IN MOHAMMEDAN CHINA
High up above the plain of Lanchow, on the topmost hillock of the partly
terraced mountains that bound it on the south, stands a new pagoda. It
was built by the wife of the former Tuchun, but as neither he nor she,
nor her particular brand of Buddhism, were popular favorites, the people
say that their prosperity departed on the day it was completed.
Conspicuous as it is from many _li_ away, no one seems to visit it. At
least there was not another footstep in the snow that had fallen some
days before when I climbed to it one morning, and its three stories,
open to all the world, showed not a single recent human trace. The mere
fact that it took three hours of steady and not easy climbing, first by
a mountain trail to some distant village, then at random up and across
terraces where the feet floundered in snow and loose earth, could hardly
have accounted for this abandonment; for no holy place in the Orient is
too difficult of access for an occasional zealot. No, the pagoda of the
Tuchun’s wife was plainly not a welcome addition to the landscape.
It was unsurpassed, however, for its bird’s-eye view of Lanchow and its
environs; though, to be sure, a steam-heated lounging-room would have
improved it at this season. While the capital of China’s most western
province is on the thirty-sixth parallel, like Memphis, Tennessee, it is
five thousand feet above sea-level, and the wind-swept pagoda was much
more so. The snow had now laid the dust that swirled so easily when we
rode into the city, but it had not fallen deep enough to hide any
important features of the great oval plain stretching from the foot of
this southern barrier to the Yellow River, beyond which the world piled
itself up again in what would have been the familiar brown, utterly
barren tumbled hills of northwestern China but for its light mantle of
winter white. The plain was not a mighty checker-board, for the myriad
divisions into which the little low mud barriers between its fields
marked it were altogether too numerous and fantastic in shape. But as a
whole it gave that impression, or, still more exactly, it resembled a
mammoth pane of glass that had been shattered into many more than a
thousand pieces, and then laid together again on a flat surface by some
artist in Chinese puzzles.
When we had first ridden across this oasis many slender, misformed trees
caught the eye, but from this height these barely relieved the vast
expanse of an appearance of total treelessness. On that day we had
noticed many fields of gray, a color so out of keeping with an autumn
Kansu landscape that we were eager with curiosity until we found that
acres after acres had been carefully covered, apparently by hand, with
small stones. This was a method of keeping the precious moisture in the
ground, which, our host explained, was common to all this region; when
the fields are tilled or planted the stones are merely raked away from a
small space at a time and then quickly replaced. We resolved to tell the
next group of New England farmers we met that there are people who
purposely cover their fields with stones.
The snow of course had obliterated these mere variations in color,
though it had not disguised the fact that by far the greater part of
this fertile flat-land was wasted in graves. Under the thin white layer
thousands upon thousands of the little cones of earth that serve as
tombstones to the garden variety of Chinese looked like peas, or, let us
say, mustard-seeds under a sheet, while the _p’ai-lous_ and stone
monuments scattered among these would of themselves have filled a very
large graveyard. The huge barracks which had oozed and absorbed soldiers
incessantly when we passed it lay half-way or more toward the eastern
end of the plain, where we had descended upon it out of the last loess
cañon. In the other direction, the eye, sweeping hastily across Lanchow
itself, hurdling several clusters of temples and many nondescript heaps
of mud buildings, fell at length upon the four big round forts erected
on the crests of the ridge shutting in the valley on the southwest,
against the next Mohammedan rebellion. During the several uprisings of
the Moslem Chinese Lanchow itself has never been taken, but it was at
least once so long and closely besieged that cannibalism is said to have
flourished within its walls. After the last revolt the defenders saw the
wisdom of fortifying this high ridge, from which the city had been so
easily bombarded, and which is the last barrier between it and Hochow,
the “Mohammedan capital,” only two hundred _li_ away.
[Illustration:
An _ahong_, or Chinese Mohammedan mullah of Lanchow
]
[Illustration:
Mohammedan school-girls, whose garments were a riot of color
]
[Illustration:
A glimpse of Lanchow, capital of China’s westernmost province, from
across the Yellow River
]
[Illustration:
Looking down the valley of Lanchow, across several groups of temples
at the base of the hills, to the four forts built against another
Mohammedan rebellion
]
From the height of the despised pagoda the several walls of Lanchow,
enclosing even its extensive suburbs, look like the graphic design on
some large scale of relief-map of an over-ambitious draftsman; for not
even those of Peking have as many sections and certainly no such angular
afterthoughts. But the city lies well out on the further edge of the
valley, as close as possible to the Yellow River, and to get anything
more than a general view of it one must come down again from the pagoda.
The south gate, nearest this, is the one by which all luck comes into
the city, so that no coffin or corpse is ever allowed to pass through
it. High up over the portal itself, in the most conspicuous place, is
one of those huge wooden placards with a few large characters, bringing
to any one who can read them the astonishing information, “Ten thousand
_li_ of Golden Soup.” This has no reference, as the first dozen
incredibly naked and gaunt yellow beggars to accost the stranger will
show, to any unusual abundance of nourishment; it is merely a poetic
reference to the river close under the north wall, which one with a
poet’s license might find golden, and which easily covers the distance
mentioned in its vagrancy from the highlands of Tibet to the gulf of
Chihli. Nor is it any great stretch of the imagination to call it soup,
here in Lanchow, where every one, rich or poor, native or foreign,
drinks it every day of his life.
Within the gate one plunges into the chaos of any large Chinese city.
Outside the brilliant sunshine floods everything; within is mud and ice
and gloom, and only rarely, in the narrow streets, the briefest glimpse
of the low winter sun. The Yellow River is incessantly being carried to
its consumers in two-bucket lots over the shoulders of tireless coolies,
and these perpetually slop street, alley, and noisome lanes with
delightful impartiality. The chief north gate of Lanchow, paved at a
slight slope with big slabs of stone rounded off by the centuries, is
impassable for animals and carts, and almost for pedestrians, during
midwinter; for the water-carriers find it their easiest entrance and
keep the pavement constantly sheeted with new ice. With Peking in mind
the almost total absence of rickshaws would be astounding, had they not
already been half forgotten in the long journey across the province in
which they are virtually unknown. Bright red “Peking carts” hooded with
the omnipresent blue denim and drawn by big sleek mules jolt the
well-to-do about town. Officials still use the gaily colored
sedan-chairs of viceregal days; some inhabitants bestride native ponies
or occasionally a donkey; but the great rank and file, of course, ride
shanks’ mare. The streets offer myriad Chinese sights, sounds, and
smells, yet little that may not be seen, heard, and smelled in other
Chinese cities, so alike have the centuries left this wide-spread race,
so different is the land of Confucius from its neighbor, India, where
districts a hundred miles apart are often quite diverse. The Chinese
themselves assert that “every ten _li_ has new customs,” but they refer
to minor inconspicuous things which easily escape the attention of the
most leisurely traveler.
Lanchow already boasted the rudiments of electric light and telephone
systems which may in time improve beyond the exclusive, embryonic stage.
Far more prominent were walking corpses who crawled into garbage-barrels
by night and begged by day—before the winter was over Lanchow was
throwing these into open trenches in the outskirts as they starved to
death—precious padlocked boys, and the dull _thump-thump_ of
_feng-hsiang_, “wind-boxes” serving as bellows for cooks and craftsmen
along every important street. The better-class women wore their feet
only half bound, which was at least the beginning of an improvement.
Manchu girls, we were informed, could be bought for eight ounces of
silver each, which would be less than six American dollars; but there
were no outward signs whatever of the profligacy which this appalling
depreciation in human flesh must surely have abetted, for superficial
decorum in some matters is the most outstanding of Chinese traits.
Many shops had closed, residents told us, because of the dreadful
condition of the local currency. To our Western eyes there seemed plenty
of them left, and the rattling of the “coppers” which had been forced
upon the district made the narrow soggy streets sound like endless
chain-lockers overwhelmed by an unprecedented run of business. The
former Tuchun had printed paper notes and compelled the people to accept
them at par, but the moment he left these had dropped to eight cents on
the dollar and were gone now to the limbo of such things. The silver
dollar was so rare as almost to be out of circulation, and besides the
miserable molded brass and sand impositions of the present lord of the
province—or of as much of it as he could reach with his own
soldiers—there was nothing whatever but the _tael_, so that every one
handling money must have scales in which to weigh out the irregular
chunks of silver, throwing in bits of it resembling buck-shot to make
the balance exact. Even then, of course, there were innumerable
opportunities for disputes, for it would not be Chinese to have one
system of weights, or scales which agreed, or which there was no easy
way of manipulating according to whether the owner was buying or
selling; and silver of course varies greatly in purity. Thus the people
of Lanchow were able to indulge to their hearts’ content in the beloved
Chinese pastime of squabbling over money matters, but it was a mystery
how merchants could carry on at all.
Truly the money problem is fantastic in this western country. Our host
had to send two hundred _taels_ (about $143 in U. S. currency) to pay a
week’s wages to the workmen who were building, with the remnant of
American earthquake-relief funds, the bridge forty _li_ to the eastward,
and as the money had to be in “Lanchow coppers” it required eight
pack-mules to get it there. When the great ditch for draining the
largest lake we had seen in the earthquake district was being dug, seven
tons of “cash” were required on every pay-day for the three thousand
workmen.
However, what did all this matter to a mere visitor who could spend
his time idly strolling the town? As in Sian-fu, access to its great
wall was forbidden; but unlike my experience there, where a
lieutenant-colonel and a large military escort was furnished me with
the Tuchun’s permission to make the circuit of it, which “face”
therefore obliged me to do on horseback, Lanchow’s entire “foreign
office,” in the person of a gentleman of delightfully uncertain
English, made the stroll with me on a brilliant Sunday morning. Half a
dozen temples rose in artistic little open-work structures above the
general level, two or three of them the minarets of mosques from which
at certain hours sounded the voice of the muezzin, hardly to be
distinguished from those of street-hawkers. Dyers had enlivened the
scene with great strips of drying cloth, overwhelmingly coolie blue in
color; on some of the roofs sat huge jars filled with some local
delicacy made of pickled vegetables. We were high enough to look
across the crest of the ridge on which stand the round forts against
revolting Moslems, and to see these apparently unoccupied, though
surrounded by a wilderness of cone-topped graves as far as the eye
could be certain of what it saw. At regular intervals we passed the
little stone and mud houses to be found on any important Chinese city
wall, each with two or three soldiers napping or amusing themselves
within. Whistling pigeons, familiar even to the residents of Peking,
filled the transparent air with a wailing sound, ebbing or increasing
as the flocks behind the whistlers circled back and forth over the
city, now flashing white and almost invisible, now suddenly changing
again to the blue of shimmering silk as the whole swirl of birds
turned their backs upon us. The whistle is a feather-weight one of
cylindrical shape, and is fastened to the pigeon in such a way that
the wind, rushing through it as he flies, makes him and his few
whistle-bearing companions a perpetual orchestra. The Chinese purpose
in all this seems to be partly musical and partly to gather other
pigeons, which flock about the whistlers like children about the _Pied
Piper_. Perhaps the birds are eventually used as food, but this seems
rather to be an example of that Chinese love for feathered pets which
so often sends staid old gentlemen out for a stroll, cage in hand, in
order to give birdie an airing.
A score or more of big gates tower above the general level of the
several-walled city. In the northern and more Mohammedan section we
looked down upon a great sheet of blood-pink ice, covering a pond where
the Moslems are for ever washing newly slaughtered sheep. The circuit
brought us at length to the northern wall, which falls sheer into the
Yellow River. The American bridge thrown across this a decade ago, the
only one in the west, or, I believe, with the exception of the two on
the railways south from Peking, throughout the whole rambling course of
“China’s Sorrow,” still looks incongruous against the background of the
old walled city or of the heaped-up suburb terminating in a golden-brown
pagoda on the further bank. Now and then a train of camels or a herd of
wild half-yak come streaming across it, increasing the incongruity.
Huddled together in that little perpendicular outskirt at the northern
end of the bridge are several mosques and a Moslem school, temples
dedicated to Confucius, Lao-tze, and Buddha, nearly a dozen of them
piled up the hill at regular intervals as stations on the pilgrimage to
the pagoda; and not far beyond these is a memorial hospital bearing the
family name of the best known brand of American condensed milk! Not that
this is all, of course, for there are also gambling-dens and assorted
shops, inn-yards dusty with rolling mules, craftsmen busily engaged in
the din of their trades, peddlers of everything shrieking their wares,
water-carriers slopping the steep streets with ice, and higher up among
the beautiful bare hills that vary with every mood of the unclouded sun
one can trace the ruined walls of what was once a Tartar city, long
before Lanchow itself was founded many centuries ago. To-day three
thousand soldiers were escorting a bright new sedan-chair out along this
further bank to meet an emissary of Wu Pei-fu who had journeyed to
Lanchow by the northern route, and banners of many colors waved in the
breeze that brought the snorting of many bugles to our ears.
Rafts made of blown-up goatskins and a wooden framework come floating
down the Yellow River to Lanchow, bringing wheat from the borders of
Tibet and travelers from Sining; often a whole stack of hay or straw,
which seems to be sitting serenely on the surface of the water itself,
glides past. Vegetable oils from hundreds of miles up the stream are
landed at the low spot near Lanchow’s picturesque camel-back bridge in
big bullock- or half-yak hides, still covered with their long hair,
which on land quiver at a touch, like living animals. Down in the
perpetual shadow of the north wall one of the goatskin rafts on which
Kansu does much of its down-stream traveling in warmer seasons was being
tied together for a belated trip, and a cluster or two of logs from the
Tibetan slopes was being readjusted before continuing its long cold
journey, which would not end until the winter was over, to the
coffin-shops of eastern China. A great wooden water-wheel at the edge of
the river added another medieval touch to the scene; and at length our
stroll was brought to a temporary halt at the locked and soldier-guarded
gate beyond which the city wall belongs to the Tuchun’s private grounds.
I had already seen these, with their rows of barracks, their gardens and
artificial-stone grottos, the two pet Kansu wapiti that bugled so
fiercely when a foreigner paused to look at them, and the score of
buildings that eventually gave way to the main entrance, with its huge
devil-screen and gaudy painted demons, opening on the swarming
second-hand market.
In the long open space before the Tuchun’s “yamen”—as they still call it
in Lanchow, for all China’s conversion to republicanism—there stand to
this day the four high poles, daubed with red and each bearing a kind of
seaman’s “crow’s-nest,” which were the symbols of the Manchu viceroy who
ruled northwestern China in the old imperial days. From these the
military governor still flies four great banners, and it would not be
difficult to forget that any change of régime has come over this distant
province. The rectangle of public domain between the entrance to the
yamen and its farthest devil-screen outpost is the busiest market-place
of Lanchow, and swarms from dawn to sunset with as dense a throng of
ragamuffins as can be found in one collection anywhere in northern
China. For it is made up of the buyers and sellers of all manner of
second-hand junk, stuff which in America would be entirely thrown away,
of the owners and the clients of outdoor portable restaurants in which
the whole menu does not cost more than two or three real cents, of all
the odds and ends of Chinese society, among whom Lanchow’s incredibly
starved and ragged beggars and her rafts of thieves probably
predominate.
Both these latter callings are banded together into gilds, as in most of
China. Our host had known well the former head of the thieves’ gild, not
because he made a practice of keeping such company, or had any hope of
bringing him into the Christian fold, but because all owners of
important property found it essential to their peace and prosperity to
come to some understanding with him. Though he was strictly Chinese,
this clever old rascal had been the accepted ruler even of the
Mohammedan “three-hand men,” who flourish in great numbers, and who now
obeyed the not yet widely advertised chieftain who had recently
inherited his power and unfailing emoluments. Among the Moslem Chinese
in particular there is as much pride in belonging to this adventurous
calling as to any which the country has to offer, though in the nature
of the case this pride may not be as freely shouted from the housetops.
Mohammedan children are given long and careful training for it, and the
fathers in whose footsteps they usually follow show a justifiable
delight in any extraordinary professional feat accomplished by their
offspring. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why persons of
property find it better to make an agreement with the thieves through
their chief than to depend for protection upon officials and police not
very distantly related to them. I need scarcely go into details as to
how the members of this romantic gild are not only induced to let
certain properties alone but to protect them against any outsider, any
“scab” thief who does not belong to the union. A single example will be
quite sufficient. The innkeeper who held the contract for carrying the
government mails in and out of Lanchow paid fifteen dollars a month to
the head of the thieves’ gild—through the police at their main
station!—and these mails were never molested even in the most desolate
parts of the country.
One little tale, too, will suffice to show how expert thieves belonging
to the union must become before they can look for praise within their
own ranks. If at any instant during the telling the suspicion of
exaggeration should raise its head, let it be borne in mind that the
host from whom I have it is both a Britisher and a missionary of the
highest standing, and the son of a highly respected gentleman to whom
the same statements may be equally applied.
A thief who was approaching old age decided to mend his ways before the
time came to meet Allah face to face. He opened a mutton-shop on one of
the less frequented streets. Next door to him was the large compound of
a very wealthy Chinese merchant. One day, as he was separating the
carcass of a fat-tailed sheep into its component parts, the ex-thief
noticed several young Mohammedans grouped closely together across the
way and furtively eying the rich man’s gateway. He recognized these
fellows at once as belonging to the organization from which he had
recently resigned, and their movements were a plain indication to a man
of his experience that they were planning to rob his wealthy neighbor
that very night. When he closed shop, therefore, he asked permission of
the gate-keeper to speak with the prospective victim, whom he told all
he knew, even of his own experience in his former profession.
“But what shall I do?” demanded the man of wealth, as one suddenly
stricken might ask for expert advice from a gray-haired lawyer or a
septuagenarian physician.
“That is easy,” replied the ex-thief. “The simplest way of breaking into
your compound is for a small and supple man to crawl under your gate,
where you have not recently taken the trouble to do any repairing. Hide
yourself in the darkness beside this, and when the man’s head appears
inside put a brick under his chin and go away.”
The merchant conducted himself exactly as his expert neighbor had
advised. When the thieves outside found it impossible to rescue their
bricked comrade, and dared wait no longer, they severed his body at the
neck and carried it away. In the morning the rich man came to the
mutton-shop early and in great agitation.
“See what a pretty plight you have got me into!” he cried. “When I came
out to the gate before daylight to see if there was anything the gateman
should not see, what did I find but the head of a man, and the blood
that had flowed from him when he lost it! Now the police——”
“Do not distress yourself, sir,” replied the mutton-seller. “I will take
care of the head, and when your _k’an-men-ti_ speaks to me about the
blood, as he is sure to do, I will tell him a newly killed sheep was
left there by mistake. As to the gang starting any inquiries about their
lost companion, that is the last thing they would dare or wish to do.”
All went as the ex-thief had outlined it, but that afternoon, as he was
drumming on his chopping-block with a cleaver in the hope of attracting
customers for the last morsels of mutton, whom should he see across the
way but the same band of ruffians, minus, of course, one of those who
had gathered the day before. Their heads were together again, but this
time their furtive glances seemed to be turned not so much toward the
rich man’s gate as upon the mutton-seller.
“Aha!” thought the latter, for he was inordinately clever in reading the
gestures and glances of his former brethren-in-arms, “they suspect me of
thwarting their plans and have decided to kill me.”
Therefore that night, when it was time for him to stretch out on his
_k’ang_, he placed upon it, instead, a sheepskin that he had blown full
of air and covered it over with some old clothes. Then he hid himself in
the darkness outside.
It was exactly as he had suspected. Hardly had he begun to long for a
cigarette when several forms slunk past him and entered his hovel. There
came the dull sounds of as many blows as each thrust his knife into the
sheepskin, followed by an escape of air resembling the pouring forth of
blood; then the assassins disappeared again into the night.
Next day, after the briskness of trade had been succeeded by the apathy
of the first Chinese meal-hour—for no profession which works by night
can be expected to get up early—the former thief saw the same group
huddled together across the way, staring at him as at a ghost. At length
they straggled over to him, with a contrite and respectful, not to say
admiring, air, and a spokesman addressed him with the highest honorifics
of which such unschooled fellows are capable.
“Oh, Great Teacher,” he said, “we recognize in you, our revered Elder
Brother, a very clever man, a man much more clever than ourselves. Will
you not, therefore, become our leader, for with your cleverness and our
agility how could we fail in any undertaking?”
“Your agility!” sneered the mutton-seller, meanwhile insultingly
continuing his work. “Where have you picked up that false impression? I
don’t believe you know the first rudiments of your profession, that you
can even climb through the open window of a foreign devil and escape
with his watch and wallet without being heard. I, forsooth, become the
leader of a gang of clumsy, untrained louts who cannot so much as move a
brick with their Adam’s apple! Away with you!”
Lanchow has been called the meeting-place of central Asia. This seemed
to us something of an exaggeration, for to be worthy of such a title
surely a city must have something more to show than sporadic examples of
Oriental tribes and customs all but lost in a great sea of Chinese. But,
for one thing, they told us, this was not the season of great markets,
to which even princes of Tibet were attracted, and which brought samples
of almost everything in the human line that the elder brother among
continents has to offer. As it was, I ran across Tibetans, Mongols,
Buriats, Kirghiz, and several other individuals who plainly belonged to
none of these divisions, merely in strolling the streets. Then there
were of course Russian refugees, and Cossacks, and single chance
visitors from far-off countries not often represented, such as we
Americans, for instance. Two or three Russian officers of the old régime
were in the employ of the Tuchun, who had fished them from the stream
that had been spasmodically flowing down through Kansu for the past four
years, and who strutted the soft streets of Lanchow in all the glory of
their pre-war uniforms and their disdainful, rather childlike demeanor.
Our host and his fellow-missionaries, the active little Belgian who had
grown more than gray in superintending the salt monopoly in two
provinces, the densely bearded Catholic priest of similar origin, the
over-conscientious, English-speaking postal commissioner from Canton,
the Tuchun himself, and all the higher officials were constantly being
appealed to in behalf of poverty-stricken aristocrats or of pitiful
cases of suffering among mere ordinary human beings who had drifted down
from the northwest and hoped to better their lot by pushing on to Peking
or Shanghai. Just what impression such cases made on the Tuchun, who
probably distinguished almost as little between different kinds of
Caucasians as do the rank and file of Chinese, the handful of foreign
residents were never quite sure; but they did know that he often gave
money to Russian refugees—though their real benefactor was the Belgian
salt official—and that the provincial Government furnished
transportation to the next province for those incapable of making their
own way. In fact, almost the only important duty of the “foreign
office,” who had discoursed to me more or less in my own tongue on the
unworthiness of Lanchow from its wall, was to adjust matters between
muleteers and cartmen who did not feel that the Government should force
them to carry penniless foreign devils—though of course they did not
openly speak of them as such—for the mere pittance it offered.
One morning while we were still at breakfast, a little hollow-eyed
foreigner in a strange uniform was brought in by the gate-keeper. He was
a Polish captain who had once before escaped capture in some brush with
the Soviet troops by making his way overland through Asia and back to
Poland, only to be forced to repeat the experience. At least, that was
what we gathered from a long conversation, in which we could not muster
among us more than scattered single words that were mutually understood,
and during which both sides were forced to resort mainly to gestures and
intuitions. The captain and his wife, he said, were living in a Chinese
inn, without money and with no other clothes than those they were
wearing. That same day word drifted to our ears of a Russian lady who
was offering for sale the carriage and horses in which she had reached
Lanchow, and which might possibly do for our return journey. I found her
a frail, visibly suffering woman probably still really in the thirties,
speaking perfect French, and by no means stripped of that air of
distinction which generations of well supplied leisure give. She was
living in the mud room of an ordinary Chinese inn, facing upon the usual
barnyard-and-worse courtyard, and evidently found it difficult even to
pay for these accommodations, for the Chinese about the place had a
surliness which could scarcely have been due to anything but
disappointments in the matter of money. Her husband, a general once high
in the czar’s armies, had, during the journey, died of typhus in the
very coach that she was offering for sale. There was still with her an
adult son in a shock of pale yellow hair, whose manner suggested more
haughtiness than ordinary horse sense; and half a dozen Cossacks—at
least she called them that—were left from the retinue with which the
general had begun his flight. It was not uninteresting to see how these
sturdy, peasant-faced fellows in worn and badly assorted civilian
clothing snapped to attention when the general’s widow addressed them,
and fell over one another in carrying out her order to show me carriage,
harness, and horses. But the horses were not visibly different from the
Chinese ponies for sale in the gully below the “thieves’ market”; the
harness was more massive and intricately Russian than in good
preservation; and the carriage would have taken first prize at any
American fair as an example of the impossible contrivances which
“furriners” inexplicably build for themselves. It was four-wheeled,
which alone would have barred it from continuing any further eastward
and aroused astonishment that it had been dragged this far; it had all
those Russian conveniences which to any other race seem quite the
opposite, such as a great yoke over the off horse and a roof which, if
it had been repainted some brighter color, would not have looked greatly
out of place on a Chinese temple; while the seats had been taken out by
the roots, so that the interior of the coach was nothing but a bare
wooden floor some six feet long and four wide. Two of us could stretch
out on this, with our bedding under us, very comfortably, the lady said,
as she and the general had done. The local Government was furnishing
“Peking carts” for her party, but she was too ill to travel in those and
was holding out for a mule-litter, hoping meanwhile to get together a
little money for the long journey still ahead by selling her personal
rolling-stock. I regretted that by no stretch of the imagination could
we see ourselves making our way back to civilization spread out on the
floor of what looked painfully like a hearse and which most certainly
could not have been operated on the hundreds of miles of no roads that
lay before us without a plentiful supply of Russian profanity.
Fully a thousand such cases a year, said our host, pass through Lanchow;
but, like the scattered samples of central Asia to be seen in the
streets, they are as nothing in the old familiar thronging Chinese
crowd, in filthy quilted garments, hands thrust in sleeves in lieu of
mittens, and cold, bluish running noses. It was hard to realize the
fact, when some reddish-bearded Moslem, wholly free from Chinese
features yet wearing Chinese uniform, came down from those distant
regions and directed attention to it, that, far west as Lanchow is,
China stretches for many weeks’ travel still farther westward, in a
great tongue of land which at length opens out into the broad reaches of
Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan, even though her assertion of total
suzerainty of Mongolia and Tibet be disallowed.
The people of Lanchow struck me as less courteous than those of Peking,
but still by no means deliberately unkind to foreigners. They seemed to
be but slightly informed on anything more than their own immediate
problems, at which of course there was no reason to wonder. For the
whole vast province has no newspaper except one flimsy sheet of
“official lies” spasmodically published in Lanchow; no students are sent
abroad from this province, “because,” to quote a Chinese, “officials are
more interested in filling their pockets”; and the “heathen” schools
even in the provincial capital are so bad, in spite of some recent
improvements, that missionaries feel they must have Christian schools
for their converts, quite aside from any question of mere religious
faith. There is no discipline left in Chinese schools since the
revolution, they assert, and every one, from Tuchun to servants, is more
avid for “squeeze” than before the republic was established. On the
other hand, the overwhelming majority of the population knows nothing
more of the word “republic” than its pronunciation, and “voting” is so
frankly a farce that ballot-boxes are calmly filled by order of the
authorities days before and brought to “polling-places” from which
soldiers exclude all citizens on “election day”; or the boxes are
stuffed then and there by the soldiers, under orders from headquarters.
Though the respect for foreigners or the fear of them is still so great
among the rank and file that the little Belgian chief of the Salt
Gabelle had more than once confiscated whole camel-caravans of smuggled
salt which he came upon in his travels, it was not so easy to make
officials honor either foreign rights or treaties. The Belgian, for
instance, had deposited in the official bank six hundred thousand
dollars income from the salt monopoly, which is designated by treaty for
use in paying off China’s foreign indebtedness—and the next thing he
knew it had been replaced with promissory notes of the provincial
Government; in other words, with worthless paper. Peking has no real
power in these back provinces, and even if provincial officials cannot
connive with bank employees to their hearts’ content, all the Tuchun, or
some Mohammedan general, or any official with audacity enough, has to do
is to ask Peking to instruct the “salt man” to give them money, and
neither he nor Peking can refuse. In a way China is more militaristic
to-day than ever Germany was, but the Chinese are not a fighting race,
depending rather upon the subtleties of graft and “squeeze” than upon
force. Were they not so docile and passive and so lacking in community
spirit, it would not be so easy for military governors, almost always
coming from other provinces than the one they rule, to get rich quickly
by all manner of tricks and then go home, or, if their peculations have
been too notorious, to some foreign concession in the coast cities,
where even a strong Central Government could not touch them.
There are few outward signs of disagreement between the two divisions of
Lanchow’s population, but old residents say that the feeling is far
deeper than appears to the casual observer. The Mohammedans also have
much of the Chinese temperament, or at least of the Chinese outward
attitude, and are inclined to temporize longer before they will fight
than do their brethren farther west. They are particularly gentle when
they are in a minority, as they are in many towns even of Kansu. But
they are more progressive, more interested in outside news, than the
mere Chinese, and they stick together, like most minorities. I heard of
only one Christian convert from among them, and even the missionaries
were not at all sure of him. After a long period of repression the
Chinese Mohammedans have to a large extent shaken off the Chinese yoke
in Kansu and, being better fighters, there is little doubt that they
will win still more from their former oppressors, who are hopelessly
divided. Already not only the orthodox headquarters of Hochow but other
districts are virtually self-governing, and certain Mohammedan generals
rule their sections much as they see fit. The “Hwei-Hwei” have long felt
that the province of Kansu is their special domain and that they should
be allowed to govern it, either as a part of China with a Tuchun of
their own faith, as an independent state, or by joining hands with
Sinkiang, its congenial neighbor on the west. During one of their
rebellions Yakub Beg ruled the Chinese Mohammedans for ten years, until
he was put down by troops sent from Peking. In the opinion, at least, of
most foreign residents, the Chinese have been stupid in their handling
of the Kansu problem, so that whereas, by just and generous treatment
when they were powerful, they might have had a strong Moslem province as
a more or less autonomous buffer-state on the west, yet still loyal to
the rest of the country, now that they are weak they may easily lose a
large part of the Mohammedan region.
Yet though one listens one is not so easily convinced. There comes to
mind the unfailing suppression of “Hwei-Hwei” rebellions in the past,
lighted up by the knowledge, sure to be picked up by any inquiring
traveler, that there is much internal friction, not to say combustion,
among the Moslems of Kansu themselves. Were they as strictly united as
they pretend to be, they could probably now throw off the Chinese yoke
entirely. But there are “Turk,” Arab, and Mongol “Hwei-Hwei,” not to
mention the still greater number perhaps of purely Chinese Mohammedans,
many of whom were “converted” during the rebellions of the last sixty
years; some still adhere strictly to the Koran, while new sects hold
later traditions or have incorporated elements of Buddhism and
Christianity. In fact, all the big Mohammedan rebellions have been due
to Chinese interference in “Hwei-Hwei” sect quarrels; that of 1895–96
began over the dispute as to whether or not a man under forty should be
allowed to grow a beard! It is the old story of the champion of a beaten
wife being fallen upon by both husband and consort. The day may not be
far distant, whatever the casual traveler may conclude, when the world
will wake up to find on its breakfast-table the news of the founding of
a new Moslem nation, in which Chinese features will be in the majority.
Meanwhile the “Hwei-Hwei” keep in form by fighting each other and by
drubbing the Tibetan tribes along the Kansu border, from whom much of
the metal was taken that has reappeared in the miserable “money” which
the people have had forced upon them.
Turks and Arabs can talk with many of the Chinese Moslems without
difficulty; which is the chief reason that our host was asked in 1914 by
his home Government to sit where he was and keep his eyes and ears open
instead of hotfooting it for Flanders. Mysterious delegations of Germans
and Ottomans were constantly passing through Kansu while the war was on,
and there are certain indications that their aborted plans were bold and
carefully laid. But all that is over now, and such interesting
similarities of tongue have become again merely of philological
interest.
Up to the time of the republic even Mohammedans high in the government
service could only live in the suburbs of Lanchow—whence its many walls.
But to-day there is a more tolerant spirit on both sides, at least in
every-day, peace-time intercourse. Some of the more reasonable and
educated “Hwei-Hwei” make friendships irrespective of faith. There was
“Mr. Donkey,” for instance, who was one of our host’s most frequent
visitors, though he never sat down at his table. Like so many of his
coreligionists, he bore the family name of “Ma,” which is derived from
Mohammed, but which also is the Chinese word for “horse”; and, there
being a distinct stratum of humor in our host’s make-up in spite of his
calling, he had taken a slight liberty with natural history when his
Moslem friend asked for the English version of his name. The joke had
long since been shared with the victim, but he was still likely to
startle foreigners to whom he was being introduced by displaying his
entire knowledge of the English language at one fell swoop with, “Sir, I
am Mr. Donkey.”
“Mr. Donkey” and a certain Taoist priest were bosom friends and were
given to periodic sprees, in which they were now and then joined by a
“Living Buddha.” Occasionally this convivial trio had irrupted into the
mission compound during the small hours, in the hope that their good
friend of still another faith might for once forget his little
idiosyncrasies of doctrine and join them. Once news had come to the ears
of our host that a “Britisher” had been confined in the Chinese jail;
and, being the chief example, if not the official representative, of the
British nation in Kansu, he could not of course permit this violation of
extraterritoriality to continue. He demanded the immediate release of
the prisoner, which his good friend the provincial governor granted at
once—and turned over to him an Afghan. What was more natural than that
he should have sent this fellow-national, for whom he had made himself
responsible, to stay with “Mr. Donkey,” a fellow-Moslem? Being a good
host, Mr. Ma promptly brought out a bottle of whisky, whereupon the
Afghan, being a good Mohammedan who still took his Koran literally,
walloped him severely on the jaw. The Chinese Moslems are more
easy-going in these little matters. Many of them drink, and smoke not
only tobacco but opium. The one rule to which they cling most
fiercely—though even that, it is said, many of them will break if there
are no coreligionists to tell on them—is the prohibition against eating
pork. They never speak of a pig by its real name unless they are volubly
cursing or shriveling up an enemy with an impromptu description of his
family tree. If there is no avoiding mention of the unclean creature in
polite intercourse, it is referred to as a “black sheep.” When the
Moslem population of a Kansu town is in the majority, no one in it is
allowed to keep or bring in pigs, which naturally tends to a further
decrease of the minority. Chinese may eat in a Mohammedan’s house, but
the latter cannot accept a return invitation, for fear not so much of
being purposely insulted by being offered pork, as of being fed in
dishes which have at some time or other been contaminated with pork or
lard. The Chinese, when things come to the point where it is worth the
risk, tell the “Hwei-Hwei” that their dislike of pork is merely a dread
of eating their ancestors; and then the knives come out.
“Mr. Donkey” took me to an important mosque in which posters, depicting
the Kaaba and similar scenes, and covered with Arabic text, had been
pasted in and about the prayer niche. Pilgrims had brought them from
Mecca, and the last little “Hwei-Hwei” in the group about me knew what
these symbols represented. Yet in all our journey through the northwest
I never saw a man bowing down in prayer toward Mecca, though others tell
me that this was mere accident. Certainly no such accident would
continue throughout a two months’ trip among the Moslems of the Near
East. Only once, too, did I see a woman veiled; her face was completely
covered with a thin black cloth, a curiously embroidered old-fashioned
skirt hid what were no doubt her bound feet; and a small boy was seated
close behind her on the donkey she rode, which a man on foot was urging
across the country at unusual speed. There are Mohammedan as well as
Christian schools in Lanchow, and they seem to rival each other in some
of their superiorities to those of the Chinese, though the Moslem ones
copy these in hours and uproar. I have seen Moslem children gathering
before the sun was above the horizon, and have come upon roomfuls of
boys loudly chanting in Chinese, though there was no evidence of a
teacher still in attendance, when darkness was creeping over the mosque
that raised its flare-roofed minaret above them. A certain amount of
“Alabi” is taught in “Hwei-Hwei” schools, and any man who can read the
Koran—which it is forbidden to have translated—is highly honored as an
_ahong_, though many know only the sounds of the words they are reading
and not their meaning.
“Hwei-Hwei” and Chinese customs are particularly at variance in the
matter of burials. The former believe in a decent interment for all,
while the Chinese see no reason why the bodies of mere girls and
unmarried women should not simply be thrown out on a garbage-heap or
into some convenient gully. Among the non-Moslems actual difficulties
are often placed in the way of the proper burial of a still-born child
or of a mother dying in childbirth, even if the family is willing to go
to the expense and trouble. Yet the Chinese consider the “Hwei-Hwei”
custom of disposing of their dead the height of barbarism, particularly
in the case of male parents. In each mosque is kept one elaborately
decorated coffin—without a bottom. When a “Hwei-Hwei” dies the body is
bathed at the home, swathed in white cloth on which are written Arabic
characters, carried to the grave in the coffin—and buried without it.
Naturally such a custom is shocking to a people who are addicted to
ancestor-worship and whose massive coffins are the chief cause of an
advance of deforestation that is already well beyond the Tibetan
frontier. In fact, though wolf, dog, otter, lynx, squirrel, fox, bear,
leopard and snow-leopard, deer, and several other skins come down in
considerable quantities from Tibet into Kansu and flow on into the rest
of China, probably the Chinese resentment at England for abetting the
Tibetans in throwing off the rule of Peking is due as much as anything
to the fear of the rank and file that their forests will cease to
furnish the coffins without which no genuine Chinese can either live or
die. During the fighting in Shensi Province in 1911, it was a very
common thing to see strings of pack-mules each carrying a frozen
“Hwei-Hwei” corpse on either side, wending their way back to Hochow, the
Chinese Mecca; but once the corpse has been taken home for burial there
seems to be none of the Chinese desire to preserve it as long as
possible.
At a genuine “Hwei-Hwei” wedding every one comes on horseback to the
bride’s home for the ceremony by an _ahong_, and then the whole
cavalcade gallops back to the house of the groom. There is said to be
less infant mortality among the Mohammedans than among their neighbors,
not only because girls are perhaps a little less unwelcome, but because
of the greater consumption of mutton and milk. “Hwei-Hwei” boys of
fifteen often turn muleteers and tramp twenty to thirty miles a day over
the mountains and spend much of the night feeding their animals, months
on end, while they steadily grow into sturdy men to whom almost any
hardship is not even recognized as such.
[Illustration:
A Kansu vista near Lanchow, where the hills are no longer terraced,
but where towns are numerous and much alike
]
[Illustration:
This method of grinding up red peppers and the like is wide-spread in
China. Both through and wheel are of solid iron
]
[Illustration:
Oil is floated down the Yellow River to Lanchow in whole ox-hides that
quiver at a touch as if they were alive
]
[Illustration:
The Yellow River at Lanchow, with a water-wheel and the American
bridge which is the only one that crosses it in the west
]
The dinner given in our honor by the “copper”-making Tuchun of Kansu was
in most points a repetition of that in Sian-fu. This time, in addition
to the invitations on red cards, there was sent around a list of the
guests, written in Chinese, of course, on a long sheet of similar color,
which we were expected to sign in Chinese after our names. If one is not
able to come—or perhaps if he finds some of the other guests not to his
liking—he makes an appropriate mark in lieu of signing. When the hour
for the dinner approached, messengers came to remind us to come; perhaps
I should say to _warn_ us not to be late or absent, for this was plainly
a custom of viceregal days which still survived out here in the far
west. In those days a visit to this same yamen was an event to cable
home about, quite different from dropping in to see a military governor
who from the Chinese point of view was extremely “democratic.” The man
who hoped to live to boast of having been received by a viceroy got into
his best dress about the middle of the night and appeared at the yamen
toward four in the morning, when he might possibly be admitted to the
semi-imperial presence within an hour or two, since viceroys more or
less followed the custom in audiences of the court at Peking; or he
might have the pleasure of waiting most of the day, and perhaps of
coming back again next morning to see another sunrise. If, when at last
he was received, he was of high enough rank to be asked to take a chair
or its viceregal equivalent, he sat gingerly on the extreme edge of it,
like one who knows how reprehensible it is to dare to draw breath in so
sacred a presence. But those same old viceroys knew how to rule the
Chinese, and their modern successors seem to come most nearly succeeding
at the same task when they adopt viceregal methods, for all their
up-to-date uniforms in place of flowing Ch’ing dynasty costumes. Then,
there was an exact unbroken line of responsibility all the way from the
viceroy clear down to the village elder, and things that were ordered
done usually occurred, and vice versa. But we all know what a long row
there is to hoe between autocracy and anything approaching real
democracy.
Long lines of soldiers presented arms as we passed through the various
compounds of the yamen in the wake of our visiting-cards, held high
aloft as usual. At length there came the period of innumerable
waist-hinged bows, attended by the difficulty, now so familiar in China,
as to whether hats or caps should be lifted or left undisturbed. For by
Chinese custom it is bad form to uncover the head before guests or
hosts, even indoors, while the European style is not only quite the
opposite but is here and there followed by Chinese who consider
themselves progressive, though one can never be sure when or where such
alien manners, perhaps including the unsanitary hand-shake, will break
out. After the preliminary formalities in the every-day guest-room, we
streamed away through the compound of the bugling wapiti and across the
now barren garden to a huge room on the edge of the city wall and
overlooking the Yellow River. Not only was this open and cold but its
walls were mainly of glass, which did not improve the temperature. It
was not easy to find our places by the red place-cards bearing merely
our Chinese names, but when we did we found that America had been
signally honored. For on the Tuchun’s left, which is nearest the heart
in Chinese custom, sat the major, while a Mongol prince who ruled a
tribe in the Kokonor region of Tibet had been relegated to his less
important right hand. However, the prince, who was also a lama, and
according to some uncertain authorities a “Living Buddha,” cast far into
the shade not only the major, but the Tuchun himself, this time in a
black gown instead of uniform, to say nothing of the civil governor—in
practice merely an underling of the military ruler of any Chinese
province and as pale a moon as a vice-president in the shadow of the
White House. For his Highness, or whatever familiar title he answered
to, wore a brilliant saffron jacket embroidered with dragons, a cap of
similar color with a large pink tourmaline—perhaps, for I am no expert
in colored stones—a purple skirt, and dull-red Mongol boots! With him
had come a princely suite, one member of which, swarthy as a mulatto and
with a curiously eagle-like eye, stood between his master and the Tuchun
and acted as interpreter. But the prince was anything but talkative,
possibly because he was not garrulous by temperament, perhaps because he
shared the common dislike of hearing his remarks relayed in a foreign
tongue, but most likely for the reason that his attention was fully
taken up with the intricacies of what purported to be a foreign meal.
The strange eating-tools were evidently quite new to him; but he had the
wisdom of common sense as well as the unexcitability of Mongol princes,
and by watching the Tuchun at one end of the table and the civil
governor at the other he came off very well indeed. How deep was his
wisdom is shown by the fact that whenever he was in doubt he merely
“passed.” Perhaps he really did not smoke or drink, as he stated with a
word and a gesture, but there could hardly have been any religious
motives for refusing half the countless courses, beginning with sharks’
fins—no simple luxury this far from the coast—and ending with macaroons,
which he plainly avoided as another unknown, and therefore possibly
dangerous, form of food.
How the soldier servants, to whom a boy picked up from the dump-heap
brought things from the kitchen, handled not only slices of bread but
the eating end of forks and spoons without any apparent consciousness of
the absence of manicurists in Lanchow need not of course be mentioned.
Besides the lama-prince there were Protestant missionaries, a Catholic
or two, ordinary Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucianists, probably
fetishists pure and simple as well as mere pagans, and certainly there
were Mohammedans among the soldiers swarming within and about the room,
though not, of course, among the guests. Conversation never rose above
the gossip plane, and glancing along the table I realized that one
possible reason for this, besides custom at semi-public Tuchuns’
dinners, was the fact that there were eight different mother-tongues
among the bare score of men about the festive board.
Night had fallen before the servants had cut up the fruit and
distributed it piecemeal, and had snatched away from any unwary guest
the cigar laid before him a moment before, slipping it deftly up their
sleeves, and we were at length in a position to bid Lanchow an official
farewell. The final scene was not without its picturesqueness. When the
last polite controversy on precedent at the many yamen gateways and the
final bows had subsided, the blue embroidered night turned to a
whirlpool of big oval Chinese lanterns, as the chair-bearers gathered in
the outer courtyard prepared to take up their masters and trot. Each
chair was tilted forward until its owner had doubled himself into it,
his cushions were adjusted by ostensibly loving hands, and the curtain
which formed the front wall closed upon him. The chief of his carriers
shouted out orders that were repeated as well as executed by the others,
and each group shouldered its burden in turn and jogged away into the
night, its big paper lanterns swinging gently to and fro. Even the
Belgian representative of the salt administration was attended by
soldiers as well as his four chair-bearers, for high officials cannot
overlook the matter of “face” in China merely because they chance to be
foreigners. The Mongol lama-prince, like one who deeply scorned any such
effeminate form of locomotion, mounted the red-saddled horse led up by
one of his rather poorly mounted escort, which clattered away over the
flagstones behind him, bugles blowing and scattered groups of soldiers
presenting arms, while we simple Americans wandered out and away on
foot.