ON TO SIAN-FU
Early on the fourth day we climbed up out of a great road cañon to a
mammoth stone archway that marks the boundary between Honan and Shensi
provinces, and immediately pitched down again into another chasm of
equal depth. Nor was there any improvement in the fragile soil, in the
endless lines of coolies going and coming, or in the mangy beggars who
squatted, loudly lamenting, in the dust here and there along the sunken
road all the way into strongly walled Tungkwan. This important outpost
of Shensi Province lies just over the Honan border, on the Hoang Ho,
yellow river indeed here at this shallow season, across which one may
see the loess hills of the province of Shansi, just then suffering
acutely from drouth. The world had worn away from about the massive wall
that surrounds the town, as it does from about even a mud shrine in the
loess country, so that we had to climb again, rather stiffly, to reach
the imposing city gate that admitted us.
In strict duty, no doubt, the soldiers straggling about it should have
demanded our passports, which the Wai-chiao-pu in Peking, whose
privilege it is to look after “outside-country people,” had smeared with
half an acre of red-ink-stamped characters purporting to be permission
to visit five specified provinces, after which they must, officially at
least, be returned to Peking for further desecration. But all the
soldiers said was “Pien-tze,” and the Chinese visiting-cards we produced
in answer to that laconic request were evidently all they wanted as
proof of our identity. Since the major’s name chances to begin with Ph,
forcing him also to pass as Mr. Fei in Chinese, we were at once taken
for brothers, even in the face of decided facial proof to the contrary,
and passed on our way unquestioned.
The native pastor of the _Fu-ying-tong_, as the Chinese call a
Protestant mission, was not in town. But in the interior of China any
Caucasian passes at face value, at least until he has definitely been
proved a counterfeit, and we were soon installed in several dusty,
slightly furnished rooms of the rambling, temple-like compound, while
Chang and the cook explored the kitchen with the caretaker. Had we
arrived an hour earlier we might perhaps have gone on at once and
reached Sian-fu that same night. For, strange as it sounded, there was a
motor-bus line running more or less daily half-way across “Hidden
Shensi,” from Tungkwan to the capital. But the buses started early in
the morning; moreover, with all our dunnage we should probably need a
special car, and there was just then none in town. If we really wished
to go on next day, it would be best, they told us, if the major in his
official capacity should wire the Tuchun at Sian-fu, to whom this little
venture in less sluggish transportation personally belonged. Meanwhile,
there was the matter of settling with our muleteers, and deciding how
much _cumshaw_—without which no transaction in China is considered
properly closed—we cared to give them. Tungkwan, too, was large and
interesting enough, with a wall which clambered for a long way along the
crest of a ridge high above us; but there is much sameness to most
Chinese cities, and this one seemed to offer nothing unique. But at
least there was something of that quality in a leisurely half-day for
the ablutions, razor-wieldings, resorting, and repose of which we were
in arrears.
It did indeed require a special car for all our expedition, and even at
that I was forced to banish to the running-board the chauffeur’s
assistant, who habitually fills out the front seat of any public
conveyance of this sort in China. His duties seemed to be to crank the
car, to attend the wants of a perpetually parched radiator, to tinker
with the engine whenever there was the slightest chance to do so, and in
general to help the imported chauffeur to reduce the exiled vehicle from
a movable to an immovable object as soon as possible. The driver had
been brought all the way from Tientsin to grace Shensi’s new enterprise,
having been chosen evidently because of what he did not know about
automobile engines and their proper manipulation, and therefore sure to
be free from prejudice. If we understood rightly, the conveyance had
been carried piecemeal through the loess cañons on mule-back, and no
doubt some of the parts had been assigned tasks for which they had never
been trained. But it is axiomatic that nothing short of total
dissolution will prevent a Ford truck from functioning, and less than
two hours after this one had been requested to start we were staggering
in spasmodic jerks out through the western city gate.
It is 290 _li_ from Tungkwan to Sian-fu, almost exactly the same
distance as we had made in mule-litters in more than three days; so that
though we never attained breathless speed the journey felt rapid by
comparison. Once through the massive stone archway that separated city
from country, the going did not at first seem to be appreciably better
than the alleged road behind us; one gasped at the temerity of any one,
especially the timid Chinese, actually setting out on so ideal a route
for an obstacle race with the expectation of really reaching a
destination nearly a hundred miles away. But in time we came to realize
that it was what the Chinese consider an unusually fine road. Loess had
for the most part given way to a somewhat more cohesive soil, and there
were no real cañons. When he was Tuchun of the province, the “Christian
general” had built, mainly with soldier labor—the two words seem
incompatible in China—this raised highway beside the old haphazard route
all the way from the frontier to the capital. His intentions had been
excellent; but his funds were limited, the soil available contains not a
hint of stone or gravel, and public coöperation was of course wholly
lacking. The general had done his best to replace this last un-Chinese
asset by board signs set up at frequent intervals along the way, with a
warning that the highroad was reserved for automobiles only, and that
any other use of it would be severely punished. His successor had
evidently tried to keep in force this unprecedented interference with
Chinese freedom of individual action, and his authority was certainly
considerable, as witness the fact that only here and there had the
sign-boards even yet been turned into fuel. But the Tuchun could
scarcely be expected to patrol the famous highway personally, and even
at that he could not have kept an eye on all parts of it at once.
Therefore it was much more densely thronged than the typical Chinese
road down below it. Donkeys, mules, pack-cattle, rickshaws—these often
run the eighty-seven miles in less than two and a half days, and make
the round trip in five, at a cost to the passenger of about two American
dollars—innumerable wheelbarrows, especially coolies in never ending
procession, prefer to ignore the sign-boards, if indeed even the slight
minority who can read them consider the prohibition as really meant.
Worst of all, whole regiments of the Tuchun’s own soldiers were moving
eastward, evidently in order to be more immediately available to their
real commander-in-chief, Wu Pei-fu, and more than half the carts that
carried these and their helter-skelter paraphernalia were themselves
frankly disobeying the placarded order. These sharp-tired, two-wheeled
contrivances are magnificently designed for ruining a road, particularly
one built merely of earth, in the shortest possible time, and the result
of the trespassing of even the few thousand we passed during the one day
can readily be imagined. Then there were many spots where the Chinese
genius for never repairing anything until repair is absolutely
unavoidable manifested itself, and here and there some farmer had
frankly chopped the highway in two to make a passage for his
irrigation-ditch, a privilege as time-honored as China’s written
language.
[Illustration:
An old tablet in the compound of the chief mosque at Sian-fu, purely
Chinese in form, except that the base has lost its likeness to a
turtle and the writing is in Arabic
]
[Illustration:
This famous old portrait of Confucius, cut on black stone, in Sian-fu,
is said to be the most authentic one in existence
]
[Illustration:
A large town of cave-dwellers in the loess country, and the terraced
fields which support it
]
[Illustration:
Samson and Delilah? This blind boy, grinding grain all day long,
marches round and round his stone mill with the same high lifted
feet and bobbing head of the late Caruso in the opera of that name
]
There was a certain satisfaction in seeing Nemesis, in the form of our
staggering, stuttering truck and the regular bus we sometimes passed,
sometimes dropped behind, overtake these lawbreakers whom neither
authority nor public opinion was able to curb. There are few automobiles
in Shensi Province, probably never more than ten, and few of the throng
along even its most nearly modern road are in a frame of mind to meet
one without what the “movie” world calls “registering astonishment.”
Most of them register a very exaggerated form of it, which not only
affects all the muscles of the body but often manifests itself even in
their domestic animals. With their creaking wheelbarrows and a heavy
head wind to hamper their hearing, many permitted us almost to step on
their heels before they showed any inclination to give us the right of
way; but this selfish attitude was more than offset by the alacrity with
which they did so when once their minds were made up. At times the road
immediately ahead was so crowded with coolies and mule-drivers fleeing
wild-eyed at cross-purposes that we were forced to pause and even to
halt until the atmosphere had cleared itself sufficiently to make out
the ruts again. The conventional line of action was to abandon
wheelbarrow, animals, or pole-slung burdens at once and to go, quite
irrespective of destination. The road being from six to ten feet above
the surrounding country, barely wide enough in most places for one car
to run comfortably, with sheer sides and often a deep trench on either
hand, the punishment which overtook many of the trespassers almost
fitted the crime.
The coolies invariably grinned broadly or laughed aloud at their own
discomfiture, with that quick and genuine sense of humor which
transforms their rude, comfortless lives into a kind of perpetual game
and makes them, for all their many less agreeable qualities, almost
lovable. The few travelers of the haughtier classes, however, strove to
preserve the dignified deportment due their high standing, even in the
face of this ridiculous contrivance of inhuman speed from the barbarous
outside world. But they did not always succeed in upholding all the
precepts of Confucius. Among scores, probably hundreds, who performed
extraordinary feats of agility for our beguilement during that day, the
prize should be awarded to a man we passed less than two hours out of
Tungkwan. He was unusually well dressed, as if of the wealthier merchant
class, and was also bound westward, seated high above his stout mule on
the pile of bedding and baggage in cloth saddle-bags which the
well-to-do Chinese long-distance traveler carries between himself and
his saddle. The mule under him was jogging comfortably along on the edge
of his own side of the road—which in most of China is the left—though
not on his own road, leaving us room to pass without more than the
hazard to which the brink-loving chauffeur habitually put us. The animal
showed every evidence of self-control and the ability to handle the
situation without mishap, but he reckoned without his merely human
master. We were perhaps ten yards behind them when the man’s ears and
brain coördinated and he looked around. His first impulse was evidently
to snatch the reins and attempt to better the already perfect behavior
of his mount, but the un-Confucian speed with which we were lessening
the already slight distance between us confirmed him in the impression
that it would be safer to dismount with all seemly haste and leave the
animal to its own fate. Without losing an iota of his poise or dignity,
or even his position for that matter, the haughty gentleman calmly
slipped off his high seat on the ostensibly safe side, still in the
right-angled attitude of a sitting person—and admirably maintained that
pose until he disappeared, seat first, into a cross between a swamp and
a lake which unfortunately bordered the road at that particular place.
The chauffeur and I had the exclusive benefit of this portion of the
performance; the rest was reserved for those bouncing on our baggage in
the truck itself. When the major first became aware of the existence of
the haughty trespasser, it was in the form of a mere head, topped by a
dripping Chinese skull-cap, protruding from the body of water alongside,
and his last view of him as he receded into the horizon was of a
water-gushing figure clinging to the edge of the road and shaking his
open hand after the disappearing truck in the gesture which the Chinese
substitute for shaking the fist, while the mule stood just where he had
been abandoned, patiently awaiting the good will of his temperamental
master.
With the end of October it had turned distinctly colder, which was
fortunate; for the heat of Honan would have made the exertions often
required of us much less of a pastime than they were. Though it had been
smilingly new when it reached the province three months before, our poor
old truck resembled some maltreated, ill fed donkey which even its
heartless Chinese owner must soon turn out to die, yet which faithfully
toiled on to the very best of its ability. So long as it hobbled along
beneath him, the alleged chauffeur had not a worry in the world; but
whenever the slightest hill or sand a bit deeper than usual brought us
to a halt he was as helpless as a Hottentot with an airplane. Having
roared the engine almost out from under its hood, as the only antidote
suggesting itself to him, he sat supinely back in his seat, at the end
of his resources, and waited for some one else to do something about it.
Luckily there are always plenty of coolies within call on any important
route in China; but their natural timidity increased in the presence of
the strange snorting monster that most of them had only seen hastily
from a distance, and it required the force of example to get them to
approach and exert themselves. Thus it came about that, though we had
paid rather generously for the transporting of our expedition from the
boundary to the capital of the province, we furnished the motive-power
ourselves for a considerable fraction of the journey.
For one short distance there were a few rocks and trees; but we were
soon in swirling loess again, dust so thick that it covered our faces as
with a white mask. Now and again we passed a high-walled town, usually
through the inevitable extramural suburb, a long line of ramshackle mud
huts, with men crowded together under the thatch awnings, eating all
manner of strange and unsavory-looking native dishes. Even in the rare
cases when we entered the city itself there was nothing much more
imposing. All morning long Hwa-shan, second only to Tai-shan among the
five sacred mountains of China, walled off the southern horizon with its
series of jagged ranges, shaped not unlike a mammoth sleeping elephant,
their sunless northern slopes like a great perpendicular wall of
beautiful blue-gray color, topped by a wonderfully fantastic sky-line.
About 2200 B.C. an early emperor of what was China in those days, with
this region as a nucleus, used to go to Hwa-shan to offer sacrifices and
to give audiences to his subjects, and the range has been sacred in
Chinese eyes ever since.
One might have fancied that a world war was on again, so often were we
held up by endless east-bound trains of soldiers, most of them lounging
in straw-roofed carts of two wheels, red banners with white characters
flying. It was noticeable that no one but the soldiers had horses, of
which most of China has been drained by her swarming, autonomous
militarists. Companies, even battalions, were busily drilling here and
there; two or three times we passed large military camps in tents of
wigwam shape, with a modernity about them that looked incongruous
against such backgrounds as a great medieval, anachronistic city wall
blackened by the centuries. Twice we passed mule-carts laboring east or
westward with the mails; all day long a distorted line of
telegraph-poles bearing a sagging wire or two stretched haphazard into
the distance.
The country grew a bit more rolling, with even less suggestion of loess,
as we neared Sian-fu. For miles the way was lined with countless graves,
ranging from dilapidated little cones of mud to immense mounds. Bygone
glories lay all over the landscape, monument upon turtle-borne monument,
so much more important from the Chinese point of view than passable
roads. At length the great east gate of Shensi’s capital rose above the
horizon, like some huge isolated apartment-house, and just as the last
daylight of October flickered out we roared our jerky way up its broad
main street to our destination.
To say that I was disappointed in Sian-fu would be somewhat overstating
the case. But as nearly as I can recall the preconceived picture, always
so swiftly melting away in the glaring sunshine of reality, I expected
something more “wild and woolly,” something a bit less like an abridged
edition of Peking. Surely the city that was for centuries the chief
Manchu stronghold of the west, almost their second capital, which had
welcomed the cantankerous old dowager fleeing before the justifiable
wrath of the Western world, which had seen such cruel and unnecessary
bloodshed during the birth of the republic, which had so often been the
outpost on the edge of a great Mohammedan rebellion, might at least have
had some faint thrill, some little hint of hidden danger, left to cheer
up the jaded wanderer. Instead, there was the same flat, placid city
partly within and partly without a mighty stone wall, swarming with the
harmless pullulations of petty traders, cheerfully enduring all the
time-honored discomforts of China, quite like those which lie scattered
like unto the sands of the sea in number over all the vast land that so
long gave Peking its undivided allegiance.
One stepped out of the big post-office compound where most
English-speaking foreigners find hospitality, upon that surprisingly
broad main street, to find it paved with something that has long since
lost the smoothness essential to comfortable rickshaw riding, and lined
for much of its length with houses unusual in northern China, being of
two stories. Along this one may come upon wood-turners quite like those
of Damascus in their methods—a little shallow, frontless shop, a kind of
Indian bow with a loose string for lathe, a sometimes toe-supported
chisel. Perhaps a householder would find more interesting the long rows
of wheelbarrows, filled with huge chunks of that splendid anthracite so
abundant and so cheap in northwestern China, backed up against the curb
and patiently awaiting purchasers. But at the big bell-tower marking the
center of the city this broad street contracts to squeeze its way
through the resounding, dungeon-like arch, and never again regains its
lost breath. Here the paving is of big flagstones, worn so convex that
riding is not merely uncomfortable but well nigh impossible, except to
those who are inured by generations of such experiences, or to whom the
loss of “face” would be fatal. Others, at least new-comers, may rather
welcome this unspoken invitation to dismount and stroll. For though
there may be nothing in it not to be seen in a hundred other places in
China, “sights” are as compact in this busiest street of Sian-fu as if
they had purposely been gathered together here as into a museum.
This main thoroughfare, and the one crossing it at right angles beneath
the bell-tower, cut the Shensi capital into its definite quarters. The
one on the right hand, as one comes in from the east, is, or rather was,
the Manchu city, given over now largely to great open spaces; for here
hundreds of the then ruling class jumped into wells or otherwise
violently did away with themselves, or were violently done away with, to
a number popularly estimated at more than five thousand, when China last
threw off an alien yoke and announced itself a republic. Mere mud walls,
with the brick or stone facings gone to serve in some other capacity,
mark most of the compounds of what were perhaps for centuries Manchu
palaces. Of the palaces themselves there are few traces; dust and bare
earth are much more in evidence, though trees have survived to an extent
almost suggestive of Peking. Beyond this, filling the northwest quarter,
is the Mohammedan section, much more crowded and with few open
spaces—with none, perhaps, except they be public or private courtyards.
There are towns in western China where Moslems must live outside the
walls; but Sian-fu has been more charitable toward her unabsorbable
minority, and even during the great rebellion they retained their
intramural quarter, suffering little more than constant surveillance,
and no doubt occasional reviling. Whether or not they would be driven
back into it again if the worshipers of Allah chose to live in some
other part of town matters not, for custom is as strong a bond with them
as with their fellow-Chinese, and whatever is Moslem about Sian-fu will
be found in this quarter, at least when bedtime comes. Here are all the
mosques; here are women who have scarcely stepped outside their
compounds in a generation, not even with covered faces; from here set
forth each morning the water-carriers, the muleteers, the common porters
who profess the faith of Medina. Outwardly the stroller through this
quarter may find it scarcely at all different from that Chinese half of
the city which lies to the south of its main thoroughfare. He may note
that the skullcaps of men and boys are more likely to be white than
black, that he sees only the most poverty-stricken class of women, and
not many of those, that many of the passers-by have liquid black eyes
and a very trifle more self-assertion, a slightly less lamb-like
expression than the common run of Chinese. Possibly it will occur to
him, too, that more of the little mutton-shop restaurants wide-opening
on the pulsating main street are on the north side of it, and that the
men who tend and patronize them also favor white skullcaps and have
something intangibly redolent of the Near East in features and manners.
But his eye is likely to be caught by more conspicuous things along the
stone-hard thoroughfare,—big whitish loaves of bread nearly two feet in
diameter and only two or three inches thick, the splashes of color of
myriad heaps of ripe persimmons, an occasional woman with natural feet,
relics not of Mohammedan but of Manchu custom. There live half a million
people within the city walls and as many more in the environs, say
unofficial guessers, and about one in ten of these are Moslems and a
bare two thousand Manchus, the latter now mainly servants and
recognizable to the others by their Peking dialect and the somewhat
different dress of the women.
I picked up a man of standing in the Moslem faith one morning and
strolled out to the chief mosque. Outwardly there was nothing to
distinguish it from any Chinese compound, enclosing perhaps a temple, to
judge by the typical tile roofs and the tree-tops rising above it.
Indeed, the courtyard itself, beautiful with its old trees and
buildings, filled with the twitter of birds, which seemed to make it a
kind of sanctuary, restful and peace-loving in atmosphere, would not
easily have been recognized as containing anything but the usual
promiscuous mixture of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs.
There were the same wooden tablets bearing two or three big Chinese
characters leaning out from under the eaves; the same curious little
figures adorned the upturned gables; there had been a genuinely Chinese
indifference about cleaning up after the birds. But closer inspection
brought out the underlying Mohammedanism. Not far from the entrance
stood a big stone tablet, purely Chinese in form, even to the top-heavy
dragon carvings; but the text that covered it was not Chinese but
Arabic. Here and there were other stone-cut bits of that same tongue;
“Yalabi” the not inhospitable group that had gathered about me called
it, though one or two murmured something sounding like “Toorkee.” The
beautiful little three-story tower of pillar-borne roofs turned out to
be the minaret from which a Chinese muezzin singsongs the faithful to
prayer. Certainly it was leaving Chinese custom behind to be required,
however courteously, to leave my shoes at the door of the mosque itself
before I could step through the cloth-hung opening of a building which
up to that moment might have been anywhere in China. But inside we had
at last left China entirely behind. Not a suggestion was to be seen of
those myriad fantastic and demoniacal figures which clutter up the
interior of Chinese temples; the Koran’s prohibition of graven images
had been obeyed to the letter, and the final sanctuary itself, where the
men of Sian-fu’s northwest quarter gather each Friday to turn their
faces westward toward Mecca and pray, was as severely beautiful in its
Arabic style as if it had been directly copied from the Alhambra.
The Islamites of China, or at least of Sian-fu, seem to have lost that
fierce inhospitality toward the unbeliever which makes it impossible for
those not of the faith even to enter many a famous mosque farther west.
Centuries of dwelling among them has given even the intolerant
Mussulmans much of the tolerance, or at least of the easy-going, almost
indifferent attitude, toward their religious paraphernalia, which is so
characteristic of the Chinese. There was no objection, so long as I
removed my shoes, to my wandering at will in every part of the mosque,
to stepping within the niche in the west wall which takes on much of the
sanctity of Mecca, not even to my photographing it. The Chinese Moslems,
indeed, seem never to have heard of the Prophet’s implied injunction
against permitting one’s likeness to be transferred to paper; any
refusal to stand before my kodak among the group that trailed me about
the compound was probably due to mere Chinese superstitions, coupled
with that dread of giving their fellow-men the faintest opening for
ridicule which is one of the strongest traits in the Chinese character.
For these fellows were essentially Chinese, for all their religion,
their swarthier complexions and more Semitic noses; even the few among
them whose features would not have been conspicuous in a throng of Turks
or Arabs had all the little mannerisms, and to all appearances the
identical point of view, except in their alien faith, of their
fellow-countrymen.
Though there is no intermarriage between the Chinese Mohammedans and
their neighbors, the blood that runs in their veins is largely the same.
When the militant faith of Islam swept in upon China from the west, at
the time when it was spreading in all directions, and was halted in our
own only by the activity of Charles Martel in France, the surest way of
escaping the sword was to embrace the new faith; and no one moves more
quickly under the inspiration of fear than the Chinese. Then, too, the
conquerors needed wives, or at least women, and took them from among the
conquered. Perhaps its greatest gains were during the inflow of trade
following the victories of Kublai Khan. For a long time it was, and
probably still is, the custom to adopt Chinese children into Mohammedan
homes. Thus the Turkish or Arabic features of the invaders have been
greatly modified, and even the few who have a trace of these left seem
to be greatly outnumbered by the purely Chinese descendants of those who
embraced the faith under compulsion, so that even within a mosque
compound it is often only by inference, or the catching of some slight
detail of custom or costume, that the stranger can recognize a
“Hwei-Hwei.” Foreigners resident where the Mohammedans are numerous
claim to be able to tell one at sight, if only by a faintly more
stiff-necked attitude toward the rest of the world, a drawing of the
line, beyond which he refuses to be imposed upon, just a trifle closer
to his own rights than do his pacific Chinese fellows. Step into a
temple at any time, and you will receive nothing but profound courtesies
from the Chinese, however unwelcome you may be at that moment, say these
experienced Westerners; enter a mosque when a service is in progress,
however, and while the customary outward politenesses may not be
lacking, the atmosphere will be charged with something that says as
distinctly as a placard, “This is not the time to call.” I had a little
hint of this myself just before taking my departure. A high dignitary,
what we might call a bishop, wearing a strange blue costume and
supported as he tottered along by two lesser officials, issued from an
inner court on his way to perform some ceremony in a private family. My
request to photograph him was declined, not discourteously, but very
definitely and very promptly, as if, being a _hadji_ who had made the
pilgrimage to Mecca, he was well aware of the ban which the Prophet put
on the making of likenesses, whatever might be the general ignorance of
it about him; and something gave me the feeling that if I had attempted
to act contrary to his wishes the smiling group of his coreligionists
about me would have found some unviolent Chinese way of preventing me.
The non-believers among whom they live have, of course, other terms than
“Hwei-Hwei” for the Moslem minority, some of them so far from
complimentary as to be out of usage in any but the lowest society. One
of the less unkindly ones is “Pu-chih-jew-roe-ren,” the don’t-eat-meat
people. The Mohammedans have a name or two for themselves and their
religion so respectful and self-complacent that their fellows decline to
use them, so that the middle ground of “Hwei-Hwei” is the one on which
the two sections of the community commonly meet. This term means
something roughly corresponding to “the associated people,” the single
character for _hwei_ meaning, approximately, “association.” The Y. M. C.
A. which functioned—under a boyhood friend of the major, from Maine, it
turned out—in the quarter of Sian-fu opposite to that of the mosques was
known as the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” which is quite the same as our own
abbreviation, except that our third letter, with all that it stands for,
is left out. This does not of course mean that the religious element is
lacking in the organization as it exists in Sian-fu—quite the contrary
seemed to be the case; but to stroll into the purely Chinese compound,
with its Chinese buildings, its board placards covered with only Chinese
characters, was also not to realize at once that one had entered the
precincts of another alien religion. The “Hwei-Hwei” establishments
looked outwardly pure Chinese partly because of the fear of persecution
in the past; the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” I believe I am safe in saying, did
so mainly because it had been forced to house itself in such quarters as
it found attainable.
It would, by the way, be unfair to the score of men and women, a few of
them our fellow-countrymen, who are giving their best efforts to
educational, medical, and, not disproportionately, I trust, to
denominational matters in the several Christian missions scattered in
and about the Shensi capital, not to make mention of them, even though
they may not vie, in the minds of those of us from the West, in
picturesqueness and local color with the mutton-sellers in the
market-place. They live unmolested, even befriended now by most of the
rank and file and by nearly all the higher officials, and in a comfort
befitting modest human beings; but the time is not so far distant as to
be by any means forgotten when they came nearly all to being martyrs to
their cause. The man who stood all night to his neck in a pond, holding
his baby girl in his arms while the rest of his family was murdered by
the mob that circled for hours around him, is still there at his post,
with a new family to certify that he still has faith in those to whom he
has chosen to give his life’s work. Lest neither side forget entirely,
however, there is a modern brick Memorial School in the western suburbs,
with its bronze tablet in memory of the victims,—one mother, one young
man, and six children ranging from eight to fifteen. It was no
antiforeign feeling, in the accepted use of that phrase, which gave the
missionaries of Sian-fu their most dreadful experience; that is, they
were not attacked either as missionaries or as Westerners. The
revolution that was to bring the republic had come; the hated Manchus
were fair prey at last; and while some of the rougher element no doubt
took full advantage of their sudden brief opportunity, there was
honestly no distinction in the minds of the uneducated masses between
Manchus and any other “outside-country people.”
The temple of Confucius out near the south wall was as peaceful, as
soothing a spot as could have been come upon within sound of human
voices, with that aloofness from the world so befitting the philosophy
of the great sage. But here, too, there was something beneath the
surface not inherent in the ancient architecture or the rook-encircled
tree-tops. A modern touch had been introduced; one suspected the hand,
or at least the influence, of Feng Yü Hsiang, the “Christian General,”
who had only lately ceased to be Tuchun of Shensi to become that of
Honan. Feng’s penchant for anything, ancient or ultra-modern, which will
bring the results he seeks is well known. The Confucian Hall had several
walls covered with very up-to-date placards in colors, ranging all the
way from illustrations of the awful depredations of the fly—it was hard
to imagine the Chinese worrying about a little thing like that—to the
graphically pictured assassination of Cæsar and such scenes as the
Nativity; for Confucius, of course, has nothing of the intolerance
conspicuous in Christianity or Mohammedanism. In another section there
were portraits of many famous foreigners, Washington, Lincoln, and
Franklin being the only Americans among some forty. There is surely
nothing reprehensible, though something more than incongruous, in trying
to make Confucius a modern teacher and his temple a place of propaganda
against the merely physical ills.
So near the temple of Confucius as to be dully audible from it all day
long is the famous “Forest of Monuments.” Centuries ago, you will
remember, a Chinese emperor ordered all the classical books to be
burned. In order that such a catastrophe should never be possible again,
all the important texts in those classics, gathered together from odd
volumes that had escaped the flames, or from the memories of old
scholars, were carved on scores of stone monuments—hundreds, I believe
one might safely say, after wandering through the several long
temple-sheds or shed-temples in which they stand close together in long
rows. There all day long, from the end of the New Year’s debauch of
loafing until the New Year comes around again, stand dozens of men
taking rubbings of the famous texts. The head-high monuments are covered
over with big sheets of what is almost tissue-paper, and coolies and
boys, perhaps not one among whom can read a single character of the many
thousands about them, pound and pound with wooden mallets until copies,
covered with a kind of lamp-black except where the indented characters
have left them white, are ready to be added to the stock of shopkeepers
near the entrance to the grounds. The consumption of these flimsy
facsimiles throughout the Far East is evidently enormous, for the
dullish _rap-a-rap_ of many mallets is seldom if ever silent from sun to
sun.
Off by itself in a conspicuous spot stands the Nestorian Tablet, most
famous of them all, at least to those from the Western world. For on it
is carved the story of the first coming of Christianity to China, long
before even the Jesuits included that land in their field of operations.
To the ignorant Occidental eye it looks quite like any other
turtle-borne stone carved with upright rows of intricate characters,
except that above them there is cut a well defined Greek cross. The
Nestorian Tablet, I believe, was not considered much of a find when it
was first dug up out of a field in the neighborhood of Sian-fu; but the
fame of that jet-black slab has since grown so great that the not
over-distinct characters are likely to become even less so with the
constant taking of rubbings.
No less ebony black is the stone at the far rear of the same compound on
which a few thin white lines sketch what is widely reputed to be the
only authentic portrait of Confucius. The austere simplicity of the
execution and the not unkindly severity of the portrayed face are at
once a contrast and a rebuke to the silly gaudiness of demonology that
clutters almost all Chinese temples. Then, before Sian-fu can be left
behind, there are the famous stone horses, mere bas-reliefs of galloping
steeds done centuries ago, yet so full of life and action as to be the
despair of any living sculptor. These race low along the outdoor wall of
a corridor in the local museum, and imperfectly now, for a vandal all
but destroyed them. He was a Frenchman, and the love of art was so
strong within him that he resolved to steal the famous horses of Sian-fu
and carry them off to his native land. The big stone slabs were
impossible to transport entire; the art-loving Gaul broke each of them
into several pieces, of course with the connivance of bribed Chinese,
and the carts bearing them were already many miles on their way when
they were overtaken. It is such little adventures as this, justly
distributed throughout China, which make it strange that
“outside-country people” are so generally treated with respect by nearly
all the four hundred million, and only very rarely as “foreign devils.”
Perhaps the major would have been detected through his incognito of a
man on a purely personal jaunt anyway, but it was that wire from
Tungkwan concerning motor transportation that gave the game away
entirely. We had barely begun to deplore with our host in Sian-fu the
difficulties of filling portable zinc bath-tubs with hot water that must
be purchased and carried in from the outside, when two Chinese officials
called. One was merely a magistrate, but the other was high up in the
“foreign office” of the province, as well as no less fluent in our
tongue than in his own. He had come at once to pay his respects, to
welcome us to the province, and to bring the startling information that
we were expected to lodge in some yamen or palace which the Tuchun’s
soldiers had spent all day in preparing in a manner befitting the
American military official who was unexpectedly honoring Shensi with his
presence. I was not grieved that the delicate task of declining these
accommodations fell upon the major’s broad shoulders. We could not, of
course, put the Tuchun to any such trouble; we were already installed in
the capacious dwelling of the postal commissioner, who not only was
British but had innumerable other qualifications to recommend him, who
was keeping bachelor hall and was entitled to company, who was a very
old friend—the major did have, I believe, a note of introduction to
him—and who from time immemorial had been the accepted host of any
visitor to Sian-fu whose native tongue was English and whose evolution
had passed the eat-with-your-knife stage. There was no necessity of
divulging such further facts as the fear that even the Tuchun’s ideas of
supreme hospitality would probably include wooden-floored beds, unswept
corners, and a perpetual crowding by curious and irrepressible
retainers, and that civilized toilet-facilities, effective
heating-arrangements, and freedom to come and go without formality were
quite as sure to be lacking. The chief emissary, being versed in foreign
ways, probably knew that all these thoughts were none the less existent
for remaining unspoken, and accepted our declination in what seemed to
be good spirit after far less than half the usual number of repetitions
required by full-blooded Chinese courtesy.
But that did not prevent us from being overwhelmed with official
formalities during our stay in Sian-fu. Formality is fully as sturdy and
omnipresent a crone in China as in Latin America. It would have been the
height of discourtesy, of course, not to make a formal call upon the
Tuchun soon after our arrival; this, in the case of so distinguished a
visitor as the major, a fellow in arms, had to be returned; there was
old precedent for giving us an official feast, which could only properly
be reciprocated by getting our host to invite the Tuchun to an elaborate
luncheon; the civil governor and the corpulent head of the “foreign
office” must at least be honored with a call, which we must be prepared
to have retaliated; it would have been discourteous not to return the
kindness of our first two callers, even though the magistrate was so low
in rank that we could not remain with him more than five minutes; each
group of missionaries in town expected us to dinner, or lunch, or tea,
or, if worse came to worst, to breakfast; the Chamber of Commerce and
other bodies of important citizens expected speeches—fortunately some
engagements hopelessly conflicted—and, not to go particularly into
details, there was a complete round of farewell calls that could not
under any circumstances be omitted. Looking back upon it, I am amazed to
realize that we spent only three full days in Sian-fu, and even at that
managed to see most of its worth-while “sights”; and that we left it
still in tolerably good health in spite of the fact that we accomplished
as many as five incredibly heavy meals, not to call them “banquets,” in
a single day.
This feat was made possible by the fact that Chinese feasts come at
about eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon. Thus we could
stagger away from either of these just in time to sit down with a
deceptive smirk of pleasure at the repast prepared by some of the
foreign groups with a special view to assuaging our ravenous road
appetites. In anything concerned with the Tuchun at least, we were
obliged to save “face” both for him and for ourselves by bumping about
town in a “Peking cart” such as all Sian-fu residents of standing
regard as one of their most indispensable possessions. In fact, the
Tuchun sent his own for us. There were two of them, gleamingly new,
but nicely graded as to caste in details invisible to us, yet as
plainly publishing to the Chinese the distinction between a great
foreign official like the major and a mere traveler like myself as if
their blue cloth sides had been daubed with red characters. A huge,
well groomed mule drew each of them; they were upholstered, padded,
and cushioned not only within but on the sort of veranda where those
of lower caste may sit, while the two wheels were magnificent examples
of that universal to-hell-with-the-public attitude of China which
dictates great sharp iron-toothed tires that would destroy any road in
record time, yet which have absolutely no justification except
swank—and perhaps the fear of skidding on wet corners during the
three-mile-an-hour dashes about town.
In calling upon a Chinese official one first sends one’s Chinese card
over by a retainer, in order that the great man may be prepared. Within
half an hour or so one may follow, presenting another card to some
underling who will be found waiting where, in the case of a Tuchun, one
might otherwise be casually run through with the naked bayonets which
the swarms of soldiers about such a place so generously display. The
underling disappears for some time, because the great man is sure to
hold forth in the far interior of the flock of buildings filling his
long compound, where he could be reached only with difficulty by an
unauthorized visitor, even though he knew its devious passages well. In
time he returns, and marching before the visitors and holding their
cards above his head spread out fan fashion, names to the rear, like a
hand at poker, he conducts the way. Gradually more important
functionaries take up his task, until the callers are invited to seat
themselves in a sort of ante-guest-room by a man who may even be of high
enough rank to dare to open conversation with them. This anteroom is
usually furnished with a platform built into one wall and upholstered
into a divan littered with red cushions, with a somewhat raised space,
or a foot-high table, in the center. Tuchuns, however, even of the far
interior, have in most cases adopted a foreign style in this as in
military uniforms, and one finds oneself instead in a larger and very
commonplace room furnished with a long, cloth-laid table surrounded by
chairs, with at most a Chinese scroll or two on the walls as the only
hints of local color. But a flock of servants and orderlies, setting a
little handleless cup of tea before each guest and under no
circumstances permitting him to empty it, keep him reminded of his
latitude and longitude. If he is of any importance, he is also furnished
a cigarette—by having a single one laid on the cloth in front of
him—which, if he shows any tendency to consume it, some one lights for
him before he realizes it. If he is a man of extraordinarily high rank,
such as a military attaché from “Mei-guo” on the other side of the
earth, the principal flunky offers him a cigar. This invariably is of
some sad Manila brand—the Chinese word for cigar is “Lüüsung-yen,” or
“Philippine tobacco”—this time in the box, and usually a full box,
whether in the hope that he will not be so bold as to disturb the
symmetry of the precious contents or because cigar-smokers are so rare
in China that the box seldom loses its pristine fullness. At length the
great man himself appears from behind a blue cloth door reverently
lifted by several soldiers; there is a general uprising about the table;
the host and his guests each fervently shake hands with themselves and
bow times innumerable, like automatons hinged only at the waist; and at
a graceful gesture of the Tuchun’s hand the gathering finally subsides
into the chairs and proceeds to converse on things of no importance as
fluently as the guests’ command of Chinese or the ministrations of an
interpreter permit. If the call is nothing more than that, it ends in
the anteroom where it began. After another long series of bows the
guests are accompanied to the door, and as much beyond it as befits
their rank. This is one of the most delicate points of Chinese
etiquette, the one on which the foreigner, at least if he is newly
established in the country, is most apt to stumble. For there is an
intricate gradation of ranks in society even in “republican” China, with
many factors modifying each under different circumstances; and not to
see one’s guest far enough is as serious a social blunder as to
accompany him beyond the point to which his caste entitles him. In a
Tuchun’s yamen—in theory they call such a place _gung-shu_, or “people’s
house,” since the rise of the republic—there may be nearly a dozen doors
or openings of some sort between the inner depths and the front
_p’ai-lou_, and at each of them courtesy requires much “you first” stuff
and pretended protests from the guest against his host’s going any
farther, so that when the final leave-taking is far out on the threshold
of the last gate, as in the case of an official representative of great
America, a glance at a watch is likely to be startling when one finally
does at last break away.
Our first call on the Tuchun of Shensi was at his military headquarters
in the ex-Manchu quarter of town. Here his predecessor, Feng Yü Hsiang,
had turned the largest available open space within the city walls into a
drill-field with long rows of modern brick barracks. On the big
stone-and-mud wall enclosing all this there were painted at frequent
intervals huge Chinese characters. But these are not the shoe and
tobacco advertisements the resemblance to a baseball-field might lead
the uninformed stranger to conclude; they are some of those moral
precepts with which the “Christian General” is famous for surrounding
his soldiers. Much of the material for wall and barracks, by the way,
was said to have come from the palaces in which the Dowager Empress of
sinister memory lived with her pet eunuch during the year following her
flight from Peking in 1900. The former military governor saw no good
reason to keep up this imperial establishment under a republican régime,
and now there remains but little more than a field scattered with broken
stones where less than a year before our visit there had been something
mildly resembling the Forbidden City in Peking. Speaking of the crafty
old shrew in question, we no longer wondered so much at her cantankerous
disposition when we realized that she rode all the way from Peking to
Sian-fu in a “Peking cart,” eating the dust of the loess cañons, and
spending her nights at the odoriferous inns along the way, some of which
still boast of that fact by their names or decorations.
The Tuchun’s dinner in the major’s honor was an exact replica, except in
location, of the call of respect we had made the day before—up to the
time when we had begun to take our departure on that occasion. This time
the whole party began about five o’clock to drift toward the
“banquet-hall” at another end of the compound, with as much contention
at every portal along the way as if each had been a dead-line upon which
a nest of machine-guns had its muzzles trained. The guests included all
the foreigners in town—that is, adults of the male gender—even to a
Japanese official who had come to collect an indemnity from the province
for the killing of a stray cotton merchant from Nippon; and the flock of
Chinese officials mingled with them lacked no one worth while in the
political circles of Sian-fu. The three provincial military chieftains
with whom we dined during our western journey all go in for
foreign-style dinners on official occasions, and attain their intentions
in this respect as far as local information and the extraneous learning
of their cooks can carry them. The result is an entertaining gustatory
hybrid resembling its alien parent perhaps a bit more than its Chinese.
Of the irrepressible swarming of persistent flies over all the
sumptuousness of that lengthy table I really should have said nothing,
for it is surely not the duty of a Tuchun to squander his military
genius against such insignificant enemies. That the soldiers flocking
almost as thickly about us should have passed slices of bread in their
hands instead of using a plate was as genuinely Chinese as were their
several other minor _faux pas_, and merely improved the local color. At
least the great Oriental institution of _gam-bay_-ing held its unaltered
own, even in the presence of half a dozen Protestant missionaries and a
chief guest of honor who lamentably failed to hold up his end of that
pastime.
[Illustration:
The east gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the capital of Shensi,
rises like an apartment-house above the flat horizon
]
[Illustration:
All manner of aids to the man behind the wheelbarrow are used in his
long journey in bringing wheat to market, some of them not very
economical
]
[Illustration:
The western gate of Sian-fu, through which we continued our journey to
Kansu
]
[Illustration:
A “Hwei-Hwei,” or Chinese Mohammedan, keeper of an outdoor restaurant
]
The privacy of the military governor—and therefore usually the
dictator—of a Chinese province must indeed be slight. When he has
guests, swarms of soldiers and servants crowd every doorway and fill
every window with staring faces, if, indeed, they do not flock into the
room itself. Every joke, every slightest scrap of information picked up
from the conversation is instantly, and often more or less audibly,
passed out into the yard and relayed to the last coolie within the
compound. Most Tuchuns have the reputation of double-dealing to feather
their own nests; how on earth they ever succeed in privately arranging
any of their little deals is a mystery, for there must surely always be
some underling about to listen to the conversation. This is not
eavesdropping but the frank presence of servants and the like, even of
mere strangers struck with curiosity, in situations where the worst bred
ignoramus in the Western world would never dream of intruding; and as
the Chinese desire for privacy is as slight as their sense of it, such
intrusions are not only seldom rebuked but probably in many cases not
even noticed. Even a private home is little more respected than a public
office. When the Tuchun came to lunch with us his soldiers poured into
the house of our host, crowding the doorway of dining-room or parlor
and, as we ate or chatted, fingering their Lugers, unconsciously
perhaps, but as if they were expecting us at any moment to attempt the
assassination of their chief.
Shensi’s ruler at the time of our visit had been civil governor of the
province under the “Christian General.” Upon his own accession to chief
power he retained, and apparently honestly attempted to keep up, many of
the reforms and policies of his predecessor, though he made no
profession of Christianity. Feng, for instance, had abolished the “red
light” district and actually driven the inmates out of the province, a
very unusual and to most of the population an incomprehensible action.
Several times the Sian-fu chief of police had petitioned the new Tuchun
to allow these places to be reëstablished, because they brought large
increases to the provincial treasury—to say nothing, of course, of the
liberal “squeeze” to all officials concerned. His refusal was still
apparently genuine at the time of our visit. But pity the poor officials
of present-day China who wish to be honest and progressive, and perhaps
even moral in the Western sense; a Tuchun must at least have money to
pay his troops, must he not? When Feng took over the province of Shensi
it had been for some time under the rule of a former bandit, who had
followed an honored precedent in collecting all land and other possible
taxes for years in advance. This left the new Tuchun the rather scanty
_likin_ taxes and a few minor sources of income on which to run his
government and keep his troops up to their unusually high efficiency. It
could not be done; and after he had appealed to the Christian
missionaries to show him any possible means to avoid resorting to that
extreme, Feng fell back upon the lucrative tax on opium exported from
his province or passing through from Kansu beyond, however illegal such
traffic is and whatever his personal feelings toward it were. A mere
local detail this; but it is symbolical of hundreds of problems facing
those who really wish to work for the future betterment of China, and it
is not difficult to guess what happens in the case of the many more weak
or indifferent men who have attained to some degree of power, with still
no vision beyond the universal corruption which sank its roots deep into
Chinese society in the old imperial days.