LIFE ON THE UPPER YANGTZE
At this point, before entering on the empire province of SZE CHUAN, it
is desirable to give a few facts and impressions regarding life on the
Upper Yangtze, my experiences of which extended over five weeks
altogether.
The Upper River, with all its peculiarities, lies above Ichang. It must
never be forgotten that it is the _sole_ highway for the vast commerce
of the richest province of the Chinese Empire, with an area about the
size of that of France, and a population estimated at from 50,000,000 to
70,000,000. The nature and risks of this highway may be gathered from
these and other descriptions of it. Except in the gorges and some few
quiet intervals, it is a series of rapids and races, which at present
are only surmounted by man force. Mr. A. J. Little’s success in 1898 in
getting a large steam launch up to Chungking proves that a steamer can
ascend, but not that steam navigation can be made commercially
profitable, or that if it were it would be the ruin of junk navigation.
A large up-river junk is from 80 to 120 feet long, from nine to twelve
broad, and from 40 to over 100 tons burden.
They are all alike in that they have low square bows, lofty sterns, flat
bottoms, and single masts from thirty to forty feet high, carrying huge
oblong sails, with which they can only sail with the wind aft. They are
very frequently built at Wan of a cypress which abounds in its
neighbourhood, and being stained with orpiment and oiled over that with
the oil procured from the _Aleurites cordata_, they look like varnished
pine, and have a very trim as well as picturesque appearance. The
planking is about an inch thick. The holds are only from three to seven
feet deep. A junk to carry fifty tons of goods can be built at Wan
complete for £125, and a first-class junk to carry 100 tons or more for
£200, about 2500 strings of _cash_. The holds are in compartments. The
forward part is uncovered in the daytime, and the cook does his
unceasing work in a well in the middle with a clay stove in it. At night
a framework covered with bamboo mats is erected, under which the crew
sleep. The high stern cabin is usually occupied by the _lao-pan_ and his
family. A junk of 120 tons carries a crew of 120 men.
In passage junks the open space forward is diminished as much as
possible, most of the deck being housed over, but in cargo junks less
than half is covered. In the big junks a sponson runs along each side,
which is used both for poling and communication. Junks carry a spare
mast and sweeps lashed outside. The helmsman stands inside, with his
head and shoulders protected by a raised “wheelhouse,” in which he works
with much skill and infinite patience a very long and clumsy tiller
attached to a huge rudder, which often projects four feet from the
stern. The roof of the housed portion is used for the monstrous coils of
bamboo rope, ofttimes three inches in diameter and 1200 feet in length,
which are used in tracking, and are coiled and uncoiled continually.
These ropes only last one voyage.
The lofty stern is frequently much decorated, and in all cases has a
fascinating picturesqueness. Its square windows are of ground
oyster-shell or paper, or even of stained glass. Occasionally it has a
carved gallery with flowering plants in pots. Altogether a SZE CHUAN
junk is an ingenious and noble construction, and the owners take great
pride in them. Their stately appearance and apparently large size are
deceptive as to their carrying capacity, which is small. I believe that
no junk on the Upper Yangtze draws over seven feet, which necessarily
gives a shallow hold, and the freeboard is of startling scantiness. The
large tenders smartly handled, which land and re-embark the trackers,
are really big _sampans_, and often have a curious rig—two masts like
sheers, forty feet high amidships, with the width of the deck between
them, the spar which carries the sail running on both.
We call the junks “lumbering craft,” but no craft anywhere are more
skilfully handled; none run such risks; no crews are better disciplined
to act together and at a second’s notice in cases of emergency; no men
work so desperately hard on such small pay and with such poor food; and
it remains to be seen if vessels of any other build and management can
supplant them in the carrying trade of the Upper Yangtze.
Large fortunes are not made in junks; the losses are too heavy. But,
judging from the comfortable houses of retired junk owners in many a
pleasant place, a moderate competence for old age is in sight of all
except the very unlucky. The wife and family usually live on board, and
these wives seem to have a speciality of strident and powerful voices,
which are heard above the roar of the rapids and the yells of the crews.
As to the risks, the Chinese say that one junk in twenty is annually
lost, and one in ten is stranded. Consul Bourne[23] states that
one-tenth of the foreign goods shipped at Ichang arrives damaged by
water, and Mr. A. J. Little estimates the loss of junks and merchandise
since the formation of the Hing-lung-t’an, or “Glorious Rapid,” in 1896
as eight per cent.[24] Consul Bourne, writing in December, 1896, says,
“A hundred junks and 1000 lives have been already lost, we are told,
_i.e._, since September 28th of the same year at that rapid.” Both the
upward and downward passages are full of tremendous risks. On the upward
passage in February I counted forty-one junks stranded at different
points between Ichang and Wan Hsien, some breaking up, others being
repaired, and all having to discharge their cargoes; and when I came
down like a flash on high water towards the end of June, though it was
impossible to count the stranded junks, they must have been nearly half
of that number, even with the much-reduced summer traffic, and I saw one
big junk strike a rock while flying down a rapid and disappear as if she
had been blown up, her large crew, at the height of violent effort the
moment before, with all its frantic and noisy accompaniments, perishing
with her.
Besides junks of various sizes, there are native house-boats, like mine,
and others running up to four times its size, which carry passengers
only, and _wupans_ and _sampans_—undecked boats with hooped bamboo
roofs; these carry passengers or cargo. I have already described the
arrangements of a house-boat. If the Upper Yangtze junks number from
7000 to 8000, the men employed on them at the lowest estimate must be a
quarter of a million, in addition to many thousands working in
house-boats and smaller craft.
Junks never anchor, and, indeed, carry no anchors, and choosing a
mooring ground is a most important matter—not that there are not very
many nooks and bays untouched by the current, but because of the
caprices of the river, which often rises or falls, as I experienced, six
or seven feet in a night, so that a careful watch must be kept in order
to pay out or haul in line according to circumstances.
Big junks sound their way towards the bank, rig out great wooden fenders
fore and aft to prevent their sheering into shoaler water than they
draw, and one of the “water trackers” plunges into the water with a
line, which he makes fast to a stake on shore, the fenders, which are
really massive poles or straight young pines, also being lashed to rocks
or stakes.
Junks bound west keep as close in shore as they can on the side freest
from rocks and easiest for the trackers. When the wind is fair and
strong they can stem the ordinary current with their huge sail only, and
they take their trackers on board; but if the fair wind is light, it
only gives the trackers an easier haul. At all rapids, races, and rocky
points, the tow-line is in requisition. Eastward-bound junks lash their
mast alongside at Chungking, and are rowed down, being steered by a
prodigious bow-sweep. It is absolutely necessary that their speed should
be in advance of that of the current, and at every rapid frantic efforts
are required from the crew.
Junks carry trackers in proportion to their tonnage, but a _lao-pan_, or
skipper, usually part owner, the steersman, the _t’au-t’ai-kung_, or
pilot, the _tai-kung_, or bowsman, the cook, and the _t’au-lao_, or head
tracker, are indispensable. The pilot and steersman never leave the
bow-sweep and rudder, except for meals, while the junk is in motion. The
skipper’s functions are chiefly to buy food, bargain for extra trackers,
pay wages, and stimulate the crew to frantic efforts in dangerous places
by yells and gesticulations.
The bowsman, or _tai-kung_, acting also as pilot in my small boat, is
the most important man in a junk. I never ceased to admire mine, a tall,
broad, well-made fellow, the personification of knowledge and
carefulness, silent, alert, never flurried, hand and head steady, all
that a pilot should be, until the moment when he collapsed with the
opium craving, after which he might nightly be seen in a state of
blissful vacuity lying beside his opium lamp. The work of the _tai-kung_
is to lead with his skilled touch the eight or ten men who, in a big
junk, work the bow-sweep, a timber, from thirty to forty feet long,
projecting over the bow, without which no boat could ascend or descend
rapids and races in safety. When this great spar is not in use he stands
at the bow sounding with a long iron-shod bamboo pole, giving the junk a
sheer-off from upstanding points or rocks, and signalling to the
steersman in which direction sunken rocks lie, which his trained eye
discovers by the eddies in the river. His responsibility for life and
property is enormous, and he bears it nobly. The sweep is used to shoot
the junk out into the current, and enable her to clear rocks which
cannot be avoided by the steersman and rudder.
Having slightly sketched the junks and the manner of navigating the
Great River, I will conclude with a brief description of the “inhuman
work” of the trackers, by far the worst of which is in the region of the
gorges and the most severe of the rapids, extending for a hundred miles
west of Ichang. Captain Blakiston, Captain Gill, and more lately Mr. A.
J. Little in his delightful book, _Through the Yangtze Gorges_, have all
expressed both sympathy with these men and their wonder at their
hardihood, industry, and good-nature, and with my whole heart I endorse
what these writers have said, and regard this class as typifying that
extraordinary energy of the Chinese which has made and kept China what
it is, and which carries the Chinese as thrifty and successful emigrants
to every part of Eastern Asia and Western America.
The crews, which in big junks number 120 men, are engaged at Ichang. For
the upward voyage, lasting from thirty to fifty days, they get about
four shillings and their food, which is three meals a day of rice, with
cabbage fried in a liberal supply of grease, and a little fish or pork
on rare occasions, and for coming down, which rarely takes more than ten
days (I did it in a _wupan_ in a little over four), about eighteenpence
and food, and indeed many crews work their passage down for food only.
For this pittance these men do the hardest and riskiest work I have seen
done in any country, “inhumanly hard,” as Consul Bourne calls it, week
after week, from early dawn to sunset. The opening of Chungking as a
treaty port and various other causes have tended however to raise their
wages.
[Illustration: TRACKERS HOUSES.]
The larger number of these trackers are usually on shore hauling, being
directed from the junk either by flag signals or drum beat, under the
_tai-kung’s_ direction; a proportion remain on board to work the huge
bow-sweep, at which I have seen as many as fifteen straining. A few
attend the trackers to extricate the tow-rope from the rocks, in which
it is constantly catching, and two or more _tai-wan-ti_, or water
trackers, specially expert swimmers, and without clothing, run ahead of
the tow-rope ready to plunge into the water and free it when it catches
among rocks which cannot be reached from the shore. If tracking and
sailing are both impossible, the trackers propel the junk by great oars,
each worked by two men, twenty at a side, who face forwards, and mark
time by a combined stamp and a wild chant.
In descending, in order to keep steerage way on the junk in a current
running from six to twelve knots an hour, every agency of progression is
brought into play. The slinging of the mast alongside gives a lumbering,
ungainly look. The deck is literally crowded with men, naked in summer,
and in winter clothed in long blue cotton coats. Some are rowing face
forwards; fifteen or more are straining for life at the bow-sweep;
others are working the huge oars called _che_ (wheel), each of which
demands the energies of ten men; others are toiling at _yu-lows_, big
broad-bladed sculls, worked over the stern or parallel to the junk’s
side—even women and children take part in the effort—the _lao-pan_ grows
frantic, he yells, leaps, dances; drums and gongs are madly beaten, and
yet, with all this frantic effort, it is all the junk can do to keep
steerage way enough to clear the dangerous places, and not always that,
as I saw on two occasions junks fly down rapids, strike rocks, and
disappear as unconnected masses of timbers, as if exploded by dynamite.
I saw over eighty big junks descend the great rapids, and it was such an
exciting sight, with its accompaniments of deafening din, that I not
only never wearied, but would have been glad to see eighty more.
Where it is impossible to sail—and even with a fair wind there are few
reaches except the gorges where it is possible—the trackers prefer the
“inhuman work” of tracking to the slow headway made by the severe and
monotonous toil of rowing, or of hugging the bank, and hooking the junk
along by seizing with hooks on rings with staples driven into the rock
for this purpose, or keeping her off with stout fenders while they pole
her along with iron-spiked bamboo poles, which they drive into holes
which have been made by this process in the course of ages in the hard
conglomerate or granite.
In small house-boats like mine the trackers are landed from the boat,
but in junks from the attendant _sampan_. Except the _tai-wan-ti_, they
wear short cotton drawers, and each man has a breast strap. The huge
coil of plaited bamboo, frequently a quarter of a mile long, is landed
after being passed over the mast-head, a man on board paying out or
hauling in as is required. Small boats pass under the loftier tow-ropes
of big ones, which often saves time, and often leads to noisy quarrels
and entanglements. The trackers uncoil the rope, each man attaching it
to his breast strap by a hitch, which can be cast off and rehitched in a
moment.
The drum beats in the junk, and the long string of men starts, marking
time with a loud yell—“_Chor-chor_,” said to mean “Put your shoulder to
it.” The trackers make a peculiar movement; their steps are very short,
and with each they swing the arms and body forward, stooping so low to
their work that their hands nearly touch the ground, and at a distance
they look like quadrupeds.
Away they go, climbing over the huge angular boulders of the river
banks, sliding on their backs down spurs of smooth rock, climbing cliff
walls on each other’s shoulders, or holding on with fingers and toes,
sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes on shelving precipices where
only their grass sandals save them from slipping into the foaming race
below, now down close to the deep water, edging round a smooth cliff
with hardly foothold for goats, then far above, dancing and shouting
along the verge of a precipice, or on a narrow track cut in the rock 300
feet above the river, on which narrow and broken ledge a man
unencumbered and with a strong head would need to do his best to keep
his feet. The reader must sympathetically bear in mind that these poor
fellows who drag our commerce up the Yangtze amidst all these
difficulties and perils, and many more, are attached to a heavy junk by
a long and heavy rope, and are dragging her up against the force of a
tremendous current, raging in billows, eddies, and whirlpools; that they
are subject to frequent severe jerks; that occasionally their burden
comes to a dead stop and hangs in the torrent for several minutes; that
the tow-rope often snaps, throwing them on their faces and bare bodies
on jagged and rough rocks; that they are continually in and out of the
water; that they are running many chances daily of having their lives
violently ended; and that they are doing all this mainly on rice!
Their work is indicated from the junk either by the rapid beating of
drums and gongs when they are to haul hard, or a slow rat-a-tat when
they are to cease hauling, or by flag signalling, one man being told off
on shore to watch the signals and communicate them to the trackers. An
error would be as fatal as if within a ship’s length of a reef ahead an
engineer were to mistake the order “Full speed astern” for “full speed
ahead.”
Occasionally rough steps help the men up and down spurs, and rock paths
made by the pickaxe occur frequently. Many of these were thirty feet
above the river when I went up, and were submerged when I came down.
There is, however, one noble rock path, four feet broad, running for
many miles at an even height, built, I believe, by a private individual
as an act of benevolence to the trackers and for the “accumulation of
merit.”
At some points where the rapids are bad and the shores are big broken
rocks, only fitted for goats to climb, and the junks hang or slip back,
and the men give way, and several big junks, each with from 200 to 300
trackers, are all making the slowest possible progress, gongs and drums
are beaten frantically; bells are rung; firearms are let off; the
hundreds of trackers on all-fours are yelling and bellowing; the
overseers are vociferating like madmen, and rush wildly along the
gasping and struggling lines of naked men, dancing, howling, leaping,
and thrashing them with split bamboos, not much to their hurt. A
tow-rope breaks, and the junk they are tugging at gyrates at immense
speed to the foot of the rapid, the labour of hours being wasted in two
or three minutes, if there is not a worse result.
Among the many perils encountered by junks and trackers are the _chipa_
or races, which are usually caused by a projecting point or spur of rock
below which there is a smooth eddy. Arrived at the point and landing the
trackers, the _tai-kung_ throws the boat’s head out into the current to
get her clear of the point, with the bow-sweep, and with the strongest
line in use, seventy or eighty trackers haul on it with all their force,
men work with long poles to fend her off the rocks, and with her head on
to the current the water foams and rages under her bow, but if all goes
well, after a period of suspense she is dragged by main force round the
point into smooth water, and then it is often the case that the cliffs
are inaccessible; the trackers come on board and “claw” the junk along
in deep water with claws on long boathooks, which they hook into the
rocks, others fending her off.
Things do not always go smoothly. I went up these races in my boat many
times, and such small incidents happened as thumping a hole in the
bottom on a small rock, the rope catching on a rock in the water and a
bold swimmer having to go overboard to detach it, and the tow-rope
holding fast round some point of rock or getting entangled in a crevice
which looked inaccessible. It was horrible to see the poor fellows climb
with bare feet up apparently smooth precipices, “holding on with their
eyelids,” while the drum beat “Cease hauling,” and the junk hung tugging
and quivering in the torrent and fraying the rope which was her one
salvation. On two occasions where there was absolutely no foothold for a
cat, a man was let down over the precipice by a rope under his arms to
free the fast-fraying tow-line. These lines, hardened by the silica in
the bamboo, have cut channels two, three, and four inches deep over many
of the points, neat, smooth grooves in which they run easily.
There is much more to be said about the trackers and their work, but the
reader is weary, and I forbear. No work is more exposed to risks to limb
and life. Many fall over the cliffs and are drowned; others break their
limbs and are left on shore to take their chance—and a poor one it
is—without splints or treatment; severe strains and hernia are common,
produced by tremendous efforts in dragging, and it is no uncommon thing
when a man falls that his thin naked body is dragged bumping over the
rocks before he extricates himself. On every man almost are to be seen
cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores from cutaneous disease, and a
general look of inferior rice.
These trackers may be the roughest class in China—for the work is
“inhuman” and brutalising—but nevertheless they are good-natured in
their way; free on the whole from crimes of violence; full of fun,
antics, and frolic; clever at taking off foreigners; loving a joke; and
with a keen sense of humour.
Those who crowd in hundreds to the great rapids in the season for the
chance of getting a few _cash_ for a haul are a rougher lot still. They
bargain for the price of haulage with the _lao-pan_ through gangsmen,
and very often where there is much competition, as at the Hsin-tan, get
only about a penny for four hours’ hard work. Their mat camps are very
boisterous at night. At the lesser rapids the _lao-pan_ goes ashore,
dangling strings of _cash_, and as there is usually a village close by,
he secures help, after some loud-tongued bargaining and wrangling,
engaging even women and boys to tug at his ropes, and occasionally a
woman with a baby on her back takes a turn at the dragging!
That so vast a traffic is carried on under such difficulties is a
marvel. Many of these are created on the upward passage by the necessity
which hauled junks are under of taking the shallow inshore water, with
its rocks, obvious and sunken, reefs, broken water, and whirlpools.
Full-powered steamers, with suitable steering arrangements, ascending
the smooth deep-water channel used in the descent, might escape the
majority of the risks run by junks; but then a complete survey of the
Upper Yangtze is required. So far as I could judge of the Great River
between Sui Fu, at the junction of the River of Golden Sand and the Min,
and Ichang, leaving out the gorges, there are very few reaches in which
rapids, races, and rocky broken water are not to be met with. Indeed, it
may be said that there is no tranquil water, and Admiral Ho, the
superintendent of police for the Upper Yangtze, is probably not
exaggerating when in his official _Yangtze Pilot_ he enumerates about a
thousand perils to navigation. When I returned I realised that Mr.
Endacott’s remark concerning occupation had much truth in it: “You’ll
have enough to do looking after your life.”[25]