the irrigation ditches that are so widely needed in this deforested,
rain-stingy land, others rotating big stone rollers for the hulling or
grinding of wheat. Brick-kilns, which the Chinese seal up for long
periods with their contents, stood forth like rudely chiseled monuments
or artificial hillocks. The earth was worn away around everything,
walls, trees, roadsides, monuments, those great slabs of stone,
top-heavy with carved dragons, that may be seen anywhere; for great
portions of China are half-desert, dry as dust, of a moistureless brown
soil ready to wash or blow away at the least provocation, and slavishly
dependent upon irrigation. Chinese farming methods, too, increase this
erosion. Everywhere men were cutting off the top layer of soil and
screening the earth into many little mounds that stretched in long rows
across the sunken fields. Later they “spread this between the wheat,” if
I understood Chang’s laborious explanation; that is, they use it as a
kind of fertilizer, sometimes mixed with the droppings of animals
gleaned along the roads, as well as for the building of the many little
low field-dikes.
Barely over the boundary of Honan, where it thrusts itself in a point
that recalls the “gerrymandering” of the West into the two provinces
bounding it on the north, is Changte, burial-place of Yuan Shih-kai. A
tomb evidently rivaling those of the most powerful emperors, certainly
larger and more sumptuous than that of Mencius not far east of here in
Shantung, rises among great trees within easy sight from the train. But
it is not covered in imperial yellow, for the new dynasty that the
occupant hoped to found, and which, if numerous examples in Chinese
history still mean anything, would have been the more natural
development, failed to materialize, less because of wide-spread
republican sentiment, one suspects, than for lack of tact, among the
virtues of political sagacity, in the make-up of what might have been
the founder.
Yuan Shih-kai is the father, so to speak, of the curse of swarming
soldiers that now overrun China. For it was he who first saw in Korea,
when he was a mere officer of the Manchus, the first Western-style
soldiers, and who coaxed the Government to start what has become the
present military misfortune of China. There were “soldiers” everywhere
now—in China one must use the word with a grain of salt, for to put a
simple country youth or a mere coolie into a faded gray cotton uniform
and hand him something resembling a weapon does not make a real warrior,
as the sight of rows of men standing at “present arms” and at the same
time staring back over their shoulders at a strolling foreigner
suggested. These artless, slouch-shouldered fellows lounged with fixed
bayonets along the graveled platform of every station; they packed the
trains to overflowing; they were drilling in companies and battalions,
once or twice, it seemed, in whole regiments, on bare, dusty fields
along the way. Had the half of them been genuine soldiers there should
not have been a bandit within a month’s march in any direction.
At Chengchow next morning the head of a man, his long hair carefully
wrapped about it, as if that were much more precious than what had been
his neck, lay a yard from his trunk, hands and feet rudely tied with
ropes, out on the bare space before the station. Perhaps he had really
deserved this frequent, casual Chinese fate, and was not the simple
coolie substituted for influential or unattainable criminals which his
appearance somehow suggested. The curious strolled over to see him, but
the eating-stalls just in front lost none of their custom or their
cheerfulness; by noon the body was gone, and dogs had licked up the
great patch of blood that had spread between head and trunk.
The major had already gone westward, and it was not until months later
that I visited Kaifeng, capital of Honan, long after the “Christian
General” had been transferred from there to Peking. Fu Hsi lived there a
little matter of 4775 years ago and not only ruled the Chinese but, if
we are to believe all we hear, taught them to fish with nets—the Yellow
River being but a supernatural stone’s throw away—to rear domestic
animals, to use the lute and lyre, in a way, one suspects, that has not
changed since, and spent the leisure time left him in instituting laws
of marriage and inventing a system of writing by using pictures as
symbols. No doubt he played some antediluvian species of golf and
lectured on the necessity of large families also, but early history is
often careless in preserving “human interest” details. What we do know
is that Kaifeng was the capital of China under the Sung dynasty, from
960 A.D. until the court was captured by the Kins nearly two centuries
later, a brother of the emperor escaping to Nanking and setting himself
up in his place, and remained a kind of capital of the Kins until they
were finally overthrown by their fellow-Tartars, the Mongols. Since then
the city has apparently been content with its provincial status.
Its wall encloses a mammoth space, much greater than that of Taiyüan,
for instance, but with great open spaces within it. Lakes before the
“dragon throne” in the center of the enclosure, though in the West they
would more probably be called ponds, give the site mildly a suggestion
of Peking. In a far corner the _tieh-tah_, or “iron pagoda,” is worth
coming to see, though the only iron visible about it is the Buddhas in
relief peering out of each opening up its thirteen stories. Of a
beautiful glazed color of reddish brown with imperial yellow specking
it, one might also call it the world’s largest porcelain. The keeper
insisted that it was two thousand years old, but I fear tradition
uncorrected by the printed page had deceived him as to the date of the
Buddhist invasion of China, to which her pagodas are due.
There was a busy, almost a pleasant atmosphere about Kaifeng, with its
moderately wide streets, and rickshaw-men almost as fast as those of
Peking; though squeaking wheelbarrows for all manner of freight, with
women on tiny feet sometimes straining in front of them, were numerous.
Feng Yü-hsiang, China’s far-famed Methodist, cleaned up Kaifeng in the
Christian sense during the six months he was ruler of Honan there. He
drove out prostitutes; the extraordinary sight of soldiers sprinkling
chloride of lime with their own fair hands wherever it was needed was
but one of many such during his days. The only scandal that seemed to
hover about his memory was an inordinate love for ice-cream, which
reduced him to the point of sending a soldier for his share on those
Sundays when he could not dine with the American missionaries in person.
But Feng was evidently too good a Tuchun of Honan to suit his master Wu
Pei-fu. The fellow who has taken his place has merely the outward honors
of the office; Wu gives him his orders in everything of importance, and
has his own auditors on the spot. Meanwhile the figurehead enjoys his
opium, his singsong-girls, and his prestige, while the city slips back
into the habits of which Feng attempted to cure it, and soldiers now and
then run amuck in it. A thousand mere boys drill a month or two in
compounds recently walled for them in the very outskirt where the
missionaries built in the hope of an un-Chinese bit of quiet now and
then, and pass on into the ever-swelling armies to make room for as many
of their fellows. Bugles blare seven days a week long before the June
hour of dawn, and all day long the recruits do their worst to sing
scraps of Western music as they march.
The chief interest in Kaifeng to the traveler in quest of the unusual,
however, is its Jews. The Chinese call them “Yu-t’ai,” which undoubtedly
is derived from “Judea,” though whether by word of mouth or merely
geographically is not clear. They came many generations ago, just when
or why neither their neighbors nor they themselves seem to know. To-day
they consist of “seven names and eight families”; that is, there are
eight Jewish families who have between them seven family names, every
one, as I have mentioned before, being compelled by circumstances over
which he has no control to adopt one of the hundred and some Chinese
surnames when he settles in China. Some doubt whether there are a
hundred individuals left; the present head of the clan put the number at
“one or two hundred.” They seem to have lost every vestige of Jewish
identity, except the name they are all known by, which persistently
survives. All those I saw looked less Jewish than do some of the
Chinese; certainly their features would not definitely distinguish them
from their neighbors, though the “head Jew” boasts that several persons
have come to take his photograph “because he has such a big nose.” I ran
this man Chao to earth for a somewhat similar purpose, and found him and
his son keeping a little shop in a slovenly part of town, stripped to
the waist and otherwise conducting themselves quite like Chinese a bit
above the coolie class. Their home behind had not an un-Chinese hint
about it—unless it was a large photograph of the father and son with a
very Russian Jew from New York between them, which occupied a
conspicuous place. But they were if anything more friendly, more
bubbling over with excitement at a visit from a foreigner and the awe
this inspired among their crowding neighbors, than pure Chinese of their
class would have been. The merry little father, it seems, has twice been
in jail charged with murder, if that really means anything concerning a
man’s character in China; the fact that he had gotten out again
suggested that there could scarcely have been much evidence against him,
for the Jews of Kaifeng are not wealthy.
They intermarry with the Chinese, and some have even taken up Chinese
idol-worship; the rite most insisted upon by orthodox Jewry has not been
practised for generations. Formerly they had what they called a
synagogue, but about fifty years ago this was completely destroyed, and
does not seem to have been kept in repair even until then. There has
been no attempt to restore it, and a stone tablet that stood within it
is all that is left. On this last relic is engraved a sketch of Hebrew
history and the names of the patriarchs. Once it bore also the names of
the principal Jewish families in Kaifeng, but these were obliterated in
order to throw off the scent those who tried some decades ago to
persecute them. This tablet, by the way, is now in the compound of the
Kaifeng mission of the Canadian Episcopal Church. No one in Kaifeng, as
far as is known, can read Hebrew, and the clan seems long ago to have
lost any interest in Judaism. Several portions of Hebrew scriptures have
been found on the streets for sale, evidently as mere curios. The chief
Jew proposed one day, in a talkative mood, that he order all the Jews to
become Christian and join the church of the American missionary with
whom he was speaking—because he had had a quarrel with the pastor of the
other church.
The father of two likely-looking Jewish lads who attend the American
mission school is a silversmith and has some means, but as a group the
Jews of Kaifeng have not yet developed any Chinese Rothschilds or
Guggenheims; nor is the wealth of the city in their control. In other
words they seem to have become completely “un-Jewed,” if the expression
be allowed, which is their chief claim to interest. For the Chinese, I
believe, are the only people in the world who have completely broken the
racial tradition of the Jews for remaining a distinct race. The slow and
patient sons of Han have blotted out the marks that have identified the
sons of Abraham for thousands of years, as they have pacifically
assimilated race after race that has come into close contact with them,
and it should occasion no great surprise if the Jewish colony of Kaifeng
were entirely lost within another generation.
Soldiers were particularly numerous on the “Lunghai” line west from
Chengchow, for this led to the headquarters of China’s just then most
powerful general, Wu Pei-fu. Chang and I fell to talking with some of
them in the crowded third-class coach. They were all volunteers—except
perhaps as hunger and its allies coerce—enlisted for three years, new
soldiers drawing, in theory, six “Mex” dollars a month, old ones, for
what our own call a “second hitch,” eight. But in practice none of those
with whom we spoke had ever been paid more than three such dollars
during a single “moon,” at least, as they put it, “in time of peace.” It
would be no great wonder if some of those off now on a furlough to their
homes with only that amount to their names should be cogitating some
violent means of improving that penurious condition of affairs.
One might become an officer within a year, they said, if one proved to
be a good soldier, particularly if one were a friend of some friend of
the general, or had money to scatter in the right quarter. Company
officers seemed to receive about as much as our enlisted men do, with
the privilege of buying their own food and clothing; but there are, as
every one who has passed a bit of time in present-day China knows, other
means by which they, and to a large extent the soldiers under them,
often appreciably increase their official stipend.
[Illustration:
Chinese farming methods include a stone roller, drawn by man, boy, or
beast, to break up the clods of dry earth
]
[Illustration:
Kaifeng, capital of Honan Province, has among its population some two
hundred Chinese Jews, descendants of immigrants of centuries ago
]
[Illustration:
A cave-built blacksmith and carpenter shop in Kwanyintang, where the
Lunghai railway ends at present in favor of more laborious means of
transportation
]
[Illustration:
An illustrated lecture in China takes place outdoors in a village
street, two men pushing brightly colored pictures along a two-row
panel while they chant some ancient story
]
Disarmament, I reflected, is like those long and complicated cures for
virulent diseases that are so easily caught. When what we somewhat
mistakenly call the most civilized nations of the world set the example
of war, of mighty military forces, the infection cannot but spread to
what seem to us the more backward races. Like a pebble tossed into a
pool, the bright idea is taken up by race after race, country after
province, until by the time the advanced nations are on the verge of
bankruptcy and ready to quit for a while they must keep the thing up as
a protection against the peoples of color and of strange faiths who have
been stirred up by their example. In China there is an added
complication. Soldiery, and banditry, too, are there largely a phase of
the problem of unemployment. If China has the four hundred million
inhabitants popularly attributed to her, any one who has traveled even
in the less crowded northern provinces has seen that at least a hundred
million of them must be perpetually hovering about the brink of
starvation. An ambitious politician, or a general who refuses to lose
his perquisites as such, himself imbued with the centuries-old dread of
becoming one of the hungry, inarticulate masses, gathers about him all
the soldiers he can recruit and find any means of keeping in his
service. Most of these are simple, boyish fellows gleaned from the farms
and villages before they have really taken root in the complicated
society and industry of China. If they are discharged, if they are not
paid, if the overthrow of their leader makes them fugitives, there is
nothing much left for them to do but to turn bandits. Many have served
alternately as soldiers and as brigands for years; many know no other
trade, and, though they did, it is little less difficult to find an
opening in the crowded, ill paid ranks of China’s workmen than to
perform the venerable trick of passing a camel through the eye of a
needle.
Thus the same men who, as soldiers, force helpless villagers to make up
their arrears in pay, find it no great leap, as bandits, to the
torturing of rich Chinese who fall into their hands, until their victims
have subscribed enough to drive starvation once more into the
background. Raids on towns, invitations to chambers of commerce to save
the community from the torch and looting by raising so many thousands of
dollars, are the order of the day in many parts of China; and testimony
is almost unanimous that most Chinese soldiers are as bad as the
bandits. In fact, there are towns which pay the _tu-fei_ fixed sums not
only for promising not to loot them but to keep the soldiers from doing
so. After all, is there any great difference between the flock of
generals or provincial dictators misgoverning various regions of China
as they see fit, by the use of their private armies, and another leader,
who in his day may also have been a general and quite possibly will be
one again, whose followers are referred to as bandits rather than
soldiers? Often the only real distinction is that the one is strong
enough to force recognition from the so-called Central Government, and
the other is not, though they may be equally scornful of its commands
and desires. How faint is the line of demarcation, even in the minds of
the most successful Chinese generals, is shown by the opinion of almost
all of them that when a force is defeated in one of the skirmishes of
China’s almost constant, if unacknowledged, civil war the victor should
take over most of the defeated troops and save himself the job of having
later to clear them out of his region as bandits.
China, it is evident, will never get rid of her bandits until she has
industries to absorb them, and her excess soldiers also. The latter are
commonly “disbanded” merely by some other force coming into the
territory they have been holding and driving them out, instead of
surrounding and disarming them. Thus when they are forced to turn to
brigandage they retain guns, ammunition, and uniforms; and they are
helped by every one, including the soldiers. Understandings grow up
between the two forces; the bandits bury money exacted from their
victims and pass the word on to the soldiers, who pretend to have a
great battle against the outlaws, but really dig up the money and bury
ammunition in place of it. One can scarcely expect Chinese coolies to
risk their lives, or even their skins, merely because they have been
enlisted as soldiers. Moreover, banditry has been more or less
continuous in China for many centuries. It is a rare play on the Chinese
stage in which there is not some reference to the danger of falling into
the hands of bandits; brigand chiefs are the heroes of many an old tale,
just as they are in the popular legends of Spain; more than one dynasty
was founded by some powerful outlaw who outfought his rivals. With
industries to absorb the rank and file, who can say how many of the
generals and chieftains themselves would not find a better field for
their abilities, and a better way to free themselves from the dread of
falling below the hunger line, as “captains of industry”?
I overtook the major at the headquarters of Wu Pei-fu, with whom he had
been an observer during his struggle against the lord of Manchuria a few
months before. It took an hour by rickshaw to reach the place from the
station, along the most atrocious caricatures of roads I had yet seen,
even in China. The route lay through the walled town of Honanfu, better
known to history as Loyang. Kuang Wu Ti made Loyang his capital shortly
before the Christian era, when rebels drove him out of its predecessor,
Changan, in what is to-day Shansi. It is a neglected part of China that
has not been the capital at one time or another. This one was still the
real seat of power not only of Honan Province but of a large portion of
the putative republic. Inconsistently it was more miserably unkempt,
more overrun with visible human misery, than any Chinese city I had yet
come across, possibly because it was thus far the most southerly. Dust
and the beggars squatting and rolling in it were all but
indistinguishable until the latter were cringing almost under the
runner’s feet, beggars as covered with filth as any in India, exhibiting
great open sores, men so diseased that they spent their unoccupied
moments in picking themselves to pieces.
We came at length through clouds of swirling dust to a score of great
modern barracks, housing the division with which its now powerful
commander has served since his lieutenant days. A formidable series of
sentries and functionaries admitted me gradually through a massive gate,
across a much flower-bedecked courtyard, through a voluminous anteroom,
and finally into the official waiting-room. Three foreigners, who
happened all to be Americans, and a baker’s dozen of Chinese were
waiting. The major and a politically-minded youth temporarily released
from Harvard, who was to accompany us on the outward journey, had just
returned from the manœuvers at which the general spends his days on
horseback, riding off daily at seven and returning at five, without
taking food during that time. But many of the Chinese had been in the
waiting-room since morning; indeed, it would have been easy to suspect
that callers sometimes have the privilege of waiting overnight, for in
the four corners stood as many large beds, canopied, but wooden-floored
in the hard Chinese style. A long table occupied the center of the room;
several more or less easy-chairs leaned against the wall. Nothing is
more discourteous in China than to fail to keep a caller supplied with
tea, and several orderlies, taking the leaves out of a familiar tin can
in a corner behind a bed and transferring them to the pot in hands that
showed no visible signs of recent soaping, kept the little handleless
cup before each of us constantly filled and steaming.
Toward sunset there was a stir among the retainers about the anteroom
and court yard, half-whispers of “Ta-ren lai-la” (the great man has
come) from the Chinese visitors, and a few moments later we foreigners
were asked to lead the way across another flowery court to a somewhat
more sumptuous apartment. A young man in a gown of beautifully figured
gray silk, of handsome and strikingly alert features, and speaking
almost perfect English, had taken charge of details with the air of an
accomplished, yet exceedingly cautious, master of ceremony. At least a
score of persons drifted in, all Chinese except the four of us, but from
all points of the compass,—politicians down from Peking for a
conference, or looking for a chance to get there; correspondents of half
a dozen native papers and foreign news services, some widely traveled
and speaking English or French fluently; one or two from far southern
China who could only converse with their fellow-countrymen through an
interpreter or a mutually familiar foreign tongue; and a scattering of
men of purely Chinese manners to whom a polyglot gathering was evidently
a new experience. The assemblage suggested a king’s _levée_, with the
added touch of costumes ranging all the way from the entirely Occidental
to the very Oriental.
While we chatted, Wu Pei Fu slipped in among us almost unnoticed—for an
instant,—until the silence of respect of the Chinese for any one who has
reached power fell with a suddenness that was startling. The general had
laid off his uncomfortable uniform and leather footwear, and was dressed
in the long silken gown and cloth shoes of his native land. Small almost
to the point of being tiny, he had undoubtedly “personality”; there was
something about his vivacious manner and quite evident mental alertness
which quickly set him above many of the larger and more stately men in
the room. Even the “peanut” shape of his close-cropped head, so frequent
in China, seemed to be but an added touch of slenderness; the hands,
ladylike yet with closely trimmed nails, were an index to his whole
appearance, which might have been summed up in the words “dapper yet
strong.” His face was unusually vivid for a Chinese of his type, perhaps
because he spends so much time out in the sun, particularly because of
the extraordinary brilliance of his eyes, which fairly radiated during
the frequent smiles that disclosed a small fortune in gold. Nothing,
unless it was the rather stringy black mustache that fell untrimmed over
the corners of a firm and slightly sensuous mouth, resembled in the
least the oily enigmatical Chinese of our popular fiction. Though we
knew him to be fifty, he could more easily have passed for thirty-five,
and he spoke with what even I could recognize as the rather slovenly
Shantung accent.
At a slight wave of his hand the gathering sat down at two large round
tables set for a Chinese meal, the general apologizing to us foreigners
for not placing us at his table, with the explanation that he had
serious business to talk over with other visitors, evidently the
politicians down from Peking. Politics, say those who know Wu as well as
an Occidental can know a Chinese, partly bore and partly perplex him; he
feels wholly at home only in military matters, but the plane to which
his success as a general has raised him makes escape from political
affairs impossible. They may be right, or they may never have plumbed
below the surface of an unquestionably clever Oriental. The meal
progressed like any informal Chinese dinner. Flocks of servants in and
out of uniform brought bowl after bowl of the favorite foods of China,
from which we fished with our carved ivory chop-sticks in competition
with the rest of the circle. As one of the favorite sports of Japanese
and Russians, as well as of the Chinese, waxed stronger and left us from
the West completely outdistanced, even the staid gentlemen from rural
parts, quite evidently unaccustomed to “outside barbarians,” mellowed
and grew chatty, in an improvised language made up of gestures,
monosyllables, and occasional appeals to the correspondents who spoke
English or French. That sport is known in China as _gam-bay_, and
consists of nothing more than tossing off at a gulp, whenever the head
of the table gives the signal for a toast, the little porcelain cupful
of _samshu_, _sake_, or _vodka_, as the case may be, which servants
constantly replenish, then showing the empty inverted cup to one’s
fellow-guests about the table. It may be a simple little pastime for
those whose gullet has been galvanized by suitable training. But, for a
simple person who has never outgrown in some matters a rather
puritanical boyhood, it is apt quickly to result in embarrassment at the
impossibility of proving enjoyment of hospitality in a way that will be
fully understood. From time to time, of course, wet hot towels were
passed to the guests, and when appetites flagged at last there came the
bowls of lukewarm water in which the Chinese all too audibly rinse their
mouths after eating. Our declining both these forms of ablution caused
more or less wonder among the swarming servants and orderlies, according
to their previous acquaintance with Westerners. Low as most prices are
in China, this presumably daily hospitality to his flocks of visitors
must make an impression on the never too plentiful funds of any Chinese
general in these penurious days. But nothing is so dear to the Chinese
heart as food, nothing rated really genuine without a feast attached;
and to fail in the first rule of deportment would be a proof of waning
fortune and a serious loss of “face.”
It was out in the waiting-room again that we had anything like a
personal chat with the general. His tenacious fellow-countrymen having
been deftly shaken off one by one, he joined us four Americans about the
long, green baize table on which so many hundred gallons of tea a year
are impersonally dispensed. His manner was a mingled hint of relief at
having at last reduced his callers to those who certainly could not have
come to buttonhole him for political preferment, of that respectful
cordiality which Chinese in high places usually show toward any and all
Westerners, whatever they may really feel toward the West, and of a
suggestion of expansiveness apparently due to that fondness for
_gam-bay_-ing which his friends sometimes fear may eventually be his
undoing. Through his polished and cautious young interpreter he
explained that he had come to us last that he might give us more time
and attention, and from this auspicious beginning the conversation ran
on through the fixed cycle of Chinese courtesies, we assuring him that
we had come expressly to pay him our respects, he replying something to
the effect that America has always been China’s greatest and most
sincere friend, and so on for many rounds. But there was never a moment
in which it was not evident that the general took all this buncombe and
froth no more seriously than we; he was not only “democratic” in the way
that has become so widely the fashion of late years, but he was plainly
supplied with a reasonable fund of common sense, even though it might
have Oriental trimmings. Wu Pei Fu is a man of larger background than
many of those who have forced their way to the front in modern China,
being what corresponds there to a bachelor of arts, as well as a
military graduate with a long practical experience in military service.
But the powers of evasion inborn in all Chinese do not seem to have
suffered seriously from these rude contacts. Though we chatted for some
time, nothing really worth recalling issued from the general’s lips,
parted through it all by a toothpick, except the astonishing statement
that there will be no more civil war in China and that the country will
probably be unified within three years, after which he expects to be
sent to the United States as an official representative. It may easily
be that he considered these remarks mere after-dinner chat and expected
us to take them as such. As we bumped back to our lodgings on the other
side of the walled city in an asthmatic Ford which the general insisted
on furnishing us, I regretted that some of us had not had the courage to
ask some direct questions on the subject which just then could not but
have troubled his dreams.
Briefly, banditry had about reached its pinnacle in this very province
where the super-Tuchun held forth—under his very nose, so to speak. Two
nights before, a large force of outlaws had entered the walled city of
Honanfu, barely two miles from the great barracks housing his division,
and, after warning the four thousand soldiers in town not to attempt
resistance, had killed one of the principal merchants, evidently because
he had refused to pay them tribute, and then had thoroughly looted his
establishment and calmly returned to their rendezvous. On the very day
of our visit the Protestant missionaries living and working in a great
compound outside the walls had received unofficial, indirect word from
Wu that they must thenceforth live within the walled town, as he could
not otherwise guarantee their safety.
But these were local matters. What was threatening the general with
complete loss of “face,” throughout China and even abroad, was the
kidnapping of foreigners from his very region of the country. The
bandits seemed to show somewhat of a preference for missionaries,
perhaps because they were most available, possibly, as one of them
assured his worried friends, because the Lord was purposely offering the
apostles this splendid opportunity to convert the wicked. There was no
robbery involved, no demand for a money ransom, no more hardships for
the captives than were naturally unavoidable in the circumstances. They
were allowed to communicate frankly with their friends at frequent
intervals; they were made as comfortable as the circumstances of being
dragged from hiding-place to hiding-place permitted, though this did not
spare them the acquisition of such ills as dysentery and pneumonia
during their forced wanderings. The bandits presented one demand and one
only,—that Wu Pei-fu, of the Central Government, should enlist them as a
part of the army and give them a section of the country to garrison,
_and to tax_! In other words, foreigners whom duty or pleasure took into
the interior of China were to be made the pawns in a local political
quarrel in which they had neither part nor interest. With all the
grievances that exist between different factions in the troubled
republic, there would be ample opportunity for every Occidental
venturing beyond the sea-coast to get an intimate acquaintance with
bandits and their lairs, particularly if this clever little scheme
succeeded and won imitators.
There were strong suspicions that high officers of the Honan armies, if
not Wu Pei-fu himself, were winking at the bandits and their activities,
either because these paid in a share of their loot or for other reasons
too intricate for the simple Western mind to follow. But this
impression, while justly taking the super-Tuchun to task for not
adopting a vigorous policy against the bandits, for using his influence
to coerce Peking while failing lamentably to rule that portion of the
country within gunshot of his barracks’ door, it did not, generally for
lack of personal knowledge, take due account of the territory in which
the brigands were operating. In the pell-mell, tumbled mountains of
western Honan they might circle in and out while a whole modern army
rarely caught a glimpse of them. Bombing airplanes might be an effective
argument, but Chinese armies are poorly supplied with such modern
luxuries, and there was the safety of the foreign captives to be
considered. In other words, the bandits held the best hand, and about
all even a virtual dictator to the Central Government could do was to
enter into negotiations with them as if they were a legal and
responsible opposing faction.
This, at last, is precisely what Wu did. Though it was not until weeks
after our visit to his headquarters, the loss of “face” involved when
nearly a dozen foreigners of half as many nationalities, including women
and children, had been carried off in his own province, added to slow
but moderately stern and concerted measures by the legations involved,
not merely toward the fictional Central Government but against Wu Pei-fu
himself, forced him at last into effective action. One of the main
troubles is that Wu and all his ilk, thanks largely to the supineness of
foreign governments which should impress the opposite point of view upon
the hit-or-miss rulers of present-day China, have on hand a bigger game,
too often of a personal nature, than the rescuing of a few foreigners
serving the brigands as pawns in their own little schemes. A loud and
certain voice from abroad, as was proved in this case, would probably
greatly reduce banditry even in Honan, the centuries-old home of
outlawry, and certainly would make the carrying off of innocent
foreigners as hostages a less simple and commonplace matter. Government,
however, even when it is not ludicrously misinformed on the simplest
phases of the situation in China, seems to be much more interested in
issuing ten-dollar passports and collecting income taxes from its
nationals abroad than of lending them the protection these should
involve.
[Illustration:
In the Protestant mission compound of Honanfu the missionaries had
tied up this thief to stew in the sun for a few days, rather than
turn him over to the authorities, who would have lopped off his head
]
[Illustration:
Over a city gate in western Honan two crated heads of bandits were
festering in the sun and feeding swarms of flies
]
[Illustration:
A village in the loess country, which breaks up into fantastic
formations as the stoneless soil is worn away by the rains and blown
away by the winds
]
In this case all the foreign captives were released, gradually, within a
week after the legations began to show real signs of life, not greatly
the worse for wear, and with an absorbing after-dinner topic to last
them for years to come. But it was easy to guess what splendid arguments
stray foreigners are to prove in domestic Chinese controversies, of
which they may be as supremely ignorant as uninterested, during perhaps
years to come, now that this little scheme of the bandits had been
crowned with such signal success. It is easier still to see how much
bolder they will grow in gathering such arguments, how much rougher,
when it serves their purposes, in the use of them, and how much the
self-seeking militarists of China will care how far the acknowledged
outlaws go in the matter, so long as a wishy-washy policy, supremely
ignorant of the first rules of Chinese psychology, continues to
represent the Western world in this matter.
Just what argument had been brought to bear on the brigands remained for
several days a more or less profound secret; but the “old China hand”
had his suspicions, which turned out to be fully justified. He suspected
that temporizing, compromising, and weakly yielding had been the
consecutive orders of the moves, for long experience has taught him the
more outstanding features of the Chinese character. When it could no
longer be concealed, word seeped up out of Honan that virtually all the
demands of the bandits had been granted in full. Their chieftains were
given high rank and official titles, and the men themselves were
incorporated into the “national army,” whatever that means, any world
agreements toward disarmament notwithstanding. Not only that, but their
organizations had been left intact and given a corner of the province to
rule, particularly to “tax,” instead of at least being split up among
other organizations in which some slight curb might be put upon their
activities. The Chinese populations involved protested, in so far as
they dared, but of course in vain. That is another misfortune of the
supine policy of foreign governments, that the law-abiding Chinese
masses suffer all the more accordingly. But, after all, perhaps they are
more or less responsible for the low state of authority in present-day
China, and subject to a corresponding discount of sympathy.
Months later down in Yencheng, the center of the foreigner-capturing
brigandage of Honan, I picked up a few details of their calling. Though
the outside world hears much more of it, there is hardly, so far, one
foreigner carried off by bandits to a thousand Chinese. The usual method
is to attack a village and take a man of standing, or his son of fifteen
or so, for ransom; but rather than run the dangers of dragging the
captive about with them, the outlaws often hand him over to some
resident of a neighboring village, perhaps only a woman, with the threat
to burn the house and kill its occupants if the hostage is not there
when they return for him. Many a helpless family is thus left stranded
between the devil and the deep sea. Occasionally girls are taken, but
the girl or woman who is kept overnight loses her reputation and is not
worth ransoming. Therefore they are either returned after negotiations
lasting a few hours, or are kept as camp property. When they are after
money or material advancement, Chinese brigands do not mistreat women;
these suffer more when soldiers run amuck and loot a town. Like
banditry, this is old Chinese history; in the days of Kublai Khan, of
whom we hear such romantic stories, Mongol Buddhist priests or lamas
were given an iron ticket from the emperor which gave them the right to
enter any house in China, drive out the men, and install themselves in
their place. For a fortnight a year during the Mongol dynasty, popular
Chinese history records that the country was given over to promiscuous
debauchery; bearing these things in mind one is surprised at the
comparative lack of abuse of women by Chinese malefactors.
On the way from the Peking-Hankow main line to Honanfu there had been
much of that clay-sandy earth called loess, and in the rambling half-day
from there to the rail-head there was more of it. Cultivation, rain,
wind breaking this down to varying levels, leave fantastic forms of
earth as striking as the rocks of Namur, precarious cliffs in which are
cut cave-dwellings, shrines, even temples; indeed, for long stretches
there were few other kinds of buildings. Hundreds of little fields, one
could see even from the jolting train, were gradually but irretrievably
wearing away to a common level that would eventually make cultivation
out of the question. A doubly uncertain world this, where one’s home is
a hole in the cliff-side that may any day slough off, where one must
always walk cautiously along the edge of either field or veranda, lest
it at any moment drop from under. We passed through many tunnels, always
thankful to find them stone-faced. How this soil ever succeeds in
holding together even as long as it does was one of the mysteries that
beguiled all that morning’s journey.
At the scattered town of Kwanyintang the railway abandoned us to our own
devices. Fortunately the Tuchun of Honan Province, China’s far-famed
“Christian General,” did not. All the way from Kaifeng, where the major
had gone to visit him, he had sent one of his aides to smooth the way
for us. This handsome and intelligent fellow, still in his quilted
silky-gray uniform, had once been a lieutenant-colonel but had given up
his rank in order to work for social welfare among the soldiers. He
carried several bundles of Chinese pamphlets in hectic covers, which
turned out to be translations of various books of the Bible, to be
distributed among the country people. What distinguished him still more
from the mass of China’s swarming soldiers was the fact that he insisted
on paying his fare. Had not this idiosyncrasy of the “Christian
General’s” troops already been familiar to the officials of the Lunghai
Railway, it is quite possible that we should have seen a pair of them
faint away with astonishment at the door of our unupholstered
compartment.
In the far reaches of China there is a comradeship among all
foreigners—perhaps the word “European” or “Caucasian” would be more
exact—stronger than that between fellow-countrymen in many parts of the
world. Let a rumor drift to a traveler’s ears that there is a
_wai-guo-ren_ in town, or indeed within reasonable striking distance of
his route, and he feels it as much his duty to call, quite irrespective
of the stranger’s particular nationality, as the latter does immediately
to offer him hospitality. There was nothing unusual, therefore, in the
fact that we were met at the present end of the line by an Armenian, a
Greek, and a Rumanian, all members of this Belgian-French railway
concession, who at once turned their office over to us as a lodging. Nor
was there any reason to be surprised when a Russian Jew, who had just
ridden down from Chinese Turkestan in record time, turned up there
hoping to sell us his horses. He was true to his race, however, when the
question of price came up, and we were not seriously tempted to alter
our original plan to leave Kwanyintang in mule-litters.
It is proof that our aide from Kaifeng was something more than Christian
that he had the expedition we required gathered, signed, and sealed
before nightfall. The usual system in such cases is to leave the whole
matter to some responsible innkeeper. He sets the price, engages mules
and whatever conveyances are necessary, and assumes responsibility for
the proper carrying out of the contract. In this case, as is also usual,
he came bringing a great sheet of flimsy paper daubed with Chinese
characters in red—the contract in question—and decorated with several
red “chops,” the personal seals of responsible residents of the town,
which serve as a cross between recommendations and sureties. He had also
come to ask for three fourths of the sum agreed upon, which was sixteen
“Mex” dollars per litter for the journey of 280 _li_ to the first town
over the Honan-Shensi border. Ten Chinese _li_, it may be as well to
specify once for all, make approximately three miles, though in practice
there are “small _li_” and “large _li_,” in mountainous country two or
three times as many _li_ going as coming, or vice versa, and
occasionally a complete unintelligence as to road measurements. The
innkeeper must have expected that we had taken the trouble to inform
ourselves and were aware that at most only half the amount involved is
advanced, but the Chinese never risk losing an opportunity to profit by
the possible ignorance of a foreigner. When we declined even to pay the
customary half until we could inspect the mules next morning, we ran
some risk of undoing all the labor of our more than Christian aide; for
the sons of Han hate even more to make the slightest rebate on custom
than they do not to be able to overreach it a few points. Had we been
Chinese, probably negotiations would have halted then and there until
the money was forthcoming; but foreigners still have some of their old
prestige and reputation in the Chinese Republic.
Our precaution really was hardly worth the trouble, for the night was
too black when we began to load to tell a mule from a corpse or a litter
from a lumber-pile. A Chinese mule-litter consists of two pieces of
telegraph-pole some ten feet long, which are fastened together at either
end with a crosspiece that sets into a pack-saddle, and beneath which
are two straddling wooden legs to keep the contrivance high enough off
the ground when the two animals are taken from beneath it. Between the
two poles is looped a network of ropes covered with a straw mat, with
sag enough in them to hold the traveler’s baggage and leave him room to
spread his bedding and to sit or stretch out at full length upon it.
Over all this there is an arched roof of straw matting, not dissimilar
in appearance to that of a “prairie-schooner.” My own custom of living
on the country during my travels had become so fixed that I had still
not adjusted myself to the major’s notions of a proper equipment. We had
two army-trunks, one of them very full of canned foods. Folding cots,
bedding-rolls, spare garments sufficient even for the wintry weather we
expected before the journey was over, and a small mule-load of merely
personal conveniences were enough to render speechless a wanderer long
accustomed to carry all his possessions on his own back. When to all
this was added a “boy” and a cook, and all the equipment necessary for
them to function in a fitting manner, I felt more as if I had again
joined the army than as though we were merely setting off on a little
personal jaunt. It will not be unduly anticipating, perhaps, if I
mention now that, while my companion sometimes realized he was not
living at home, and solicitous persons back in Peking fancied we were
roughing it, memory of many another cross-country tramp made this one
seem to me like traveling in extreme luxury; and the worst of it is that
I thoroughly enjoyed the change.