ICHANG
Unlike Sha-shih, the first view of Ichang, opened to foreign trade in
1887, is very attractive. At low water it stands high on the river bank,
on a conglomerate cliff above a great level sandbank, but in summer it
loses whatever dignity it gains by height, and is nearly on the river
level. A walled city of 35,000 people, gate towers, and temple roofs
rise above the battlements and the mass of houses. Between the city and
the river is a straggling suburb fairly clean, composed of small retail
shops. On the river bank are the buildings and godowns of the Imperial
Customs, including the Commissioner’s house and large garden, dainty
dwellings for the staff of twelve Europeans, and a tennis ground, with a
fine bund and broad flight of stone stairs in front. Near these are the
large houses of the Scotch Church Mission, and beyond a new plain
building put up by the China Inland Mission. The Roman Catholic
buildings are the first to attract attention from the water. There are a
few foreign hongs and godowns, and a customs pontoon moored in the
stream. Behind the British Consulate, a substantial new building with a
tennis lawn used for weekly hospitalities, breezy hills, much covered
with grave mounds, roll up towards a mountainous region, and below, the
Yangtze, with its perpetual rush and current, swirls in a superb flood
half a mile wide.
At the time of my first visit a British gunboat, a wholesome and not
unneeded influence, lay at anchor opposite the town.
The imposing feature of Ichang to my thinking is its multitude of junks
of every build and size, lying closely packed along its shore for a mile
and a half, their high castellated sterns making a goodly show. There
lay in hundreds big SZE CHUAN junks, strongly built for the rapids,
their stained and oiled woodwork looking like varnished pine, the junks
bound up the river with their masts erect, the masts of those which had
come down lashed along their sides. Big passenger boats there were too,
for all passengers, as well as cargo, bound up the Yangtze must “change”
at Ichang.
On the opposite side are cliffs along the river front, backed by hills
and fine mountains, among which are fantastic peaks and pyramids, one of
them known as Pyramid Hill, exactly resembling the Great Pyramid in
shape, and said to have the same height and area as its prototype. Its
peculiar position and form were supposed or believed by the local
geomancers to interfere with that mystery of mysteries the FUNG SHUI,
and thus to act injuriously on the prosperity of Ichang, so the powers
that were, it is said, built a monastery opposite, on the Ichang side of
the river, at great expense, the priests of which have as their special
business to pray that the disastrous influences of Pyramid Hill may be
warded off from the city.
The dead who people the hillsides far outnumber the living, and their
abodes having the aspect of exaggerated mole-hills, lack the frequent
stateliness of Chinese places of interment in some of the other
provinces, being mostly circular mounds of earth and sod kept together
by stones rudely built into them.
Just before I arrived many of these stones had served a sinister
purpose, and had been used as ammunition. On entering the house of Mr.
Schjöltz, the Commissioner of Customs, who was my host at Ichang and
later at Chungking, I was surprised to see cairns of stones which were
nearly as big as a human head both in the hall and outside it, which had
been collected in the dining and drawing-rooms after their windows had
been smashed in an anti-foreign riot a few days before. During some
festivities the Chinese cook of the gunboat _Esk_ accidentally shot a
very popular Chinese officer. On this there was naturally a great
ebullition of fury, specially as the cook was not given up to the
Chinese authorities when they demanded him. The Customs buildings were
guarded by Chinese soldiers, but the staff, who are all efficiently
drilled, did sentry duty at night. This was the least serious of the
many riots which have occurred in the treaty ports on the Yangtze in
recent years.
[Illustration: THE TABLET OF CONFUCIUS.]
There are now about forty-five foreigners in Ichang, about twenty of
them being missionaries. It is to be supposed that all of these have a
sufficiency of serious occupation. Their amusements consist chiefly in
tennis, shooting, and boating picnics to some of the picturesque ravines
and rock temples off the main river, and to the Ichang gorge. The
British Consul, Mr. Holland, and Mr. Woodruff, the Commissioner of
Customs, throw their spacious gardens open constantly, and by the
exercise of much hospitality do their best to alleviate what, it must be
confessed, is the great monotony of life in a small and isolated foreign
community.
Unless people are students or specialists or hobbyists of some
description, as I think every man and woman should be who goes to live
in so very foreign a country as China, amusements are apt to pall. The
winter evenings are long and dull, and those of summer hot and
mosquito-infested. People soon gauge the mental and social possibilities
of new-comers, and know exactly what their neighbours think on every
subject which can arise, and have sounded their intellectual depths and
_shallows_, and the arrival of a stranger and of the mail boat and the
changes in the customs staff are the chief varieties in life. That this
and several other of these small communities “get on” with little
apparent friction is surely much to their credit. Some say that it is
because they are chiefly masculine!
In summer large vessels can make fast under the bund, but at low water
they anchor in mid-stream, and how to get goods with due regard to
economy from the steamers to the godowns when there is an average
difference of forty feet between the summer and winter levels of the
river is somewhat of a problem. Though in itself only a comparatively
poor town in a mountainous country, the total value of the trade of
Ichang for 1898 amounted to £2,298,437. All goods going west have to be
transhipped at this port, and nearly all goods bound east, so that it is
one of the busiest places on the river. It is a curious fact that, with
enormous coal-fields only three or four days away, the river steamers
1000 miles from the sea are burning Japanese coal!
Ichang is the headquarters of a large Roman mission. Its head, Bishop
Benjamin, with whom I had the pleasure of spending one afternoon, has
been sixteen years in his present position without even a visit to
Shanghai. His large, lofty room, though furnished with all absolute
necessaries, is bare and severe, and contains nothing on which the eye
can pleasurably rest. The Bishop is a most genial elderly man, with much
charm of manner, thick iron-grey hair, and an unclerical moustache. As
we walked down the lanes to the orphanage numbers of Chinese children,
unmistakably delighted to see him, ran up to him, kissing his hands and
struggling for positions in which they could hold on to his robe.
With him I visited the orphanage and hospital, both under the charge of
French and Belgian sisters, comely women with much grace and geniality
of manner, in which the loving, all-embracing maternal instinct finds
its winning expression. The hospital, which is on the ground floor, was
crowded, indeed overcrowded, and, as is usual in Roman hospitals in
China, the doctor and much of the medical treatment were Chinese, the
aid of the foreign doctor (a medical missionary) being called in in
surgical cases.
The orphanage is a large building, with very lofty, well-ventilated
rooms, constructed for four hundred, but there were only eighteen girls
in it, who are instructed in the Christian faith, and in embroidery and
other industrial occupations. The Bishop told me that the Chinese do
not, as formerly, bring orphans and foundlings in numbers to their
keeping; indeed, I gathered that in Ichang at least the day for this is
past. I can only hazard a guess at the reasons. These may be the
anti-foreign spirit which has been laboriously stirred up recently; the
increasing competition of orphanages founded by charitable Chinese; the
partial disappointment with the temporal results of conversion; and
perhaps, above all, the excessive mortality which prevails in these
institutions, very much owing to the fact that the infants are brought
to them in great numbers either dying or suffering from disease, or in
such a feeble and emaciated state that they are unable to assimilate
their food. This mortality seems a matter of thankfulness rather than
regret to the pious sisters, one of whom elsewhere, in speaking to me of
a mortality of 1600 in the late summer, said with emotion, “So many,
thank God, safe.”
Besides the Bishop and his priest secretary there are French and Chinese
fathers, a French professor, and a seminary with eight students, who
study the Chinese classics and philosophy for ten years and theology for
seven. These Roman missionaries appear to rely for the conversion of
adults chiefly on native agency. A Belgian priest, who called on me,
claimed 3000 converts in a region above the gorges, where he had worked
for eleven years. It is well known that one cause of the successes of
the Roman missionaries is the assistance given by them to litigants, and
the pressure brought to bear upon magistrates at the instance of the
French Minister in Peking in legal cases in which his co-religionists
are concerned. This Catholic priest mentioned to me, as among the many
trials of his missionary vocation, the case of a village in which nearly
all the inhabitants placed themselves under Christian instruction with a
view to baptism. These villagers had a suit against another village in
which the possession of a certain piece of land was the point in
dispute. French influence was brought to bear, and they gained their
case, let us believe justly, after which they returned _en masse_ to
their idolatrous practices.
My Belgian visitor, in very vivid language, depicted the sufferings of
educated men from the deprivations of their lives, and specially from
the absolute solitude in which he and others are placed, living in one
room of low-class Chinese houses. He was obviously a man of much culture
and refinement, and felt the whole life acutely—the dark and filthy
houses, the dirty food, the unceasing noisy talk in a foreign tongue,
the lack of real privacy and quiet, the ingratitude of the Chinese, and,
more than all, his own failure to love them. This, though my first, was
not my last glimpse of the anguish of loneliness which these Roman
missionaries endure. “Madness would be the certain result,” my visitor
said, “but for the sustaining power of God, and the certainty that one
is doing His work.”
As I shall not return to the subject of Roman missions, I will refer
briefly to four of the causes, in my opinion, of their undoubtedly
growing unpopularity in SZE CHUAN and elsewhere, in spite of the
assistance given to Christian litigants previously referred to.
1. The exorbitant indemnity, out of all proportion to the losses
sustained, demanded and obtained by M. Gerard, then French Minister at
Peking, for damage done to mission property during the riots in SZE
CHUAN in 1895.
2. The claim of the Roman hierarchy [now conceded] to be placed on a
level in position with the higher mandarins as to the number of their
chair-bearers, etc., and the amount of personal reverence exacted by the
clergy from a people essentially democratic.
3. The non-admission of the heathen into Roman churches during the
celebration of mass and other services, while the secrecy which attends
the administration of the last rites of the Church is undoubtedly
obnoxious to the lower orders among the Chinese, who have no conception
of privacy.
4. The opposite methods pursued by the Protestants of all denominations
since their settlement in the far west a few years ago are doubtless
working against the practices of the Roman missionaries.
On the other hand, it is but just to say that the Chinese appreciate the
celibacy, poverty, and asceticism of the Roman clergy. Every religious
teacher, with one notable exception, who has made his mark in the East
has been an ascetic, and when Orientals begin to seek after
righteousness, rigid self-mortification is the method by which they hope
to attain it.
Wherever I have met with Roman missionaries I have found them living
either like Bishop Benjamin and Bishop Meitel of Seoul, and like the
sisters in Seoul, Peking, Ichang, and elsewhere, in bare, whitewashed
rooms, with just enough tables and wooden chairs for use, or in the
dirt, noise, and innumerable discomforts of native houses of the lower
class, personally attending on the sick, and in China, Chinese in life,
dress, style, and ways, rarely speaking their own language, knowing the
ins and outs of the districts in which they live, their peculiarities of
trade, and their political and social condition. Lonely men, having
broken with friends and all home ties for the furtherance of
Christianity, they live lives of isolation and self-sacrifice, forget
all but the people by whom they are surrounded, identify themselves with
their interests, and have no other expectation but that of living and
dying among them.
It must be admitted that the Chinese contrast this life of
self-surrender with that of large numbers of Protestant missionaries
living in comfortable, and what seem to them wealthy, homes in the
treaty ports, surrounded by as many of the amenities of life as are
usual in the simpler homes in foreign settlements, and with wives,
children, friends, and society, not very often, as in the case of the
Wesleyan missionaries at Hankow, living in the native cities among the
Chinese, and going home with their families for a year or more once in
five or seven years.[22]
While admiring the self-denial and devotion of the Roman missionary
priests, I do not express any opinion as to rival methods and merits,
but only state facts which are forced upon every traveller, and purpose
to return to the subject of Protestant missions later.