Henry Cates' story of the very little boy who started making a mud man
in the spring branch, but before he got the second arm on, a storm
came up, and when he came back his man had mysteriously disappeared.
But when Johnny went to town next day and for the first time in his
life saw a one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up,
he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?" Somehow the
camel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks to me as if he got away
before he was finished. He is either a preliminary rough sketch
accidentally turned loose on the world, or else he got warped somehow
in the drying process--great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene,
goose-necked, saddle-backed Old Slow and Steady!
{117}
[Illustration: A MAN-MADE DESERT.]
[Illustration: PUMPING WATER FOR IRRIGATION.]
The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast
areas that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing
Chinese pumping water by human treadmill, furnishes another
illustration of the Orient's waste of labor.
{118}
[Illustration: TRANSPORTATION AND TRAVEL IN CHINA.]
The camels that come down from Mongolia and wind their unhurried way
from Chien Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace form one of
the most picturesque of the many picturesque sights in fascinating
old Peking. The right-hand picture shows the author utilizing the
most rapid means of transit in the mountains north of Peking.
{116 continued}
Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my entire tour
has given me more pleasure than the sight of the camel trains about
Peking and all the way to the end of the Nankou Pass in the mountains
north of the ancient Chinese {119} capital. At the Pass this morning I saw
three such camel trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert of
Gobi: long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as if I
had become a character in the Arabian Nights or a contemporary of
Kublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest I have yet
seen--twenty-five or thirty camels, I should say, treading Indian-file
with their usual unostentatious stateliness, a wooden pin through each
camel's nostrils from which a cord bound him to the camel next ahead,
a few strangely dressed drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession.
Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered by my
party, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself, as we rode our
little donkeys mile after mile of rocky way from Nankou village
through the Pass. To begin with, we were ourselves funny-looking
enough, for my donkey was so small that he could almost walk under the
belly of my saddle-horse at home, and my feet almost touched the
ground. The donkeys ridden by my friends were but little larger, and
altogether we looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules--
an effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey dropped him
twice in the mud! It was our clothing, however, our ordinary American
and European trousers, coats, overcoats and hats, and the fact that we
wore no queues down our backs, that made us objects of curiosity to
the Mongolian and Manchurian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders,
and mule-pack drivers whom we met on the way, just as we were
interested in the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc., which we
found them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments. These
cotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily padded bed-quilts
ineptly called "comforts," and as the poor Chinese in the colder
sections of the empire cannot afford much fire in winter, they add one
layer of cotton padding after another until it is difficult for them
to waddle along.
On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey-ride over the
rough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their {120} very
simplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we meet come from away
up in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet gone, and the camels and the
donkeys (the donkeys in most cases larger than those we rode) bring
down on their backs the Mongolian products--wool, hides, grain,
etc.--and carry back coal, clothing, and the other simple supplies
demanded by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack trains
of donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose, each carrying a
heavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps big, well-packed baskets
or goods-boxes carefully balanced. A horse over here will tote about
as much as a horse at home would pull. Then there were several immense
droves of sheep: in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, and
every sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the general
effect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The Chinese
raise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too, and drive them to
market loose in the same way that they drive their sheep. We also met
two or three droves of mountain horses, a hundred or more to the
drove.
But it would have been well worth while to make the trip if we had
gotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great Wall at the end
of the journey. About two thousand miles of stone and brick,
twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough on top for two carriages to
drive abreast, this great structure, begun two thousand years ago to
keep the wild barbarian Northern tribes out of China, is truly "the
largest building on earth," and one of the world's greatest wonders.
It would be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but
where we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after
another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy,
stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and thousands of
tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the sheer steep
mountainsides is a question that must excite every traveller's wonder.
Certainly no one who has walked on top of the great wall, climbing
among the clouds from one {121} misty eminence to another, as we did
to-day, can ever forget the experience.
Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not clear. The
mists that hung about the mountain-peaks below and around us; the
roaring wind that shepherded the clouds, now driving them swiftly
before it and leaving in clear view for a minute peak after peak and
valley after valley, the next minute brushing great fog-masses over
wall and landscape and concealing all from view--all this lent an
element of mystery and majesty to the experience not out of keeping
with our thought of the long centuries through which this strange
guard has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long dead and
crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era began, were the hands
that fashioned these earlier brick and laid them in the mortar, and
for many generations thereafter watchmen armed with bows and arrows
rode along the battlements and towers, straining their eyes for sight
of whatever enemy might be bold enough to try to cross the mighty
barrier.
However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we cannot but
admire the almost matchless daring of the conception and the almost
unparalleled industry of the execution. Beside it the digging of our
Panama Canal with modern machinery, engines, steam power and
electricity, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, is no
longer a subject for boasting. To my mind, the very fact that the
Chinese people had the courage to conceive and attempt so colossal an
enterprise is proof enough of genuine greatness. No feeble folk could
even have planned such an undertaking.
On this trip into the heart of China, however, I have noticed a number
of things of decidedly practical value in addition to the merely
curious things I have just reported. In the first place, I have been
simply amazed to find that these Chinese farmers around Peking,
Nankou, and Tien-tsin are far ahead of some of our farmers in the
matter of horsepower help in plowing.
{122}
Coming up from Peking to Nankou, I found farmers in almost every field
busy with their fall plowing or late grain sowing, and while there
were dozens and dozens of three-horsepower plows, I saw only one or
two one-horsepower plows on the whole trip. This is all the more
surprising in view of the fact that labor is so cheap over here--15
cents a day American money would be a good wage for farm hands--but
evidently the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, they
must have two or three horses in order to get the best results from
the soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in good
condition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys (they use large
donkeys for plowing, even if small ones for riding) they get the land
in good condition in spite of the fact that they cannot get the good
plows that any American farmer may buy. I rode donkey-back through
some farming country yesterday and watched the work rather closely.
The plows, like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are much
better in workmanship. Here they are made by the village
carpenter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, and
below it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point.
The Chinese farmers, it should also be observed in passing, fully
realize the importance of land rolling and harrowing. It is no
uncommon sight to see a man driving a three-horse harrow. It is also
said that for hundreds of years the Chinese have practised a suitable
rotation of crops and have known the value of leguminous plants.
Nankou Pass, China.
{123}
XIII
FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG
I shall have to go back to Peking some time. You must hurry out of the
city, men tell you there, or else ere you know it the siren-like Lure
of the East will grip you irresistibly; and I felt in some measure the
soundness of the counsel. The knowledge that each day the long trains
of awkward-moving camels are winding their unhurried way from
Chien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow-tiled
roofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them, while to the left
are the faint gray-blue outlines of the Western Hills--all this will
be to me a silent but perpetual invitation to go back.
The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never-failing
interest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese men in gowns and
queues (the wives wear the trousers over here!), the nobles and
officers in gorgeous silks and velvets; the fantastic head-dress of
the Manchu ladies, and the hobbling movements of the Chinese women
hampered by ruined feet; the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring,
pig-tailed coolies in the shafts; the heavy two-wheeled Peking carts
like half-sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreign
or native woman glimpsed through the glass windows of her sedan chair,
eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human burden; the long
lines of shop fronts with such a pleasing variety of decorative color
as to make one wonder why artists have not made them famous; the
uniformed soldiers from every nation on the earth to guard the various
legations, and {124} Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreign
clothing. The strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memory
ever after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, the
jingling bells of the thousands of sturdy little saddle donkeys, the
rattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging gong of
a mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and behind to bear
testimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of peddlers of many kinds,
their wares balanced in baskets borne from their shoulders.
Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some man has
died and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper-covered horse in
the belief that it will be changed into a real horse to serve him in
the Beyond; and imitations of other things that might be useful to him
are burned in the same way.
Or perhaps a marriage procession may pass. A dozen servants carry
placards with emblems of the rank of the family represented by the
bride or groom, numerous other servants bear presents, and the bride
herself passes by concealed in a gorgeous sedan chair borne on the
shoulders of six or eight coolies.
Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however, Peking is
even richer in historic interest. And by historic in China is not
meant any matter of the last half-hour, such as Columbus's discovery
of America or the landing at Plymouth Rock; these things to the
Chinaman are so modern as to belong rather in the category of recent
daily newspaper sensations along with the Pinchot-Ballinger
controversy or the Thaw trial. If he wishes something genuinely
historic, he goes back three or four thousand years. For example, a
friend of mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time
ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country.
Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom. "Yes,"' he
answered, "that is our custom now, since we changed. But it has not
always been so. We did the other way up to four or five centuries
before Christ." Whereupon the audience, amazed at the utterly casual
mention of an event two thousand {125} years old as if it were a happening
of yesterday, was convulsed in merriment, which the young Chinaman was
entirely unable to understand.
When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then bearing
another name), having centuries before grown into eminence, had been
destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering upon its second youth. About
the time of the last Caesars it fell into the hands of the Tartars,
who gave place to the Mongols after 1215. It was during the reign of
the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital,
then called Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered
America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nankou, built the
great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to this day--forty feet
high, wide enough on top for four or five carriages to drive abreast,
and thirteen miles around.
Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have most
often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only ten years
and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. The widely current
idea is that this Boxer movement originated in anti-missionary
sentiment, but this is not borne out by the facts. The late Col.
Charles Denby, long American Minister to China, pointed out very
clearly that the main cause was opposition to the land-grabbing
policies of European nations. Once started, however, it took the form
of opposition to everything foreign--missionaries and non-missionaries
alike. I passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in
company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the siege that
sounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs; stories of Chinese
Christian converts butchered like sheep by their infuriated fellow
countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in another part of the city, was
finally rescued by foreign troops, the surviving Christians and
missionaries were dying of starvation; they had become mere wan,
half-crazed skeletons, subsisting on roots and bark.
The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts {126}
during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of the
church, but of mankind; for what man of us is not inspired to worthier
things by every high deed of martyrdom which a fellowman anywhere has
suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers hurled arrow after arrow with
letters attached offering immunity to the Chinese converts if they
would abandon their Christian leaders, but not even starvation led one
to desert. Colonel Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000
Chinese Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them
abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day of one
family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked out by
suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying their Master,
and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, "Jesus Is Leading Me." At
Taiyan-fu an especially touching incident occurred: Five or six young
girls, just in their teens, were about to be killed, when a leader
intervened, declaring: "It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and
urged them to recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since
that is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for their
faith with their lives.
I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means river in
Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the famous Chinese
industrial centre, about 600 miles south of Peking. About Hankow I
found farming much more primitive than that around Peking, Nankou, and
Tientsin. Instead of the three and four horse plows I found in North
China, the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox.
The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of buying a
"farm"; he buys a "field." In Kwang-tung there is a saying that one
sixth of an acre "will support one mouth." As nearly as I can find
out, the average wages paid farm laborers is about 10 cents (gold) a
day. The average for all kinds of labor, a member of the Emperor's
Grand Council tells me, is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18
cents gold a day.
In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in {127} China
or Japan there are three or four things that must always be kept in
mind. One is that there are no fences between fields; I haven't seen a
wooden or wire farm-fence since I left America. A high row or ridge
separates one field from another, and nothing else. In the next place,
there are no isolated farm-houses. The people live in villages, from
ten to fifty farmhouses grouped together, and the laborers go out from
their homes to the fields each morning and return at evening. The same
system, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as population
becomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we shall doubtless
attempt to group our farm homes also. Even now, much more--vastly
more--might be done in this respect if our farmers only had the plan
in mind in building new homes. Where three or four farms come near
together, why should not the dwellings be grouped near a common
centre? It would mean much for convenience and for a better social
life. Another notable difference from our own country is the absence
of wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any kind. In this
part of China the farmhouse is made of mud bricks, or mud and reeds,
or else of a mixture of mud and stone, and is usually surrounded by a
high wall of the same material.
Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are basking in the
joyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights they may reflect
that the Chinaman on this side of the earth enjoys no such comfort.
Enough fire to cook the scanty meals is all that he can afford. To
protect themselves against cold, as I have already pointed out, the
poor put on many thicknesses of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wear
furs and woolens. When a coolie has donned the maximum quantity of
cotton padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-plated
cruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him.
At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plowing and
harrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out to the Temple of
Agriculture, where each spring the Emperor or Prince Regent comes and
plows sixteen rows, the purpose {128} being to bear testimony to the
high honorableness of agriculture and its fundamental importance to
the empire. This happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it is
in late fall that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy now
flailing grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, or
grinding it in mills operated by a single donkey.
In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions--possibly
billions--of the Chinese dead are even more in evidence than in the
northern provinces. Let China last a few more thousand years with its
present customs and the country will be one vast cemetery, and the
people will have to move away to find land to cultivate. As not one
grave in a thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem as
if they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that each
Chinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The care
of their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even when John
goes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be used to bring
his body back to the ancestral burying ground.
In a land so given over to superstition I have no doubt that the most
horrible disasters would also be expected as the penalty for
interfering with any grave. It seems odd that a people who had a
literature centuries before our Anglo-Saxon ancestors emerged from
barbarism should now be the victims of superstitions almost as gross
as those prevailing in Africa; but such are the facts. Chang
Chih-tung, who died a few months ago, was one of the most progressive
and enlightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but not
even a man of his type could free himself from the great body of
superstition handed down from generation to generation.
In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as "Dragon
Hill," because of the Chinese belief that a dragon inhabits it. This
long hill divides the city into two parts; every day hundreds and
sometimes possibly thousands of people must climb up one side and down
the other in getting from one part of the town to another. Therefore,
when Chang {129} Chih-tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that he
would make a cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble.
And he did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a painful
abscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he consulted were
quick in pointing out the trouble. By making the cut in the hill, they
told him, he had offended the earth dragon which inhabits it, and
unless the cut were filled up Chang might die and disaster might come
upon the city. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but to
restore the ancient obstruction to travel, and so it remains to this
day.
In sight from Dragon Hill is another hill known as Tortoise Hill,
supposed to be inhabited by a tortoise spirit or devil, and at its
foot are some lakes in which it has long been said that the tortoise
washes its feet. Now these lakes are on property owned by the Hanyang
Steel & Iron Works and they decided a few years ago that they would
either drain off the water or else fill up the lakes so as to get more
land. But before they got started the Chinese civil authorities heard
of it and notified the Hanyang Company that such a proceeding could
not be tolerated. The tortoise would have nowhere to wash his feet,
and would straightway bring down the wrath of Heaven on all the
community!
It is from superstitions such as these that the schools must free the
Chinese before the way can be really cleared for the introduction of
Christianity. The teacher is as necessary as the preacher. And the
task of getting the masses even to the point where they can read and
write is supremely difficult. The language, it must be remembered, has
no alphabet. Each word is made not by joining several letters
together, as with us, but by making a distinct character--each
character an intricate and difficult combination of lines, marks, and
dots. Or perhaps the word may be formed by joining two distinct
characters together. For example, to write "obedience" in Chinese you
write together the characters for "leaf" and "river," the significance
being that true obedience is as trusting {130} and unresisting as the
fallen leaf on the river's current. My point is, however, that for
each word a distinct group of marks (like mixed-up chicken tracks)
must be piled together, and the task of remembering how to recognize
and write the five thousand or more characters in the language would
make an average American boy turn gray at the very thought. My friend
Doctor Tenney, of the American Legation in Peking, asserts that at
least five years of the average Chinese pupil's school life might be
saved if the language were based on an alphabet like ours instead of
on such arbitrary word-signs.