diverted into theocracy. The meaning of life, its value and its duty,
these basic ideas which determine the ultimate activities of every
race, were revolutionized by the new faith. To the Pagan the world
was good despite its evils; struggle against environment measured the
worth of manhood and freedom was the supreme blessing. To the Buddhist,
life was an evil in which the soul had become enmeshed. The path to
release lay not in overcoming the environment, but in retreating from
it within the citadel of the soul. Resignation, self-surrender, the
yielding of this world to secure the other world beyond,--such were the
forces which transformed the Mongols from the foremost warriors into
the priest-ridden, subject, unaspiring people of to-day. The supreme
problem in the autonomy of China, and in the subjugation of India,
is involved in the point of view of Buddhism and its outgrowth in
character.
In 1650 a son of the leader, Tu-she-tu Khan, was made chief of the
Mongol _kutukhtus_, or cardinals, with the title of Cheptsun Damba.
This monsignor began the Urga hierarchy of Gigins, or god-priests,
which has continued until the present time, when the eighth Gigin
reigns at the Holy City. As the powerful Tu-she-tu clan lost its
vitality, Chinese influence made itself felt. This was directed in
general toward the encouragement of the priesthood, whose celibacy and
other-worldliness dovetailed with Chinese control.
The Mongol khans, becoming through the years more and more unwarlike,
had grown tired of internecine feuds. They were at last won over by
China to a nominal allegiance and the payment of a formal tribute,
reciprocating which, imperial gifts of tenfold value served as artful
bribes. Modestly, diplomatically, came King Stork, leaving to the local
Daimios, seemingly undisturbed, their feudal sway. With the coming of
the first Manchu governor began the present era of Mongolia.
[Illustration: THE GLORY IS DEPARTED]
As time went on, the Chinese, more astute and cunning, took little
by little from the careless hands of the nomad princes the reins of
real political power. The native chiefs were wheedled into giving up
many ancient rights over the vassals, as well as their general taxing
powers. The celibate priests, who were draining the manhood of their
idle but powerful hierarchy, were subsidized and directed by the
interlopers. They preached to their confiding countrymen obedience and
submission. In the Mongol Gigin of Urga, the Chinese raised up a native
power superior to all the old feudal lords, whose armies melted away
beneath the ecclesiastical dominion. When the Gigin became in turn
too great a menace, they caused it to be decreed that each succeeding
incarnated Buddha must come from Tibet, and that his main powers must
be delegated to a “Council of Lamas.”
In the train of the Manchus came the Chinese traders, polite, supple,
calling themselves friends of the Mongols, offering their alluring
wares on undefined credit terms which tangled the unsuspicious natives
in inextricable usury. Peking-brought gewgaws were paid for a hundred
times over in the food and clothing which the natives kept giving to
the compounding voracity of the debt.
Chinese coolies pressed up the river-valleys, begging land here,
intruding themselves there; more followed, and ever more, until the
best of the pastures were filched away, and the nomads, in order to
exist, were forced to trek to the more distant and barren slopes.
Deforesting transformed into deserts whole provinces. The once famed
virtue of the Tatar women is forgotten, and every Chinaman has his
“friend” whom he leaves behind when he returns to his native land. The
big prosperous Mongol families, that early travelers noted, are no
more. Two or three children are the most that one sees to a _yurta_,
and the population, owing to lama celibacy and the decreased means of
subsistence, is declining from year to year.
This is the people and this the land which sent horde after horde
through centuries to conquer the world; where in half a dozen
generations a little band of blacksmiths like the Turks could breed a
nation that would dominate Asia. With narrowing means of subsistence,
and aliens draining their small surplus capital, the Mongol race lies
prostrate beneath the Yellow Empire. The grim Malthusian tenet that the
world cannot give food for all its children falls short here of the
grim actuality. The silent invasion of the Chinese has been as ruthless
as was the march of Genghis Khan. The economic garroting of a race is
what the world has seen in Mongolia.
No longer are there men to lead or men to fight. Obediently and
submissively the once fierce, ranging warriors have yielded to the
artfully-imposed yoke. The army of unmatched cavalry has become a
memory, and a nation of fighters has become a race of timid herders,
with little heart or brain. The sons of the old soldiers have learned
to shave their heads and croon Tibetan prayers, and the fires of a
people’s ambition are quenched in the creed that makes abstention
from effort a cardinal virtue, and annihilation life’s supreme
objective. What there was of virtue and of valor lies buried in distant
graves. Ringed with the bones of slaughtered captives, rusted swords
at their sides, they sleep well, those old forgotten warriors. In
poverty and hardship, priest-ridden and debt-ridden, decimated and
degenerated, their descendants eke out their sterile days. But there
lingers yet among them a half-forgotten memory of the heroic past.
The wandering chanter still sings in the twilight the old “Song of
Tamerlane”--Tamerlane who will come again, they say, and lead the
hordes once more to victory.
When the divine Timur dwelt in our tents,
The Mongol Nation was redoubtable and warlike.
Its least movements made the earth bend;
Its mens’ look froze with fear
The ten thousand people upon whom the sun shines.
O Divine Timur, will thy great soul soon return?
Return, return; we await thee, O Timur!
IX
CHINA
Destiny has bequeathed to his once subject-race the heritage of Genghis
Khan, but whether its Manchu possessor can or cannot hold even his
own birthright is to-day an enigma. The last few years have seen the
gathering of the eagles, disputing the mastery of eastern Asia, where
China stands against the world. Slav, Saxon, and Frank press in, upon
the supine empire. Has this yellow race the manhood and the capacity to
rally against them and retrieve its national integrity?
The cession of Formosa after the war of 1895 began the partition.
China’s defenselessness was then visualized. The revelation of her
easy defeat set every predatory nation on the alert. Watchful for an
occasion, which two murdered missionaries supplied, Germany, by clumsy
but successful unscrupulousness, seized Kiao-chow and two hundred miles
of hinterland. Three weeks after the bludgeoned ratification of Admiral
Diedrich’s grab, Russia procured the signature of the intimidated
Emperor to the lease of Port Arthur. France demanded and secured the
cession of Kwang-chow-wan, on the mainland opposite the island of
Hainan. England acquired the lease of Wei-hai-wei, and continental
territory opposite Hong-kong. Italy came to claim as its portion Sanmen
Bay; but this at least China found courage to refuse.
Then followed a period when, backed each by its government, invading
cohorts of promoters scooped in franchises and special privileges of
every description. The latter part of 1899 saw foreigners pushing in
from Manchuria on the north, where Russia with her so-termed railway
guards held the strategic route, and from Yun-nan on the south, where
France was constructing a similar road of conquest. It showed four
European nations so established along the coast that only by courtesy
of a foreign government could a Chinese vessel cast anchor in some of
the principal ports of China. It saw a Belgian-French railway driving
from Peking into the heart of the Empire at Hankow; an American line
started north from Canton to the same objective; an English line
controlling the territory between the main northern trade-centres,
Niu-chwang and Tien-tsin; a French society in possession of a great
south-country copper concession; Russians with the exclusive right to
all the gold in two _eimucks_ of Mongolia; and an English syndicate
deeded the best of the Chinese coal-fields.
The partition was thus far accomplished. The continental nations
seemed to be ready for all that they could get. The strength of Great
Britain’s traditional position, based upon maintaining the integrity
of China, was shaken by her lease of Wei-hai-wei, although this lease
was to run only so long as Russia should hold Port Arthur. England
was on the point of recognizing openly “spheres of influence,” as is
shown by the inferential claim to special British rights in the Yangtse
region set forth in the official transactions of Sir Claude McDonald,
and brought out under parliamentary interpellation, when a Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs in the Balfour Ministry spoke of “British
rights” to the provinces adjoining the Yangtse River and Ho-nan and
Che-kiang.
There was apparently good warrant for the general belief that in
expectation of an impending partition a provisional understanding had
been reached by the different chancelleries, regarding the share of
each nation, England being allotted the mighty domain from the Yellow
Sea to Burma and Afghanistan, including all Tibet, as well as six
hundred and fifty thousand square miles in China proper. In general,
from Shan-tung inland the valley of the Hoang-ho was destined for
Germany; the district north of her Anamese possessions for France; all
Mongolia and Manchuria for Russia; Corea and the province of Fokien on
the mainland opposite Formosa, for Japan. Peking and the surrounding
district, whose disposition was embarrassed by jealousy if not by
scruples, was alone left for the Chinese.
At this critical juncture, when the day of dismemberment seemed indeed
to have arrived, the United States came forward in behalf of the
“open-door” doctrine, as a means of preserving the nationality and the
integrity of China. In a circular letter to the Powers, our Secretary
of State, Mr. John Hay, asked that adhesion be given in writing to
three main propositions, appertaining to each country “within its
respective sphere, of whatever influence.” These points were that no
treaty port rights or other vested interests should be interfered with;
that the Chinese tariff should be maintained; that no discriminating
railway charges or harbor-dues should be imposed.
America’s might, thrown into the wavering balance, turned the scale.
Great Britain gave ready adhesion. Though the responses of some of
the other Powers were evasive, none was at this time willing to bear
the onus of an adverse stand: each nation nominally accepted, and the
movement toward partition was checked.
To most people Chinese matters seemed settled. The preservation of a
nation had been combined with the guaranteeing of a great free market;
the orgy of grabbing had ceased. Russia, assenting to the open door,
had promised to evacuate Manchuria. The special concessions, though
secured by stand-and-deliver methods, it was felt would bring economic
improvements and would furnish to the Chinese a demonstration of the
beneficent results of Western civilization.
It was recognized that there would be frictions: misunderstandings
are inevitable when old ways are faced with new. The extra-territorial
rights of foreigners and their converts, absolutely necessary to
protect their liberties if not their lives, could not but create
occasional unharmonious situations, in which the consuls would have to
intervene. The severity of the judicial punishment meted out at times
to rioting cities for harm done to the protégés of the Powers was to be
deplored, each nation grieving at the atrocities the others had seen
fit to perpetrate.
But periodic local and temporary disturbances had been going on from
time immemorial. Did not the Chinese realize, we reasoned, that their
old corrupt government had been given another undeserved chance to try
and march with the rest of the race; that this world is not the place
for graft-ridden relics from the fifth century B.C.? The least we felt
was that, thanks to the bearer of the “Flowery Banner,” the Chinese had
been given a last opportunity. A self-denying Occident had guaranteed
the nation’s existence and had presumably earned its everlasting
gratitude. “Let China get up and do something--let it redeem itself.”
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AND TABLETS IN PEI-HAI]
A very small circle of Chinese shared this Western view, and realized
at their true value the mights if not the rights. There existed among
the literati at Peking and in the coast cities the rudiments of a
foreign liberal party. Recognizing that Western methods must come, they
had been in favor of accepting foreign improvements even at the cost
of railway concessions and the violated dwellings of wind and water
spirits. When this party won over the young Emperor, there began the
period of foreign concessions. Reforms, too, covering every subject,
from queue-cutting to postage-stamps, were inaugurated.
The summer of 1898 saw the important edict which ordered the abolition
of the Wen-chang essays and the penmanship posts, with the Emperor’s
personal comment that the examinations should test “a knowledge of
ancient and modern history, and information in regard to the present
state of affairs, with special reference to the governments and
institutions of the countries of the five great continents, and their
arts and sciences.” A Bureau of Mines was established, a patent-office,
schools, a scheme of army reform.
The climaxing decree was the one abolishing sinecures. For the
Emperor’s unreconstructed entourage this last was too much. Foreign
aggression had embittered to the point of unreason mandarin and coolie
alike. The _coup d’état_ planned by the Dowager Empress, and executed
by the reactionaries, virtually dethroned the Emperor, exiled his
advisers, and ended the foreign-encouragement reform.
Indeed it was not within human nature for it to endure. From the point
of view of the party of the second part the aspect of the whole foreign
relationship, even after the Hay Note, looked very ugly indeed. The
fact of guaranteed integrity was obscured by the _laissez-faire_ of
the already consummated grabs. The idea that gripped them was the
humiliation of foreign occupation and foreign aggression. It was as
if the Russians and the English had just seized rival reservations
on Long Island and the Jersey coast, commanding New York City; as if
the English had wrenched away Charleston; the Germans, Philadelphia;
the French, New Orleans; and Cossacks were garrisoned in strategic
points throughout New England. It was as if the New York, New Haven and
Hartford Railway were manned and guarded by Slavs, the New York Central
by Belgians, the Pennsylvania by Prussians; as if the Pittsburgh mines
were handed over _en bloc_ to an English corporation, and the Russians
had exclusive mining rights to the gold of Alaska’s Yukon region. It
was as if America’s protective-tariff and contract-labor laws were
repealed at foreign dictation, and a flood of foreign machine-made
goods and undesired immigrants were poured into the unwilling country.
It was as if yellow-robed Buddhist lamas were everywhere haranguing the
Yankee farmers, telling them of the fraudulent nature of the Christian
creed, and urging upon them an approved canine method for disposing of
deceased ancestors, to replace their superstitious funeral services.
It was as if astrologers, calling themselves engineers, were to dig
up New York cemeteries in order to erect prayer-wheels; as if the
apostates whom these yellow priests had drawn into their joss-houses
were enabled to dodge part of the taxes, which consequently fell with
added oppression on the rest of the people; and as if, when they
did something which others would in the normal course of events get
punished for, a lama came before the magistrate and got them off. As
if the President and the Senate were given a weekly wigging by the
diplomatic corps, and were periodically forced to deed away sections of
the forest reserve and tracts of particularly desirable territory.
With such an aspect as this, which represents what in an undefined,
bewildered way the Chinese saw and felt, it is no wonder that they
considered the Confucian dictum obsolete: “Do not unto others, what
you would not that they should do unto you”; and joined the patriotic
harmonious Fists,--the Boxers.
Chinese sentiment was ungauged in the West because we had never
put ourselves in their places. Unforeseen save by a few unheeded
Cassandras, and unprepared for, there broke out the planless,
leaderless Boxer Rebellion, grim fruitage of the national resentment.
A few hastily gathered legation guards were alone available for
defense. Spreading from the Shan-tung Province, where the severity of
the Germans had goaded the usually peaceable people to madness, the
I-Ho-Chuan besieged the legations at Peking. It was the infuriated and
ill-directed rush of a patriotism real if futile,--a turning against
the spoilers.
The movement was crushed in a torrent of blood, and with a devastation
that for long will leave its mark upon the northern provinces. The
closing year of the nineteenth century saw the Taku forts stormed,
Tien-tsin, the Liverpool of the North, taken over and administered by
a foreign board, Manchuria and Mongolia swarming with Cossacks, the
Dowager Empress in flight, and her capital looted by foreign armies.
The coming of alien soldiery to the Forbidden Palace left its impress
in the fiercer though more carefully smothered hatred of mandarins and
people. It was still a blind resentment. They were injured, stung in
all their pride and self-sufficiency, but dumb, bewildered, not knowing
what to do, which way to turn. The liberals with their solution were
gone; with them had passed the hopes of a progressive policy.
The people, perplexed, looked to their reëstablished reactionary rulers
for guidance. But these officials, mostly of advanced age, and steeped
in the ideas and ideals of the Confucian classics, were anxious mainly
to close the ears and eyes of the masses to the unpleasant realities;
to feather their own nests and finish off their lives in tranquility.
The Chinese Minister to the United States, Wu Ting Fang, gives a
graphic picture of these Celestial Bourbons:--
“It must be remembered that most of the high officials in Peking are
born and bred Chinese of the old school. All the princes and nearly all
the ministers of state have spent most of their days within the four
walls of the capital. They have never visited even other parts of the
empire, not to say foreign lands; nor can they speak any other language
besides their own. They have absolutely no knowledge or experience of
foreign ways except those who are ministers of the Tsung-li Yamen, and
the experience of these men has been confined exclusively to their
official intercourse with the foreign representatives at Peking.”
Buttressing their hereditary _intransigeance_, these mandarins had,
after the Hay Circular, possessed a measure of confidence that their
yielding of open-door trade privileges to the greed of the foreigners
had enlisted a combined support which would preserve China’s remaining
national powers.
But so powerless to fulfill their purposes had these paper pledges
become, so far was the open-door doctrine from settling the situation,
that in China’s own territory, where by solemn promises of both parties
no special privileges could accrue, the year 1904 saw two Powers in the
throes of the greatest war of modern times.
If the realization of the combatants’ purpose has signified much to
the nations of the West,--perhaps rather to the United States, for
the others nursed no illusions,--to China it has meant far more. It
has brought for the first time a real and general appreciation of the
necessity for modernized, efficient self-defense.
Fifteen years of aggression have been needed to drive home this
knowledge. While the defeats of 1895 came as a blow to a few
keen-minded Chinese, to most they were a matter of entire indifference.
China was not conquered, they reasoned: only two provinces took
part while the viceroys of the rest looked idly on. “That Shan-tung
man’s war” was the general attitude; “Li Hung Chang’s boats beaten.”
When it was over, merely Formosa, the little-valued island of “tame
barbarians,” had been lost. The traditional policy of playing off the
jealous powers one against the other had apparently succeeded; it had
cleared the Japanese from Corea and Port Arthur. China as a nation was
hardly touched, and multitudes of people never knew there had been a
war.
The seizures of 1897-1899, coming close upon each other, exasperated,
but taught no lesson. The mass of Chinese, and even those in high
official circles, believed that a little effort would drive the foreign
devils into the sea. The march of the Allies to Peking stunned them. It
was their first facing of the fact.
[Illustration: HSUEN-WU GATE, PEKING]
The Russo-Japanese War, and the partition of the province that had
cradled their Emperor’s dynasty, dissipated their fool’s paradise. It
was seen then, clearly, by all, that China’s only hope of maintaining
her integrity lay in her defensive power. With the object, not of
securing the blessings of civilization (which the overwhelming majority
of Chinamen desire no more than we do the Holy Inquisition), but of
beating away the spoilsmen, the Peking rulers turned at length to the
survey of their actual military condition. As this concerns intimately
the Chinese internal situation, a summary of it may be pertinent.
The Hwai-lien regulars, to the number of twenty-five thousand, are
well-drilled, and well-armed with Chinese-made Mausers. They are
stationed in the northern provinces, including the Taku and Peht’ang
forts, the Tien-tsin station, and the neighborhood of Peking. These
make up the only national force of modern troops at the disposal of
the Chinese Government, but the private armies of various viceroys
bring up the total somewhat as follows: The camps of foreign-drilled
troops, formerly Yuan Shi Kai’s, probably the best in China, number
roundly twenty thousand. From the Shen-ki Ying, or artillery force,
from the camps of the Manchu Banners, which the Government is making an
effort to whip into some kind of shape, from the Imperial body-guard,
and other scattered and less important troops, ten thousand effectives
might be culled. In the south the Viceroy of Nanking has, all told,
some twenty thousand more men holding the Wusung forts, who may be
classed as efficient and well-armed; some of these are German- and
Japanese- drilled. This total of seventy-five thousand represents
China’s numerical military strength in effective modern troops.
The old hereditary organization of twenty-four Banners, adds some two
hundred thousand Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese,--of the privileged
soldier caste, which through two hundred and fifty years has drawn
an annual subsidy of eight million taels from the Peking treasury.
Billeted as the nominal wardens of the provincial cities and garrisoned
around Peking, these Tatars have become as a rule so degenerated by
immemorial idleness as to be useless save for picturesque parades. The
one positive element is that they are men under pay, subject to order,
and available for initial experiments.