CHINA’S FAR WEST
From the moment that it enters the province of Kansu, the most westerly
of China proper, the ancient route from Sian-fu to Lanchow is lined by
huge old willows, supplanted here and there by a sturdy poplar. A
heritage from some far-seeing ruler of the province under the old
dynasty, these flank with four rows, and occasionally with six, the wide
strip of land on which a road might long since have been built, had it
not been in China. But though there seems to be some strong sentiment,
probably with fear as its main ingredient, against cutting them down,
not a few of the trees are missing; and the many more that stand with
their roots indecently exposed explain what befell those that are gone.
For how can a tree live to ripe old age in a loess region where the
earth is constantly dropping away or blowing out from under it?
Yet this unusual bit of Chinese forethought arouses a grateful feeling
in the passing traveler. In cloudless summer the shade must be a
godsend; and though the November sun was so welcome that travelers had
already worn paths along the edge of the winter wheat on the south side
of the shaded route, the long rows of waving branches were a joy merely
to look upon in a region where one may journey for days at a time
without catching sight of another tree, or even the slightest living
thing of the vegetable kingdom, as far as the eye can reach on either
hand. Magpies and crows build great stick nests in these branches, but
it was noticeable that boys who will struggle for the possession of a
twig or the most unseemly substitute for fuel on the ground below never
climb up after the abandoned nests that would make such a fine haul. The
reason is probably simple: they are afraid; for while his Western
contemporary is constantly risking his neck in hazardous feats which
have no economic value, the Chinese boy displays that timidity which
habitually remains with him as a man, even in the face of material
rewards for a bit of courage.
We found it 430 _li_ from Sian-fu to the border, and crossed it at the
village of Yao-tien early on the fifth morning. By this time we were up
on the plateau which, gradually rolling higher and higher, culminates in
the lofty land of Tibet; and though here it may not be more than three
or four thousand feet above the sea, this was enough to give appreciable
aid to advancing winter. All that day there was a wind fit to blow us
off the map, with every promise of a snow-storm to come, and everywhere
women and children, and not a few men, were out gleaning the little dead
willow branches as they fell, almost in showers. With the sun gone it
was bitter cold now, and we were forced to walk almost as much as we
rode. It was on this fifth day that we met two Russian Jews with long
beards, and a string of carts the first of which flew a makeshift white
flag bearing some Chinese characters and the assertion, “Belong Americun
firm from New Jork.” Possibly, the misspelling aside, it did, but in
these days allegiances are often quickly made by those foreigners in
China who would otherwise lose their rights of extraterritoriality and
the greater protection for their persons and their belongings which goes
with it.
Some sage has asserted, in the face of ample proof to the contrary, that
it never rains but it pours, and on that day at least we were inclined
to agree with him. For barely an hour afterward, while we sat eating a
cold lunch on the cold _k’ang_ of a miserable little inn, with only hot
tea to improve the situation, two more foreigners walked in upon us.
They were big sturdy Catholic priests, Hollanders and twin brothers,
also in great forests of beards, and wearing cassock-like Chinese gowns
that showed signs of long and arduous travel. One had been for thirty
years, and the other for three, in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan, and
having been ordered to another post in northern China, they had set out
in August and been already three months on the road. The natural route
to their new station would have been northward from Lanchow, down or
along the Yellow River, but bandits were said to be so active along it
that they had struck eastward instead. It would be unjust to assume
another reason which may not have existed; but personally, if I had
lived for thirty years, or even for three, in Sinkiang, I should have
gone a little out of my way, bandits or no bandits, to travel on
railways and see at least Peking and get a little bit in touch again
with the Western world before burying myself once more in the far
interior of China. The animation of the padres during our brief
conversation in English and French and an occasional word of Chinese
proved that they had not grown indifferent to Caucasian intercourse for
all their long exile; indeed, they somewhat resembled in manner college
boys who have just reached home after a freshman year without vacations.
The new pope, they said, and we had confirmations of the statement on
our western trip, was filling all the posts in a large area of central
Asia with German priests, and moving the former incumbents, among whom
Belgians predominate, to less strategic positions.
In all the sixteen days between the capitals of Shensi and Kansu we did
not, unless my memory fails me, meet another traveling foreigner; hence
our astonishment at seeing four in one morning. There was, indeed,
appreciably less native travel in the new province, though great chunks
of coal were still coming out on donkey-back, and wheelbarrows were
creaking under all sorts of loads, particularly of huge pears for which
the province is famous, and which, persimmons growing rare, constituted
our chief dessert all the rest of the journey.
Several wandering trails that kept us out of the chasm—though on the
plain above the unhampered wind threatened at any moment to lift us from
the saddle—came to agreement at last with the road, and we went down a
mighty descent, which toward the end was rudely stone-paved, into the
populous town of Kingchow. Here the earthquake of two years before,
greater reminders of which we were to see farther on, had among other
feats neatly broken in two both a high hill and the temple that stood
upon it, so that a score of heathen idols in intense discordant colors
and devilish postures stood out only half protected from the cold windy
world. A church steeple rather incongruously broke the sky-line of the
lower town, and in the neat compound beneath it we found hospitality for
the first time with those Scandinavian-American missionaries scattered
all along our western route. The sturdy couple—sturdiness is an all but
necessary asset for inland China mission-fields—who had been cultivating
this not too promising human garden since the days of their youth, had
had their share of adversities; but the one that came most nearly
shaking their faith had happened within the last two years. After
decades of struggle with contributors at home and workmen and
contractors on the spot, they had at last reached the proud day when
their imposing black brick church was not only completed but relieved of
its mortgage. While his wife and coworker superintended important
operations in the kitchen and dining-room, the pastor sat down to write
the glorious news to his religious constituents in America. “At last,
dear brethren,” he began, “our church, center of a vast district that
has no other, is fin——” “_Brrrrum!_” came a sudden roaring and cracking
of walls and ceiling, apparently even of the ground itself, while
pictures swung to and fro from their pegs, and the furniture danced a
sort of improvised Virginia reel. It was all over before the
missionaries had wholly realized that a great earthquake had occurred,
but when they went out to look at it the new church was cracked and
split and broken, an all but useless ruin.
The threat of snow was gone next morning, which was calm and bright,
with hardly a breeze where the raging wind had been. The route lay up a
river valley all the way to Pingliang, and fully half the populace along
the way, it seemed, was out sweeping up with their crude
bundle-of-sticks brooms the last vestige of leaves and twigs from under
the willow-trees. In this all but fuel-less land there is an added
meaning to the old adage beginning with something about an ill wind.
There were countless half-ruined mud-wall compounds along the valley,
from the edge of which sprang the inevitable piles of terraced fields.
Strings of donkeys, each with two huge yellow-brown glazed jars filled
with smaller ones in straw, looked at a little distance like some
curious type of land-crab. We had scarcely seen a soldier since leaving
Sian-fu, but now we began meeting long lines of them again, whole
armies, at least as the word is used in China, moving eastward in carts,
on horses, and on mules, and once or twice on long strings of camels.
They were dark, rather surly-looking fellows, I fancied, though this may
have been only fancy, or the effect of an outdoor life on men with the
higher bridged noses that suggested a considerable strain of Arab blood.
In Shensi Moslems are not recruited as soldiers; but in Kansu, the
stronghold of the Chinese Mohammedans, there are many thousands of them
in uniform; and here they marched freely over the winter wheat, an inch
high, with that complete indifference to the rights of the laborious
peasants along the way which is typical of bandits and soldiers alike
throughout China.
Yet our hosts of the night before had assured us that the soldiers of
Kansu were well disciplined; for instance, they cited, they always took
off their hats when they entered a church—perhaps, I reflected, as they
would expect us to take off our shoes in their places of worship—and let
down their cues. For it is as great a discourtesy to come indoors with
the cue tied around the head as it is in the old-fashioned parts of
China to speak to an equal or a superior without removing the
eye-glasses.
[Illustration:
The Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed about once a month by the
itinerant barber. This one is just in the act of adding a switch.
Note the wooden comb at the back of the head
]
[Illustration:
An old countryman having dinner at an outdoor restaurant in town on
market day has his own way of using chairs or benches
]
[Illustration:
A Chinese soldier and his mount, not to mention his worldly
possessions
]
[Illustration:
Mongol women on a joy-ride
]
The town where we made our midday halt was denim blue with market-day.
There were big, upstanding six-foot men whom America would hardly have
recognized as Chinese; and some of them, from back in the hills, though
they had heard of white people before, had never seen them. These and
their hardy, red-cheeked boys timidly crowded nearer and nearer the
knock-kneed table which Chang had somehow found and placed for us in a
wind-sheltered, sun-flooded corner of the inn-yard, retreating in a
pell-mell mass if we rose to our feet or looked fixedly at them. In
China market-day is usually a fixed institution, frequently recurring in
most towns. Then the wooden-box bellows with a stick handle manipulated
by a boy or a coolie, which is indispensable to craftsman or cook
reduced to a mainly dung fuel, may be heard thumping by scores or
hundreds along the thronged street. The shallow eating-shops, which
thrust their customers out of doors to squat on raised strips of board
or on their own haunches, steaming bowl and chop-sticks in hand, are so
busy that they almost cease to shout for clients. The outdoor
hair-dressers for men may sometimes not move their portable
paraphernalia from a chosen spot all day long, and take in what to them
is a small fortune, though their charges would by no means keep an
American barber in soap. Wielding a razor suggestive of a carpenter’s
draw-shave, a wooden comb which the maker across the way saws out by
hand with a dozen or a score of others from a single round block, and
carrying a most scanty supply of other essentials, they all but
transform the hirsute countrymen who fall into their hands. For they are
not satisfied with mere shaving as we understand it, but wipe out
everything the broad blade encounters—down the upper cheek, a stray hair
on the nose, the eyebrows, the hair itself, leaving the victim a
striking resemblance to a boiled onion, unless he calls a halt with the
information that he still considers the cue essential to his beauty and
well-being. Even then, they say, the barber sometimes talks him out of
the old-fashioned notion—though it is hardly that in Kansu—and he joins
the growing ranks of Chinese men, who, having recognized the pigtail as
a badge of servitude rather than an honorable adornment, go as far to
the opposite extreme as is consistent with a whole—no, often a sadly
gashed—scalp. But if the client’s taste is not to be changed by
preaching or example, the last rite is the combing out of his often
magnificent black tresses, reduced of course in area to about the size
of a saucer, and the making of them into a braid which may perhaps not
be undone again for two or three moons.
But our carts perhaps are creaking out again through the inn-yard gate,
and we must ride after them, leaving the hundred other scenes of
market-day for some other place, for they are constantly repeated
everywhere. Caves and terraces and cañon roads continue; the afternoon
is June-like, the leaves of the willows and rare poplars hardly
beginning to turn, though November is stepping on. Down in the river
valley the soil is somewhat harder, so that for a little time we move
without being enveloped in a cloud of dust; but the air is so dry that
cigars and lips suffer. Passing coolies carry their money in strings of
“cash,” a thousand to each string, broken up into hundreds by knots and
the ends tied together to make carrying easy. We would hardly call it
that, however, if in addition to already mighty burdens we had to plod
our way across a thirsty country with ten pounds of money worth less
than an American quarter; for in this region the exchange averaged
twenty-three hundred “cash” to the “Mex” dollar. This does not, of
course, reduce the perforated brass coin of China to anything like the
low estate of the Russian ruble or the German mark, but those are of
paper and may be printed in any denomination, while the “cash” always
remains the single coin, both in weight and bulk. I do not recall
offhand any commodity that represents the value of a “cash”; I might say
it is worth about one peanut, but that would be true only in China, and
only in certain regions during the most plentiful peanut season,
certainly never in America, for it takes fully forty “cash” to make an
American cent. Perhaps a match comes most nearly being an even exchange,
and then the wonder comes up that they do not use those instead, and
save weight and some of the difficulties of reckoning, and always have
something of real immediate value as well as a nominal and fictitious
one. But your Chinese coolie, once out of gunshot of the big cities at
least, and even the merchants up to a surprising grade, prefers his
money in “cash,” irrespective of weight and all its other drawbacks.
In Peking and the treaty-ports small transactions are usually in
coppers, which are worth a whole fourth of an American cent each; and
silver ten-, twenty-, and fifty-cent pieces, unknown and unacceptable in
Shensi and Kansu, are as frequent there as the “Mex” dollar of which
they are fractions. It is no uncommon thing, indeed, for Peking coolies
to accept bank-notes, if they are sure of the giver and if the issuing
bank is not Chinese but foreign, with a local branch. But, after all, a
copper is not much lighter than ten “cash,” and less convenient, having
no hole for stringing, and next above that in the west comes the dollar,
which is more than many a coolie ever owns at one time, and may turn out
to be false anyway; while, as to bank-notes, they are no more current in
the interior than Confederate shinplasters are in New York. Our own
funds, by the way, we carried in the form of letters of credit issued by
the Chinese post-office in Peking and payable by the postal commissioner
at the several large cities we visited, in which he was either a
foreigner or the graduate of a foreign school. But even our cartmen, who
were well above the coolie status, lugged strings of “cash,” usually
about their persons, and every morning and every noon they unfailingly
engaged in a loud and heated controversy with the innkeeper and all his
functionaries, down to the ragged fellow who drew water, over the amount
that should be transferred from the traveling strings to those that
remained behind. Only in a few cases was there a grooved measuring-board
to obviate the laborious task of counting the miserable bits of poor
brass one by one. For of course no one could take it for granted that
there were a hundred “cash” between each knot; and usually he would have
been swindled if he did. Aside from the all but universal Chinese custom
of short-changing wherever it is possible, in many regions accepted
fictions in money matters reign, so that in one town a “hundred cash” is
really only ninety, and if you are informed that six walnuts cost a
copper you hand over nine “cash”; and perhaps in the next place a string
of “cash” is nominally a thousand but really nine hundred and forty, and
“nine coppers is ten coppers here, master, only if it is in ‘cash’ it is
nine and then a little bit, and so....” And so, while we might have been
able to get along without Chang, or the cook either, for that matter, so
far as mere eating and the like go, he became indispensable in saving us
from insanity in the handling of money.
Pingliang was the largest city on our route between Sian-fu and Lanchow.
In a way it was the most picturesque, too; at least there were few such
pictures as that down its swarming, shop- and hawker-crowded
thoroughfare seen through the outer gate with the inner one in the
middle distance. I reached it somewhat ahead of the others, and as I was
worming my way through the second barrier, leading my mule and showing
every evidence of having been on the road for a week, a man in the human
stream bound in the same direction addressed me. It was not until his
second remark that I realized that he was speaking English, and even
then I took him to be some inn-runner who was trying to induce me to
patronize his miserable establishment. We had looked forward to being
spared that fate in Pingliang, for several sets of Protestant
missionaries had made us promise to look up their co-workers there. I
replied, therefore, still giving my attention to the picturesque chaos
about me rather than to the speaker, that I expected to stop with
foreigners at the Fu-ying-tong. How should I have known that I, suddenly
bursting into town in the guise of anything but a reputable person, was
informing a total stranger that I expected him to take me in as a guest
as soon I could find his house? For it was the first time in my life
that I had met a foreigner parading the streets in Chinese garb;
besides, the Swedish-American head of the Protestant work in Pingliang
happens to be of a physical size not inclined to make him conspicuous in
a Chinese crowd.
Before the days of the republic, I learned later, when in spite of my
barbarism we were comfortably installed in his home with the glorious
prospect of a hot bath in the offing, he had sported even a blond
pigtail, like many of the inland missionaries. I need hardly add that
this was removed when, on rare occasions, he visited the “home church”
in Ruggles Street, Boston. His son also wore native garb and, being born
in Pingliang, could not be distinguished from a Chinaman in the dark, as
a native policeman once discovered to his discomfiture. On second
thought, when one had recovered from the slight shock involved, of
course native dress is the thing to wear in such cases. For one thing,
it is many times more economical than foreign garb, which would have to
be individually imported. Chinese clothing is much better adapted to
Chinese living conditions; and not the least of the advantages in cities
of the interior where only two or three foreigners live is that they can
go about their business unnoticed in the throng, instead of becoming the
center of a gaping, jostling mob whenever they halt for a moment.
I cannot, naturally, give any testimony as to the efficacy or value of
the missionary work of a host of barely twenty-four hours, though I can
speak very highly of his hospitality and of the spick and span
efficiency of whatever we saw in his two compounds. In one the church
was reached through the hospital, which seemed a fitting and sensible
arrangement. Pingliang is not well supplied with curative facilities,
and naturally the mission hospital is overworked to a point where even
charitable foreigners unconsciously grow more or less callous to mere
human suffering. Chinese strolling into the place in what to us seemed
horrible conditions were such commonplace sights to those who had spent
a generation among them that they showed little more feeling over them
than over a cut finger. “Oh, been in a fight, I suppose,” was the sum
total reply to my anxious inquiry about a man whose face and chest were
cut into ribbons and who seemed to be half groping, half stumbling his
way toward the hospital. With beggars of both sexes and all ages
wandering the town and sleeping out of doors all winter in a few
fluttering rags that expose far more skin than they cover, their
cadaverous faces blue yellow with starvation, it is hardly to be
expected that a young man born amid such scenes should lose much sleep
over them.
Pingliang, I discovered in a stroll about its wall, is not so large as
the first impression suggests, being long and narrow, with nearly all
its movement in that busy main street by which we passed through it. The
suburbs were so crowded, we found, because no Mohammedan is allowed to
live within the walls. The soldiers of the local dictator had just been
paid, and many of them were sauntering about town with six or eight
strings of “cash” over their shoulders, pricing this and that. One had a
full ten thousand looped about his neck, a veritable millstone, yet his
weighty wealth only amounted to about $2.30 in real money. I have said
that interior China has no paper money; hence I must apologize for the
oversight. For there are paper “cash” by the millions. Boys were
stamping them out of great sheets of a kind of tissue-paper, piled
twenty or more thick, so that each blow of the die accomplished
something worth while; and great cylinders of the finished coins, still
loosely held together, hung shivering in the breeze along the busiest
street of Pingliang. But this is dead man’s money, to be burned at his
grave along with paper horses and servants and perhaps a “Peking cart”
of the same material, so that he shall not find himself penniless and
unattended in the next world. The mere living must be content with solid
brass.
The soldiers, we noticed, actually paid for what they purchased. Not
until they got a day or two out of town, our hosts said, did they dare
give only what they chose or drop the word “pay” from their vocabulary
entirely. In theory Pingliang and its district are governed from
Lanchow, as the latter is from Peking. But the local general had his own
soldiers and obeyed the Tuchun ten days westward about as absolutely as
the Tuchun did the alleged Central Government. Lanchow had sent out
orders to stop the growing of opium. The dictator of Pingliang passed
the order on, in the form of a public proclamation, and at a same time
issued secret instructions—in so far as anything can be secret in
China—to his district rulers to encourage the planting of poppies, to
compel it if necessary, since he needed the money to be derived from the
traffic. An honest mandarin in Kingchow, refusing to obey secret
instructions, effectively put an end to the planting in his district—and
barely escaped in the night across the river and through the mountains
to Lanchow, disguised as a coolie. In a region west of Pingliang, we
learned when we reached it, the orders from opposite directions had been
so nicely balanced that no one dared either to plant or not to plant,
whereupon nature took upon itself the decision and grew nothing. Yet in
these very regions poor peasants have been put in cages and left to
starve because they dared to let the poppy beautify their fields, and
perhaps the very next year some neighbor was prodded into chronic
invalidism by soldiers’ bayonets because he had not planted poppies.
Thus things go on throughout a large part of China, and opium is
probably produced in fully as large quantities as ever, all the noisy
demonstrations of burning, in a few of the larger cities, piles of
opium-pipes and confiscated opium to the contrary notwithstanding. One
large section of Kansu through which we passed was threatened with a
famine because Shensi grew opium on the fields where she should grow
wheat, and then offered such high prices for Kansu wheat that it all
flowed eastward, as we had seen, and left the region that grew it to
starve. But China’s many autonomous military rulers must have money, for
without money they cannot keep soldiers, and without soldiers they
cannot hold sway over their chosen territories; and of all their few
scanty sources of revenue the tax on opium is the most remunerative.
Naturally few if any of them openly permit the planting of poppies or
openly tax the product. Has not China’s Government guaranteed to
suppress the opium traffic, and must not even an all but independent
Tuchun of the far interior take care what rumors reach that outside
country from which protest and pressure and sometimes even military
intervention come? The Chinese temperament is always for finesse as
compared with boldness or force. In each provincial capital, and in
other large centers, there is an Anti-Opium Office, the ostensible
business of which is to stamp out the traffic. But the head of it is
either appointed by the military ruler or subject to his influence; and
if the latter issues secret orders undermining his public proclamations,
the Anti-Opium Office collects the taxes and sets them down as fines,
and there you are. There are, in fact, many districts where opium taxes
are collected for years in advance, and as they are high the peasants
have no choice but to plant poppies to recoup themselves.
A day’s journey beyond Pingliang there is a range 2350 meters high,
crossed by roads so steep that one marvels how the clumsy two-wheeled
carts get over it. Were the animals not hitched in tandem they never
would, and even if we had not by this time made concessions to what at
first strikes most Westerners as the “idiotic” Chinese way of doing
their hauling, we must certainly have done so here. Pheasants almost as
tame as chickens fed in the kind of heather and brown grass covering the
lower slopes by which we approached. Terraces and caves had for a time
died out; sure-footed men came down sheer paths with bundles of dry
brush that would be an unusual and a welcome addition to the straw and
dung fuel of the region. The range itself was made up of bare hills
without a sign of bush or tree except the rows of now somewhat stunted
willows which still escorted the wildly zigzagging road. There were many
short cuts, heart breaking if your mule was so small or so tired that
the carrying of the empty saddle up such a slope seemed work enough for
him. On foot it was a stiff climb of some two hours’ duration which
brought back memories of my Andean days that were not unpleasant. But
here there was a constant sense of security, not to say of
self-indulgence, in the knowledge that I was closely followed by ample
food and a cook, and best of all, by a bed.
Donkey-loads of joss-sticks in two big square packs to each animal
carefully picked their way down from the summit. The view from this
showed a gashed and gnarled, a haphazard and truly chaotic world,
monotonously yet beautifully light brown in color, to the faint edges of
the far horizon. Over the top, coolies carrying whole chests of drawers
on the ends of their balancing poles came swinging up the swift descent
almost as if it were level ground. Once or twice before we had met the
“fast mail” hurrying eastward, and now we came upon it again,
jog-trotting over the mountains. Two men in the early prime of physical
life, with a bundle of mail-bags at each end of the poles over their
shoulders and a square glass lantern lashed on somewhere, are all this
consists of in interior China. They carry some eighty pounds each in
relays of twenty to thirty miles made at surprisingly good speed and on
the second day return with a similar load, all for ten or twelve dollars
“Mex” a month, depending on their length of service. Few postal systems
are more reliable than that of China; and even though its high officials
are mainly Europeans (this time the word is not meant to include
Americans) no small credit should be given to the poorly paid coolies
who are the chief links in the service in many parts of the country.
Letters mailed in Peking a week after we left there were awaiting us
when we reached Lanchow—for the coolie “fast mail” travels night and
day; and the loss of anything posted is perhaps the rarest complaint
heard even from those foreign residents who have developed into chronic
grumblers against anything Chinese. Other mail-matter, up to a limited
weight, may also be sent by letter-post, at increased postage; the bulk
of it goes by long trains of pack-mules, such as we had already several
times passed, at an average of twenty-five to thirty miles a day.
There were a few patches of snow, and a region somewhat more
prosperous-looking, in the Chinese sense, over the range, with a more
solid, reddish soil, though all was dreary brown and utterly bare with
autumn now. Cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, fat-tailed sheep, goats,
pigs, and chickens, not to mention blue clouds of pigeons, were
everywhere. Yet the people seemed to live as miserably as ever, wholly
without cleanliness, comfort, or plenty; and before long we found
ourselves surrounded again by broken, swirling loess. Such regions
confirmed the theory that man is made of dust; the children looked as if
they had just been finished, and not yet polished off.
The dreariness, the dismal lifelong existence of the great mass of
Chinese seemed only emphasized by such scenes as a pair of blind
minstrels entertaining a village by beating together resonant sticks and
singsonging endless national ballads or ancient legends. Nothing
whatever of the myriad simple enjoyments of more fortunate peoples, not
even grass to sit on and trees to sit under, lightens their
bare-earth-dwelling lot. Yet few peoples show themselves more contented
with what they have, perhaps because discontent increases with
possessions and possibilities. Lofty philosophers there are who, though
nothing could induce them to spend a night out of reach of a hot bath,
commend to us the contentment with little, the patience under
deficiencies, of the Chinese. These are virtues, no doubt, up to a
certain point; beyond it the traveler far afield in China comes to the
conclusion they become a curse, and the Chinese surely have in many
things passed this limit.
[Illustration:
Two blind minstrels entertaining a village by singsonging interminable
national ballads and legends, to which they keep time by beating
together resonant sticks of hard wood
]
[Illustration:
The boys and girls of western China are “toughened” by wearing nothing
below the waist and only one ragged garment above it, even in
midwinter
]
[Illustration:
The “fast mail” of interior China is carried by a pair of coolies, in
relays of about twenty miles each, made at a jog-trot with about
eighty pounds of mail apiece. They travel night and day and get five
or six American dollars a month
]
[Illustration:
A bit of the main street of Taing-Ning, showing the damage wrought by
the earthquake of two years before to the “devil screen” in front of
the local magistrate’s yamen
]
We came at length to Long-te, surrounded by a big mud wall, but with
little except ruins inside. There were great mud buildings spilled into
heaps of broken earth, threshing-floors where men and women were tossing
grain and chaff into the wind, open fields, many straw-stacks, ponds
frozen over, all within the walls, and still plenty of room for the
shrunken population. For the earthquake had been serious here. The big
city gates were wracked and twisted, sometimes split from top to bottom,
in one case overthrown entirely. Mat and cloth tents and makeshift
canvas buildings occupied what had evidently once been the business
street, and here a market-fair was in full confusion. Some of the
toughest, dirtiest coolies I had yet seen were packed in a soiled-blue
squirming mass, which seemed to be mainly Moslem, about an improvised
gambling-table. Two dice in a porcelain box, which was overturned in a
saucer that was twirled, constituted the game. It might have been swift
if the evil-eyed promoters had not always waited a long time for more
stakes to be laid on the squared and numbered table before lifting the
box. Each of these had his coolie valet behind him, who alternately held
a cup of tea or the mouthpiece of a long pipe to the lips of his master,
who kept both eyes and fingers on the absorbing business in hand. There
were grooved “cash” measuring-boards—such as our coolie at home used in
washing clothes—to obviate the counting of the money, mainly mere brass,
yet totaling large stakes for Chinese countrymen of the poorest class.
How intent they were on the whims of fate was shown by the astonishing
fact that I stood for several moments packed in with them, without the
least notice being taken of me; which did not hinder a mighty mob of men
and boys gathering at my heels and raising a great cloud of dust close
behind me all over town.
Having won the toss during my absence—so severely honest were my
companions—I found myself installed, when I reached it, in the star room
of Long-te’s best inn. That is, most of my possessions were heaped about
the uneven earth floor, and the thigh-high platform covered with a thin
reed mat which the Chinese call a _k’ang_, of a mud room perhaps eight
by fourteen feet in size. Chang was always busy enough with other
matters to have it understood that we make our own beds. Such inn rooms
are made entirely of mud,—walls, _k’ang_, and all, except for the
soot-blackened beams and thatch above. Sometimes they are so small that
an army cot would not go even lengthwise on the _k’ang_, which was
usually too narrow to take two, either crosswise or side by side. The
Chinese, of course, sleep on the _k’ang_ itself, which is heated, at
least in theory, by a crude flue beneath it; but the foreigner with a
prejudice against stone-hard beds and, in warmer weather, against those
myriad little bedfellows of which the sons of Han seem almost fond, will
find a folding cot easily worth its weight in gold on a trip of any
length into the interior. It may cost him more for lodging, for half a
dozen Chinese could find plenty of room on a _k’ang_ that would barely
hold his cot and leave him space to undress and get into it; but as the
rent of the whole room will probably not exceed ten cents gold, unless
his “boy” lets the innkeeper succumb to his natural inclination to
double or treble it out of respect for “rich” foreigners, he may find
the extravagance worth the privacy. Even in their homes the overwhelming
majority of Chinese sleep packed together on just such a more or less
heated mud platform, so that a cot would be to them not a luxury but a
senseless nuisance.
The procedure night after night hardly varied in the slightest degree.
When we had driven into an inn yard and Chang had found rooms or caves
opening off it which he considered fit to house his “masters,” the carts
were unhitched and all but our heavier belongings unloaded. The mules
had their unfailing roll in the dust, raising mighty clouds of it that
penetrated even the _k’ang_ mats, rose and shook themselves surprisingly
clean—so effective for them is this substitute for a showerbath which
was denied us—and fell to munching their well earned chopped straw and
dried peas in their broad, shallow wicker baskets or in the mud mangers.
The cartmen perhaps dust themselves with a horsetail or some
rooster-feathers mounted on a stick, and take up the important question
of getting their own food. This is indeed important even if it consists
only of a bowl or two of some cheap native cookery, since with the rare
exception of a lump of hot dough or a copper-worth of something else
from peddler or shop along the way, and a scanty mid-morning lunch, they
have not eaten since the night before. Meanwhile shrieks of
“_Gwan-shih-ti!_” rend the air. The _gwan-shih-ti_—if a slightly varied
pronunciation is easier, “John-dirty” will do quite as well, and be so
exactly descriptive as to be no tax whatever on the memory—is the male
maid of all work about a Chinese inn, though his title is somewhat more
honorable than either his duties or his income. Chang needs the
_gwan-shih-ti_ at once to build fires under our _k’angs_, to bring
water, to tell the cook where he can do his cooking, to bring us a pair
of those narrow wooden saw-horses which pass for chairs in rural China
to sit on outdoors if there is still daylight enough to read by, to do a
hundred other errands “quai-quai!” that is, instantly if not sooner,
which is the way Chang learned during his Peking service that foreigners
always expected to be served. Meanwhile there are reëchoing screams of
“_Gwan-shih-ti!_” from the muleteers, who want this or that, shrieks of
“_Gwan-shih-ti!_” from the innkeeper himself, who has a few errands with
which to keep him out of mischief, again perhaps from other newly
arrived travelers, who want to know where in —— in the already crowded
inn they are going to sleep, until one might imagine that the poor
fellow would get flustered, even in spite of being Chinese.
By this time “_Gwan-shih-ti_” has probably succeeded in coaxing the
straw and dung poked into the _k’ang_ flues to burn; and we have begun
bitterly to regret asking to have the _k’ang_ lighted. For any Chinese
inn in winter is an absolute refutation of the old theory that wherever
there is smoke there is fire. How often have we not groped our way into
our mud-built lodgings resolved to make up our beds at last or die in
the attempt, only to come gasping and clawing into the open air a moment
later—and yet have waited in vain for the slightest suggestion of warmth
to mitigate all this suffering. _K’ang_-flues seldom have any vent
except the wide-open mouths for the feeding of fuel inside the room
itself, and the volume of smoke that can pour forth from them is out of
all keeping with either time or combustibles. Yet the Chinese seem
content to go on for centuries more in this time-dishonored way, though
they need go no farther afield than Korea to copy an example of heating
the floor from the kitchen and letting the smoke out of chimneys at the
other end of the house, without loss of fuel and without turning their
homes into soot-dripping smoke-houses.
Eventually we drove out enough smoke to come in and make our beds. To
what had seemed an impenetrable sleeping-bag from Maine I had been
obliged to add a sheepskin lining in Pingliang, and under or over this
went every coat and blanket, and even my odds and ends of clothing, for
barely did the sun set when the mountain cold came down like a blast
direct from the north pole. Long before supper was ready it was often so
bitter, in contrast to an almost hot day, that we were tempted to get
into bed at once; and on the homeward trip we did, eating off our
coverlets. But barely were we settled in such cases than Chang took all
the joy out of life by appearing with the wash-basin forced upon us by
the leader of the “Third Asiatic Expedition”—then in winter quarters in
Peking, where such primitive things are not needed—and the canvas bucket
of hot water, whereupon “face” at least required us to crawl out and
perform ablutions enough to deceive ourselves into thinking that we had
removed all that day’s dust and grime.
Or, perhaps, thanks to our recommendable habit of starting every morning
without fail well before daylight, we arrived while the sun was still
high enough above the horizon to see something of the native life of the
town. We did not need to go out looking for this; it came to us, in all
its impurity. Chinese clad in dirty blue and in every stage of undress
came with trays of disgusting cooked chickens with their heads fast
under one wing and their straddling legs still intact, with boiled sweet
potatoes and steaming white balls of dough, with slabs of roasted pork
and scores of other native favorites, all equally innocent of even the
knowledge that hygiene and cleanliness exist. Not even the Parisians buy
as much of their food already cooked as do the Chinese, and there was
always great wonder shown that we did not fall upon these tempting
delicacies at once, at least to bridge over the vacuum until our own
curious viands should be ready. The varied conditions under which these
were prepared we surmised rather than knew, for we religiously spared
our feelings and our appetites by never unnecessarily intruding upon the
cook’s domain. The natives did, however, whenever it was possible, and
no doubt set down such attempts to approach cleanliness as Chang and the
cook actually observed out of our sight to the incredible
idiosyncrasies, not so much of foreigners—for some of them had seen
Russian refugees eat—as of men of incomputable wealth, which the mere
sight of our belongings, or even of our beds, showed us to be. As a
matter of fact, we lived largely on the country, and might have done so
entirely had we been content with a simpler diet. Chickens, eggs, the
principal vegetables, fruits, sugar, and the like could always be had,
on the out-journey at least, every two or three days, and now and then
there were local specialties in addition. But such delicacies as jam,
butter, cheese, chocolate, coffee, cocoa, and their kindred could only
be had from our steamer-trunks on the tail-end of the carts, while our
bread supply depended on foresight and the kindness of the rare
foreigners along the way.
It is not a bad idea to bring along a few simple picture-books on such a
journey. The boys who drift into the inn-yards are invariably keenly
interested in any hints of the strange “outside-country” from which you
come, and sometimes quite sharp-witted; so that not only will they get
pleasure and instruction out of the pictures, but the traveler will
learn many Chinese words from them, which will be of use perhaps some
day if he ever finds himself stranded without a “boy” in some town that
happens to speak the same dialect. However, all tales as to its narrow
limits notwithstanding, we found Mandarin, or Pekingese, or whatever it
is that one soon picks up a bit of in the capital, as generally
understood on all this journey as could be expected of what was no doubt
our atrocious pronunciation. Peasants and local coolies sometimes shook
their heads, either because they could not understand us or thought we
were speaking some foreign tongue and refused to try; but anything like
a real knowledge of the general language, or that very similar one of
the masses of Peking, would have been quite sufficient in any of the
provinces we visited.
At last supper would be announced, with whosoever’s _k’ang_ that showed
any signs of heat as a dining-table, and six-inch-wide saw-horses as
chairs. By this time the mountain cold would be like ice-packs applied
to the marrow of the bones—if that is anatomically possible—and unless
we watched the door, if there was one, all manner of Chinese odds and
ends, even ladies so consumed by curiosity as sometimes to forget the
stern rules of their sex, would gradually replace it by a bank of gaping
faces, the boldest of which might even find some poor excuse to come
clear inside. Perhaps the police would arrive, though this was rare,
with two or three huge and gaily decorated paper lanterns, to ask for
our visiting-cards and bow their way ceremoniously out again into the
weirdly flickering night. Then one last brief sortie with a toothbrush
and into our luxurious beds, perhaps to read and smoke a bit by the
American lantern that we succeeded in getting and keeping oil enough to
use one night out of three. For however much we paid for oil, it never
seemed to be real kerosene, and the Chinese genius for flimsy
constructions had evolved in place of a can a slightly baked mud jug
that broke at the least lurching of a cart and even seeped through upon
the back of the _mafu_ who was finally sentenced to carry it. Sleep
always came long before the end of a cigar, however, and never have I
enjoyed more sound and satisfying slumber than on most of those Kansu
nights, in spite of legs, accustomed to another form of travel, aching
from ten or twelve hours in the saddle, and though one might hear the
mules just outside munching their hard peas off and on all through the
night. The drivers always got up between two and three o’clock to feed
them, and then one might hear the steady _rump! rump!_ of the chopping
of straw as one man fed it to the big hinged knife everywhere used for
this purpose, and another manipulated the knife itself. Sometimes this
wicked implement has other uses, as in one village along our route where
the peasants captured a bandit and, not caring to make the long journey
to the _hsien_ seat, with the risk of his escape or rescue, had calmly
beheaded him with a straw-knife.
But all supreme pleasures have an untimely end, and before the delicious
night seemed well begun Chang would come to light the lantern, or the
candle, or the string wick floating in the half of a broken mud saucer
of thick native oil which Chinese inns furnish, and to break the bitter
news that it was five o’clock—or four, as the case might be. Stifling
our curses as becomes married men who should at least have reached years
of discretion and self-control, we would crawl from the tropical
luxuriance of our sleeping-bags into the arctic iceberg of early morning
with a pretense of bravery that deceived neither ourselves nor each
other, and lose more breath than time in getting inside our icy daytime
garments. A hot breakfast larger than the full daily consumption of all
but the wealthiest Chinese, however, always brought about a great change
in our spirits. In and about the yard would rise noisy disputes in which
could be heard endless repetitions of the word “_ch’ien_,” which means
money, or, more exactly, brass “cash,” and when at length these had
subsided our expedition would trail away again into the darkness. As
nearly as I made out, we paid between one and two hundred coppers a
night as our share of the inn expenditures, which included our alleged
rooms, heat, and light, _k’ang_ space somewhere for our retinue, and
various and sundry other charges exclusive of food for the mules and
their attendants, which was not our affair. But I defy any Occidental to
make head or tail of the intricacies of paying a bill at a Chinese inn.
There seemed to be a “straw charge” on our merely human part of the
bill, and each kettle of water was so many coppers, and we were expected
to pay for the right to let the carts stand all night in the inn-yard;
or at least Chang informed us that gentlemen always did and seemed on
the verge of tears that might have resulted in loss of “face” for him
and loss of our chief link with the outside world for us when we opened
for discussion the fact that our contract with the muleteers required
them to pay everything having to do with their part of the expedition.
Nor was that all, by any means; for the Chinese seem to like nothing
better than the utmost complications in money matters. Perhaps this is
because so many of them depend for their livelihood on the odd coppers
and “cash” that are chipped off in the process of making impossible
adjustments in the chaos of exchange and incompatible coins and
intricate charges, modified by vociferous bargainings, which are never
alike in two parts of the country. Possibly it is merely because they
love complexities and gratuitous difficulties for their own sake—as
their language, for example, suggests, especially in its written
form—and which have grown up during the hundred centuries of social
intercourse that lie behind them.