SZE CHUAN TRAVELLING
The following day was misty, grey, and grim, and several of its
successors were much like it. One of the local names of SZE CHUAN is
“The Cloudy Province.” Kind, capable Mr. Thompson returned to Wan after
giving the coolies various instructions intended for my benefit; and
from thenceforth I depended on myself. The great event of the day was
the complete change in Be-dien as soon as I was bereft of Europeans. His
pride and temper always remained, and were liable to flare up, or die
down into a mephitic state of sullenness, but from that morning till I
left China he was active and attentive, was never without leave out of
hearing of my whistle, was always at hand to help me over slippery and
difficult places, showed great pluck, never grumbled, arranged and
packed up my things, interpreted carefully, improved daily in English,
always contrived to get hot water and food for me, and on the whole made
a tolerable travelling servant.
The travelling was without fatigue. I walked when it suited me, and for
the rest might have been in an easy-chair in a drawing-room. The
chair-bearers were energetic, and their “boss,” a great wag, kept them
constantly laughing. Their good-nature never failed. One day when, to
relieve them, I walked up a long flight of stairs over a pass, they
asked, “Does the foreign woman think we are not strong enough to carry
her?” The idea of a wish to be kind to them never entered their heads,
yet we gradually came to understand each other a little; and I found my
cloak put over my shoulders for me, a wooden stool brought for my feet,
sundry little comforts attended to, and a growing interest in
photography, reaching the extent of pointing out objects at times “to
make pictures of”! By the end of the second day they had all shaken into
my “ways,” and things went very smoothly.
The day’s routine was a cup of tea and some flour stirabout at seven;
but, though I was always ready and eager to start at eight, it was
usually half-past, and often nine, before we got off. The coolies’ first
breakfast was often late, and there was the haggling about the bill,
neither side liking to give in. It was only a shilling for the board and
lodging for myself and my servant! This included his supper and
breakfast, my rice, and a room to myself, his share of the coolies’
room, an iron lamp fixed on the wall, with an oil well and a wick in a
spout encrusted with the soot and grime of years, and if I had a
charcoal brazier, the charge was a farthing more. My other travelling
expenses came to 4_s._ 6_d._ a day; 5_s._ 6_d._ covered everything,
including a fowl for curry every third day.
My bearers trudged along at an even pace, stopping two or three times
for a drink and smoke at tea shops where others congregated, until the
halt for dinner at a restaurant of more pretensions, outside of which I
sat in my chair in the village street, the unwilling centre of a large
and very dirty crowd, which had leisure to stand round me for an hour,
staring, making remarks, laughing at my peculiarities, pressing closer
and closer till there was hardly air to breathe, taking out my hairpins,
and passing my gloves round and putting them on their dirty hands, on
two occasions abstracting my spoon and slipping it into their sleeves,
being in no wise abashed when they were detected. For at first I ate a
little cold rice, but wearying of being a spectacle, and being convinced
that as a general rule our insular habit is to eat too much, I gave up
this moderate lunch, and contented myself with a morsel of chocolate
eaten surreptitiously. On the rare occasions when the villagers wearied
of their entertainment, even of gloves, which they thought were worn to
conceal some desperate skin disease, and dropped off, small black pigs,
with upright rows of bristles on their lean, curved spines, timidly took
their place with expectations which were not realised, picking about,
even under the poles of the chair, for fragments which they did not
find, and even nibbling my straw shoes, and ancient and long-legged
poultry were as odiously familiar.
When they had fed and smoked, the men shouldered their burdens, and
trudged on till about sunset, stopping, as in the morning, for smokes
and drinks, I walking and photographing as it suited me. Sometimes we
put up at a wayside inn, without even the privacy of a yard; this was in
very small places, where the curiosity was not so overwhelming.
In towns the case was different. The inn yard was often enclosed by
planking and a wide door, within which there might be one, two, or three
courts, possibly with flowers in pots and a little gaudy paint. Some of
these inns accommodate over 200 travellers, with their baggage. Every
room is full, and between money-changing, eating, “sing-song,” and
gambling, and half-naked waiters rushing about with small trays, and
numbers of men all shouting together, it is pretty lively. At the
extreme end of the establishment is the “_kuan’s_ room,” with one for
attendants on each side. The crowd which always gathered during my
passage down the street rolled in at the doorway, blocking up the yard,
shouting, ofttimes hooting, and fighting each other for a look at the
foreigner. Fortunately doors in Chinese inns have strong wooden bolts,
and when my baggage and I were once ensconced I was secure from
intrusion, unless a few men and boys had run on ahead to take possession
of the room before I entered it, or forced themselves in behind Be-dien
when he brought my dinner. If it were merely a boarded wall, a row of
patient eyes usually watched me for an hour, and with much
gratification, for these rooms are dark with the door shut, and my
candle revealed my barbarian proceedings.
But worse than this was the slow scraping of holes in the plaster
partition, when there was one, between my room and the next, accompanied
by the peculiarly irritating sound of whispering, and eventually by the
application of a succession of eyes to the hole, more whispering, and
some giggling. It was always a temptation to apply the muzzle of a
revolver or a syringe to the opening! Occasionally a big piece of
plaster fell into my room and revealed the operators, who were more
frequently well-dressed travellers than ignorant coolies. I used to
whistle for Be-dien to hang up a curtain over the holes, after which
there was peace for a time, and then the scraping and whispering began
again, and often on both sides, till, tired and irritated, I used to put
out the candle and lie down, frequently awaking in the morning to find
myself in my travelling dress still, clutching my interrupted diary.
When one arrived tired after being stared at and pressed upon several
times in the day, beginning with the early morning, the fearful hubbub
in the courtyard, lasting an hour or more, followed by these grating and
rasping processes, was exhausting and exasperating.
Also the landlord’s wife, and often a bevy of women with her, used to
come in and pick over my things, which fortunately were few, and ask
questions, beginning with, “What is your honourable age?” “Have you many
sons?” When I confessed that I had none they expressed pity, and a
contempt which Be-dien did not scruple to translate. “Why have you left
your honourable country?” etc. But they soon tired of the trouble of
interrogating me and talked to Be-dien, and when I asked what they were
saying, I heard such remarks as these: “What ugly eyes she has, and
straight eyebrows!” “Yes, but they see into the ground and where the
gold is hid.” “Has she come for gold?” “What big feet she has!” (Their
own were about three inches long.) “Why is her hair like wool?” and so
on.
These people had never seen lead pencils or fountain pens, and
everywhere these and the foreign writing, and the fact that a woman
could write, (for the gazers were more or less illiterate) attracted
great attention. A pronged fork, which they thought must “prick the
mouth and make it bleed,” was in their eyes a barbarism. I wore straw
sandals over English tan shoes to avoid slipping, and this they regarded
as a confession of foreign inferiority. I was wearing a Chinese woman’s
dress with a Japanese _kurumaya’s_ hat, the one perfect travelling hat,
and English gloves and shoes, and this _olla podrida_ was an annoyance
to them. Their questions were very trivial, and their curiosity appeared
singularly unintelligent, contrasting, in this respect, with that of the
Japanese. It showed prodigious apathy for adults to spend hour after
hour in focussing a stolid stare upon a person whose occupations offered
no novelty or variety, being limited to eating and writing. The
curiosity of the common people, though boorish, was not rude, but that
of the class above them, and above all of men of the literary class, was
brutal and insulting, and generally tended to excite hostility against
the foreigner.
I developed my negatives in my room at night, as it was almost always a
perfect “dark room,” and the greatest of my annoyances was when a flash
of white light showed that my neighbours had successfully worked a hole
in the wall, and that my precious negative was hopelessly “fogged.”
The indispensable _yamen_ runners are changed at every prefecture, and
the passports are examined and copied. These runners are a queer lot.
For this duty they get their travelling expenses and something over, and
the _douceur_ which the traveller bestows. A formal official letter is
their warrant. But on many occasions I found myself not with the escort
I left the prefecture with, which truly was shabby enough, but with a
couple of ragged beggars, to whom the letter with its advantages had
been sold by the runners, who thus saved themselves a journey.
Occasionally these substitutes strutted in front of my chair down a
street waving the magistrate’s letter, the wind blowing their rags
aside, showing the neglected and repulsive sores by which they excite
the compassion of the charitable. The only useful purpose which the
_yamen_ runners served was occasionally when it was growing late to run
on ahead and engage “rooms,” and always to take the passport to the
_yamen_. I write “the passport” because it deserved the definite article
from its size, the grandeur of its seals, and the consideration it
claimed for me, besides which it allowed of unlimited travel in the
eighteen provinces, as well as in Mongolia and Manchuria, and was of
such a nature as to produce an immediate change of manner in every
official who read it! Besides this I had a correct and prosaic consular
passport issued at Hankow, which I only once had occasion to use.
The compulsory _chai-jen_ are, I think, a speciality of SZE CHUAN, and
the compulsion rose out of unpleasant circumstances. I never learned
that they forced the innkeepers to take less than the usual payment;
indeed, I think that Chinese innkeepers are far too independent a class
to be forced, nor, though they have the reputation of being brutal and
truculent, did I see them maltreat anyone, but I much objected to being
sold to the beggars and to being deserted on critical occasions. When
soldiers were sent, and any trouble was threatened, they usually slipped
off their brilliant coat cloaks and disappeared, and in reply to my
subsequent remonstrances said, “What are four against two thousand?” a
specious way of excusing themselves, for the mandarin’s letter is
all-powerful even in a beggar’s hand.
Money annoyances began early, and never ceased. Before leaving Wan Hsien
I bought 10,000 _cash_, brass coins, about the size of a halfpenny,
inscribed with Chinese characters, and with a square hole in the middle.
By this they are threaded a hundred at a time on a piece of straw twist,
and at that time (for the exchange fluctuates daily) the equivalent of
two shillings weighed eight pounds! The eighteen shillings in _cash_
with which I started weighed seventy-two pounds, and this had to be
distributed among the coolies, the boss, or _fu-tou_, being responsible
for the whole. But no reliance is to be placed on the _cash_ shop. There
may be _cash_ wanting, small _cash_, spurious _cash_; consequently every
string must be counted, and this operation frequently took more than an
hour. A few _cash_ in each hundred are claimed for the “string.” On
nearly every string small _cash_ used to be found, and the haggling and
the counting occupied one of the best morning hours. This process, in
common with everything which has to do with money, is intensely
interesting to every Chinese, and the dullest wits are bright on the
subject. Some villages would only receive small _cash_; others rejected
it altogether.
The silver was a greater nuisance than the brass. The silver shoes I got
in Hankow had been broken up into four pieces each, but even then they
were unmanageably big and had to be chopped again, usually by the
village blacksmith with his heavy tools, and weighed again to make sure
that all had been returned. Then the man to whom you pay over a fragment
of your broken _sycee_, for which the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was
responsible, puts it first into the palm of one hand, then into the
other, looks at it askance, and then says the “touch” is bad, it is
inferior silver, and so on. This is after you have agreed to pay a
certain weight in silver for an article, say half an ounce. Then it
appears that not only is the “touch” inferior, but the ounce of that
town is a heavier ounce than the ounce of the last, and that your scale
is a bad one, and that the silver must be weighed in a “good scale,”
_i.e._, the seller’s own; and between the “touch” and the varying
weights, and the differing values of taels, and the charges for breaking
and weighing and possibly for assaying the _sycee_, the bewildered
traveller, who has three things always to think of—the number of _cash_
to the tael, the quality of the silver, and the weight of the tael—would
gladly compound by paying a much larger percentage than all this
botheration really costs. One of the greatest aggravations is when the
_cash_ strings break just as one is starting, and a thousand _cash_ roll
over the inn yard and lose themselves in heaps and holes. Then the
innkeeper exerts himself and clears the yard of the crowd, and a
diligent search is instituted. It is useless to say “Never mind if a few
are left behind,” for it is a point of honour with the _fu-tou_, who is
responsible for everything, that not a _cash_ shall be missing.
In this chapter I have endeavoured to glance at the most salient
features of SZE CHUAN travel, leaving others to emerge _en route_.