fashion, with some force in the centres and almost none in the outlying
districts, where the old nomad organization of society, with princes,
barons, or _tai-tsi_, clergy, and ordinary black men, still persists. A
code of Chinese laws exists, but in general justice is dealt out by the
local princes, or _guns_, who receive also the cattle-tax in some
districts, and who go by turns for a year to Peking in symbol of homage.
[Illustration: CHINESE MANDARIN]
[Illustration: GIGIN, THE LIVING BUDDHA]
These Mongol _guns_, ruling over each of the _hushouns_, or counties,
which compose the _eimucks_, are under feudal obligations to the
Chinese Emperor. Their visible subjection to China consists of
ceremonial visits with tribute, for which the Emperor’s return gifts
are of far greater value. A total of one hundred and twenty thousand
_lens_ of silver ($90,000) goes yearly from the Emperor to the nomad
nobility. A khan of the first rank receives two thousand _lens_ ($1500)
and twenty-five pieces of silk; lesser gentry in proportion.
This primitive aristocracy lives in barbaric state, with splendid
carpets, silver-inlaid furniture, and jeweled accoutrements. The women
are sometimes very good-looking. They are laden with ornaments, furs
and silks, and have a spot of carmine on each cheek, which is the
prerogative of a princess. But the normal imagination does not go
beyond the gir as a dwelling. Finely fitted it may be, yet it remains
a one-room hut, with the open brazier in its centre. Their wealth is
in ancestral ornaments, and in the flocks and herds of their private
domains. Their one relic and memorial of a past sway lies in the
custom under which the Chinese rulers call by the old Mongol names the
_eimucks_, which were the ancestors’ kingdoms. That of which Urga is
capital still bears the name of Tu-she-tu.
The Mongol lords are responsible for the feudal army, and a caste
of bannermen exists, who are paid nominally two ounces of silver per
month and a supply of grain, with the corresponding duty of keeping
their bows and arrows in order. In the Tu-she-tu khanate of the eastern
Khalka tribes, there are twenty banners, each under an hereditary
_yassak_, or tributary prince. In 1900 some banners of the Barukhs
turned out to fight Russians, but they made no showing whatever, and
hurriedly returned after a skirmish with the Cossacks. Spears and
arrows are the only weapons the Mongol army can show.
While this feudal system applies in general to the whole _eimuck_, in
Urga the Gigin has a unique position. The city is a great monastery,
practically all of the permanent native population of fifteen thousand
being priests. The laymen who are there are mostly pilgrims, or
dependents upon the Church. Over these the Gigin is master, so that
Urga is known as “The Holy Living God’s Encampment.”
Over the Russians and the Buriat tribesmen, the Chinese have no
actual sway, and from them they collect no taxes. The Russian consul
is dictator to this little flock; and behind his stockade, where the
tricolor waves, rally the Orthodox in times of danger.
Across from the _Zinzin’s_ doorway is a spiked stockade. Inside, where
they have been thrust through a hole just big enough for a man’s
body, are the miserable criminals. In the big pit dug with their
naked hands, the wretches cower, shelterless, under the terrible cold
of winter. They live or die there, sometimes fed by the charity of
Mongols, sometimes forgotten, sometimes purchasing miserable fragments
of offal with the unstolen remnants of the prison allowance. Few
waste sympathy on the inmates. The low level of existence of those
outside makes the place perhaps less terrible than it would be to
people who had known other conditions. It is a grim Chinese jest, this
loathsome prison for those who have stolen bread in the market-place,
set opposite the palace of the grafting governor who has filched the
tribute of Tu-she-tu.
From the Chinese city now, there begins to come the distant throb of
drums and clash of cymbals. Three gorgeous Mongols gallop past in their
splendid free-reined horsemanship. A sentry stalks to the door of
the stockaded prison, and looks toward the gray walls and temples of
Maimachen. The procession of the New Moon is to pass to-day.
You leap onto your little Mongol riding-pony, and spurring him into
a gallop, hasten along the way to the Chinese city. He tears down
the broad road. The resplendent trotting horsemen take the pace as
a challenge, and yell joyfully for a race as their whips come down
on their own horses’ flanks. Mongol girls walking hand in hand along
the highway scatter and call out as the riders clatter by. It is
contagious. Soon a score of riders are shouting, shaking bridles, and
lashing ponies, and it is a cavalcade of racers that gallops up to the
gate of Maimachen.
How different is this Chinese settlement from Mongol Urga! It is a
magnified replica of the city at the frontiers. Instead of the straggly
avenues a hundred yards broad, with cañon-like alleys flanked by
high mud walls, all the streets are so narrow that two strides cross
them. They are lined with miniature booths. Through the bars of their
paper-paned windows one sees the little delicately-tinted pictures of
pagodas and of Chinese girls, in quaint sweeping outlines. Red and
black and gold, the New Year placards flame on every post and wall.
Lanterns are hung before the gateways; green saplings stand sentinel
by the doors; and in the unshuttered compounds innumerable lines of
gaudy banners are seen, strung from side to side across the courtyards.
From the houses come from time to time a thrumming and a picking of
strings in minor music, broken by an occasional clang of cymbals or a
drone of beaten drums. You pass a temple of marvelously carved wood,
wrought into curves and flowers and arabesques, with eaves turning out
into open-mouthed dragons. Everything is brilliant in paint and gilt--a
blazing kaleidoscope of color.
In a friendly courtyard the horses are tied, and you walk into the
teeming streets. All the Chinese of Maimachen and half the Mongols of
Urga have come out to-day. Here is a little shifty-eyed Chinese clerk,
in his low shoes, with white soles several inches thick, his white
stockings, tied at the ankle, showing below the baggy trousers.
Here is a young Mongol lama, who hails you gleefully with a Russian
word which he has learned from a Buriat, and points out where the
procession will emerge. A Mongol woman passes, gorgeously dressed in
flowered yellow silk, with red, sable-cuffed sleeves so long as nearly
to touch the ground, and her head cuirassed with the burden of silver
ornaments. She smiles at the burly Mongol camel-driver who so openly
admires her.
A Chinese merchant, with red-buttoned cap, attended by a servant, is
pushing through the crowd. His looks are surly; perhaps he is thinking
of the whereabouts of his own establishment in this carnival.
Though the rich and wifeless Chinese may acquire Mongol companions,
they cannot buy or give affection. For a poor Mongol, who has the
sincerity and humanness which the Chinaman withholds, one of these
Mongol concubines will either deceive her master, or, if he object too
vigorously, will strip herself of his presents and go to her lover’s
_gir_.
A big Celestial with a fuse comes hastily through the gateway from
which the procession is to emerge. The crash of his firecrackers
startles the Mongol ponies pushed close along the houses. Beneath
the multi-colored gateway, next pour out a score of horsemen with
pennanted spears. They ride two by two, in white coats with red letters
on their breasts. Then comes a crowd of footmen, who fill the street
in a torrent. The curious Mongols press to each side, and watch the
procession of their alien overlords. Two ranks are robed in vivid red,
and carry poles with big gold knobs. Blue-coated Chinamen, with cymbals
and shrilling fifes, follow; then come more horsemen; then the great
silken umbrella, and a gray-mustached dignitary on horseback,--the
chief of police; next, more fifers and wand-carriers, six abreast.
With fireworks and clashing music, the vivid ranks in red and blue,
and yellow and gold, and green and purple, and every other conceivable
combination of hues, make their way around the stockade and back again
through the gated city.
The crowd seems to be trending now toward a brilliantly colored archway
spanning the main street. With the Mongol holiday-makers we follow
along into a cloistered courtyard flanked by peaked temple-like houses.
A crowd of Chinese is pressing around some one clad in blue, who has
just stepped out between the beater of a tom-tom and an artist with a
big pair of cymbals. A preliminary flourish introduces the performer--a
pasty-faced young Chinaman. He starts a rhythmic chant whose cadence
is within a note or two of one of the old crooning Negro melodies of
our South. Over and over again he chants it. A poet this is. He has
conned his verses, and now comes out to sing them. He ends with a
special swirl in what is evidently a very comic climax. The drum and
cymbals crash out once more, and another chanter comes--this one
old and feeble, with a curiously penetrating voice. He drones a long
hexameter-footed epic, in which the harsh Chinese _gh_ and _wh_ sounds
are not so coarsely enunciated as in the poem of the first reciter.
“That is one of the old legend-singers,” you are told. It is such a
ballad as Homer sang, or the Welsh bards chanted. It is the poetry
and the history of the long past, the immemorial past, far before the
infancy of other nations; for China keeps alive her antiquity, and in
her old age never forgets.
[Illustration: CHINESE ARCHWAY, URGA MAIMACHEN]
This week there can be no buying or selling. The Moon must be honored,
but visits are in order. Your friend brings you to meet a leading
Chinese merchant. At the house, a grille of thick wooden bars runs
down to the street level from the eaves just above one’s head. Looking
through them, one can see over the little square window the most
delicately-traced pictures on a white background. The panes are of
paper, all save one, which is of glass, so that the owner may see if,
coming down the street, any one turns and climbs the three steps into
the ordinarily wide-open door of his house.
The home of our host, which is likewise his office, is finely fitted up
and faultlessly clean. His light-blue silk robes are immaculate. Two
servants wait at table, bringing in the best of China tea and French
“petit-beurre” biscuits for our delectation. Everything is appetizing
and orderly.
As we are sitting over the cups with the Chinese merchant, the boy
comes to announce visitors, and two blue-robed fellow countrymen enter.
One has a strip of light-blue silk laid over his two arms, which he
stretches out. The host extends his own arms and receives it, then
gives it back to the newcomer, who goes down on one knee and again
presents it. The merchant takes it a second time and bows, this time
retaining it. The two guests bend and leave the room. “New Year’s
presents,” the merchant explains. Again the boy comes in and announces
a guest. A Mongol messenger enters, goes down on one knee, and presents
a red slip, black-lettered. “Visiting-card,” the host explains. Then,
with a smile, “White, like yours, not polite.” He accepts this too.
“_Ch’ou Ta-tzu!_” (the dirty Tatar!) he says as the latter leaves.
The calls continue, and our visit. The host is charming, cultured,
educated; he speaks English well, and lacks in no attention. But
you wonder if, when you leave, he is not going to murmur about you,
“Yong-kwei-tsz!” (foreign devil!)
Throughout all intercourse with these Chinese, one has always the
uneasy consciousness that one is doubtless, as with the card,
unwittingly offending. There are three hundred rules of ceremony,
three thousand formulæ of behavior, regulated by a classic tradition.
The ritual is so drilled into the Chinese as to become instinctive.
Celestial breeding would dictate that the little formalism which
precedes a rubber, “May I play to hearts, if you please?” be stretched
to cover every action of life. The left, not the right, is the place
of honor, and to enter a room facing wrongly is a slight. An irregular
method of folding a red New-Year’s card, and the failure in writing
to raise one character above the level of the rest, are breaches of
etiquette.
For our race there is always felt, behind the soul-mask of Chinese
eyes, a contempt. The kindness of our host to-day is unfailing. Yet we
are not at ease or sure of the ground. Errors, condoned to keep face,
are often inwardly resented. If you put your hat on the Mongol’s altar,
everybody in the hut will yell out for you to take it off. When you
remove it, they will nod understandingly as the interpreter explains
that the ignorant foreigner transgressed inadvertently. Forthwith all
is forgotten in an enthusiastic discussion of the last case of botts
among the horses. But with these Chinese one can never tell if, by
taking a chop-stick between the wrong fingers, one has not intimated
that the host’s grandfather was a cross-eyed coolie soldier. No one
will challenge or set a man right, but the breach will be silently
resented, though the tea continues to be smilingly offered.
The old-time Chinese dealers at Urga grew enormously wealthy in the
tea-trade to Kiahta. These have mostly gone back to China. But there
are still a number of the better-class merchants whose wares are sold
to the traders and by them to the Mongols. The house of Liu-Shang-Yuan
claims two hundred years of establishment. The Urga people are still
prosperous, for great sums in religious tribute come from all Mongolia
to this Lourdes of Lamaism. There are also many Chinamen who make large
profits from wool.
Of a total trade in Urga estimated at twenty-five million roubles per
year, nine tenths is in the hands of Celestials. The remainder is
Russian, for the Mongols are entirely without a merchant class. Of the
exports, wool is the main item. Some two hundred thousand _puds_ are
sent from Urga annually, four fifths of which go to the United States.
While cotton cloth, cutlery, kitchen-utensils, and other European
goods come down from Russia, the bulk of the imports are brought from
China by caravan, through Kalgan. Silks come from Shanghai, and tea
from Hankow, passing via Peking. There is trade, too, with Ulasati in
western Mongolia. It is the centre of a fur and hide country which is
isolated from outlets toward Russia by the high mountains, and must
send caravans to Kiahta. Its communication with China is either by Urga
and Kalgan, or by the caravan-route further south.
When the holiday-time is over we see more of the Chinese traders.
Sitting in the shops, with one of these, and glancing out over the
little counter of the sales-room, we converse as the customers come and
go.
The Russian in his shop shows all he has of wares, the red and magenta
cloths, the enameled kettles, the cutlery and sweetmeats. But the
Chinaman wraps his goods in hieroglyphic-covered papers, and all that
can be seen are rows of long-stemmed brass-bowled pipes, and an array
of silver and bronze teapots on shelves at one side. Very rare things,
too, our Chinese host can produce. Shanghai silks of finest texture,
ten roubles the _arsheen_; jade mouthpieces for the pipes at a hundred
_taels_; Hankow tea culled from the tenderest shoots. Everything is
labeled and systematized in the Chinaman’s place, and he goes at once
to the packet which he wishes to show.
A dozen Chinese, with bright blue silk jackets over their black
surtouts, invade now the home of the merchant. The red knot on their
black skull-caps and the length of their queues and finger-nails show
them to be men of some importance. They take off the bright-colored
ear-tabs as they enter. They are down to buy wool. To-day they visit,
next week they will trade. Then all but one will sit in the outer shop,
while the spokesman alone will go into the inner room and confer with
the merchant. From time to time the spokesman will go back to the party
and consult, till in the end the bargain is made. They will all hold
to the agreement, too, whichever way the market goes. For in this the
Chinese are inflexibly honest. A local Chinaman dispatched a mounted
messenger the six versts to Urga, to return to us twenty kopecks which
he had overcharged by a slip of his abacus-adder.
Yet the Scotch engineers saw shells in the arsenals loaded with clay
when the native troops went against the Japanese. The English miners in
the Province of Shan-tung have had their profits cut to nothing by the
official “squeezes,” and Chinese have bought in the depreciated stocks.
The ethic code of the squeeze seems to be very nice. It is a point of
honor, almost always scrupulously observed, that the first-fruits of
official graft go to repaying the one who advanced the money to buy the
office. A Chinaman, who could not be trusted to administer honestly
a trust fund of a hundred _taels_, will repay this obligation to his
backer. Thus must he keep face.
From the tax-appraiser who numbers the sheep to the civil governor
who receives the lumps of silver tribute for transmission to Peking,
every official gets his squeeze. They say in the _eimuck_ of Ulasati,
where sables are part of the tribute, that the officials take out the
best furs and put back poor skins to keep the number the same; and in
Urga, that the enormously rich administration takes a Tammany third
of the tribute. There has never been a viceroy yet, it is reported,
who has left Mongolia poor. Yet each official plays straight with his
backer, his “belly-band.” Very curious is this race, and there live few
Westerners who can at all understand it.
We ride back in the evening from the Chinese city (for none may stay
for the night), buried in recurring reveries. How brightly glitters
the face, and how barren is the heart in Maimachen! Never the thousand
ties of kinship and affection, never the thrill of citizenship, never
the love of a home. How little generosity, too, or sympathy for the
people of the land! The Mongols are but “tame barbarians,” as of old
were stigmatized the tributary Formosans. Now and then one finds a
Chinaman out among the nomad Mongols. Perhaps he may be a watcher at
a distant temple, perhaps a telegraph-operator on the two lines that
go, one to Kalgan and Peking, one to Kiahta and Russia. Always he is
something solitary--different. There is an almost sinister splendor in
this aloofness--this self-sufficiency of walled cities and compounds
where none but Chinese may dwell. What a rebuff of nationhood in the
gates that shut out at night all save the alien outlanders! What
contempt in the law that no woman of China may come among these Mongol
people, as if the very air were contamination! How the natives are
silently despised, whose bodies in death go to the dogs, while the
Chinaman’s, in a casket, is sent back over the long leagues to his home!
The homeless, wifeless, Chinese city, with the quarter of Mongol women
without the walls,--it is in many ways typical of all Chinese rule in
Mongolia. For, as the Celestial trader defaults in the duty of marrying
the Mongol mother of his children, so China defaults in many of the
duties that are inherent in suzerainty. One resents the heavy Chinese
yoke on the necks of these simple frank-hearted Mongolians. They are
a race of great good-humored children, and they are exploited while
disdained.
We are thinking of this unfairness as we ride back along the road
to Urga. Behind is the distant Chinese city, the Manchu Viceroy’s
straggling palace, the picketed prison-stockade. Before is the drooping
tricolor banner of the Czar, and the white and green of the Greek
Church, with its far-seen golden crucifix. A crowd of brilliantly-clad
Mongols, lamas and laymen and girls and youths, are strolling back from
Maimachen. They are laughing and chattering, and in uncouth playfulness
are pushing one another about across the road.
Half a dozen of the _Zinzin’s_ Chinese foot-guard are likewise coming
from Urga, stolid-faced, superior. As they reach the tumultuous band it
sinks into silence, and the men crowd to the side of the road that the
Chinese may pass.
[Illustration: THE GREAT WALL]
They tramp by without a glance. Then out from the Russian barrack-gate
swings a little Cossack in his great black sheepskin hat, gray
tunic, clattering curved sabre, boots and spurs. He is one of the
Zabaikalskaia Buriats, whom Russians call Bratskie, the brotherly
people. He speaks a tongue so similar to the Mongol that all these
people can understand him. They look up to him as a rich relative,
fortunate in overflowing measure. For on the pilgrimages of Buddhist
Buriats to Urga, their wives have told the wondering Mongol women
of the sewing-machines which they have at home to stitch linings, and
have allowed the visitors to peep into their mirrors. The Mongol men
have admired the Buriats’ breech-loading rifle, worth six horses at
current quotations. They have enviously heard tell that in Russia one
pays no cow-_alba_, but the young men get a uniform and free food when
they ride out to give their Cossack service to the Czar. They have
listened to Buriat boasts of the warm houses of Siberia, and stacks of
hay, and stored-up harvests. So Mongols smile when the Buriats come to
their _girs_. They say, “Rich smooth Buriats! Great lords! Give candle,
give sugar, give tobacco, give vodka.”
Has not a little Zabaikalskaia Buriat reason to swagger when he starts
from the Russian barrack-gate to see his lady in Urga? And should a
Cossack of the Czar step aside for a Chinaman in the shadow of the
Eagles? Head erect, with a look to right and then to left, hand on
sabre, he swings straight down the centre of the road, and right
through the Chinese soldiers. Without dispute they open a way. He
chucks a not unwilling girl under the chin as he passes the Mongols,
and he is good-naturedly hailed by the rest: “Hello, Cossack! Why so
fast? She has gone away with a lama.” And he goes a bit faster toward
Urga.
These Cossacks, terrible in war, friends and equals with the conquered
in peace, are those who have held the Russian vanguard in this march
to China,--the march which began when the two _hatamans_ of Moscow,
commanded by Ivan the Terrible, started in 1507 on their long tramp
eastward. The Cossacks it was whom Yermak led to the conquest of
Sibir. Through them, in storm and stress, despite oppression and
convict-gangs, with faults and failings, omissions and commissions, the
advance of Russia has been the way of civilization where none could
otherwise have come.
“It will mean much when a Russian railway follows our trail from
Kiahta,” says Alexsimevich; and André adds: “They will all be glad when
the Cossacks come to Kalgan.”
VII
RUSSIA IN EVOLUTION
New times have come to Russia with the events that have halted her
armies. The Slav, looking and reaching outward, has been hurled
violently back upon himself, and he turns to look inward. The stream
of Slavic civilization still flows eastward. But now held back at
the frontiers, its tide is rising behind the impounding barriers
and is lifting on its wave the level of national life. Its scour
is undermining here and there, its laden currents are depositing
and filling in the interstices of the social fabric. The struggle
is intensified to achieve representative government, to secure
administrative reform, to relieve the distress of the peasantry. The
people are in evolutionary throes and are sweeping forward in the arts
of peace, in the science of government, and in the myriad lines of
internal development.
The movements of empire-advance have been noted because they have been
conspicuously visualized. But the economic and social growth have been
only slightly regarded by our western world, intent upon great events,
crises, conflicts lost and won. The seizure of a hamlet in Manchuria
has obscured the founding of twenty cities in Siberia.