SIN-WEN-PING TO LI-FAN TING
After leaving that quiet place, where the temperature was only 52° at
7.30 a.m., we plunged at once into a wild part of the gorge, very thinly
peopled and desolate, on which grim snow-peaks looked down from the head
of every lateral cleft. The traffic on the road was altogether Tibetan,
partly accounted for by the junction of the road to Mou-Kung Ting, a
thousand _li_ away, with the Sung-pan Ting road, which we were
following. There were large caravans of very big, powerful mules, loaded
either with wool or with medicinal roots, and with a merry inclination
to lunge at us with hoofs or teeth as we passed them; the rough, uncouth
muleteers always cheerful and friendly as they exchanged with us their
national salutation _zho_.
One man at least in each caravan—every man having charge of four
mules—can shoe his own beasts, and I had the luck, in consequence of a
mule kicking off his shoe as we passed him, to see that the method is
the same as in Western Tibet. They tie the fore and hind legs of the
animal together, cast him, put a pole through the lashings, the ends of
which are held by two men, and cold shoe him, paring the hoof only very
slightly, using very long nails with tacket heads.
The Mou-Kung Ting road is one of the great routes of Tibetan traffic, of
which we saw much less after passing the junction.
The gorge is very narrow, so narrow that at times the road is scaffolded
over the water, or is carried by rough steps cut in the face of the
precipices. We ascended 800 feet during the day. The traces of spring
diminished, the hills were brown and bare, the apricots were hardly in
blossom, the few trees were leafless, the people still wore their wadded
clothes, and it was pleasant to walk a good deal. Yet here and there
were thick carpets of a sky-blue dwarf iris, a fragile thing, looking
misplaced among its rough surroundings, and patches of a blue bugloss,
and dwarf shubberies of a barberry in blossom.
[Illustration: HUMAN PACK SADDLE FOR TIMBER.]
Things had changed. Thatched roofs had given place to thin slabs of
stone, or rough boards held down by big stones. All ornament had
disappeared. China seemed left behind at such a great distance, that
every Chinese I saw looked as if he must be like myself, a foreigner.
The men were hardy mountaineers, and carried their loads on pack
saddles, striding like men, rather than at a dog trot, on the swinging
bamboo. Even the women can shoulder packs and dangle from rope bridges,
and the children have an air of freedom.
A short day’s journey ended at the hamlet of Shuo-chiao, where the gorge
opens out, and for a brief period the Min is vulgarised into various
branches clattering and boiling among beds of Brobdingnagian shingle. It
is a wild place, among high mountains, a single village street, a fine
suspension bridge, a mill or two on the shingle, and goats on the ledgy
slopes. The inn at the end of the street, where I spent two nights, was
new, and hung over a branch of the river. My room, having no ceiling,
was lofty. The boards were clean, and there were no bad smells. The
noise of the river was tremendous. Besides the roar of the water, there
was a sound of paving stones being thumped on paving stones, and a
perpetual clatter of shingle. I had to shout as loud as I could to make
my servant hear. But it was very restful. I was entirely ignored. No one
intruded into my room, and when I took a walk unattended no one followed
me.
Food was scarce, and an inroad of twelve travellers involved much
arrangement. Shuo-chiao is not a usual halting-place, and the stocks
were low. The people fell back on making macaroni, and sandwiches with
chopped garlic between layers of steamed paste. Macaroni is made of a
very close dough of barley meal, very much kneaded, and rolled out on a
clean table over and over again till it attains the desired toughness
and thinness, when the operator cuts it into long and narrow strips,
which are hung over a string to dry. When wanted these strips are
boiled, and are eaten with chopped capsicum or onion.
The following day’s journey to Weichou was novel and interesting. The
sky was grey and threatened rain, and the snow-peaks loomed grimly
through flurries of dark clouds. We ascended to a height of over 4300
feet into a barren region, where winter lingered. The few villages have
characteristics of their own; each consists of a long, clean, paved,
narrow street, the houses built of stone, the walls with more or less of
an inward slope, as if under Tibetan influence—all dwellings
two-storeyed, the upper storey of dark wood, with carved, overhanging
balconies with supporting beams also carved, and with very deep eaves
with long and elaborately carved wooden pendants. Such villages are
usually by torrent sides, with fruit trees, cedars, and poplars
clustering about them, and are approached by picturesque bridges. The
street terminates at either end with a decorative gateway, often with a
small tower and wind bells.
In many places where the Min has a narrow bank, there are ruined
villages with only ruinous walls standing; and in each house there are
one, two, or three graves. On one larger open space there are great
numbers of graves, said to be those of soldiers who died fighting; and
the whole of the slaughter and destruction is attributed by the
villagers to the Taiping rebellion. This is plausible, but doubtful.
In crevices there were minute fronds of the silver fern, which grows
profusely all along the canyon; but nature was still asleep. Limestone
and grey sandstone predominate, and the curiously marked strata are
occasionally vertical. Basalt, however, appears in some of the lateral
ravines, and pink granite; and the torrents which tumble over the latter
are exquisite in their sparkle and purity. A traveller who, except on
one day’s journey from Wan, has not tasted unboiled water for more than
two years, would wish to be thirsty to drink of these icy and living
waters.
At Wen-chuan Hsien, a small prefectural town packed among high
mountains, with a very poor but clean street, a picturesque entrance,
and a fine Confucian Temple, I sat in the grey street while the _yamen_
officials copied my passport at a table, and an old man, who seemed
influential, kept the dirty and too often leprous crowd of men and boys
from pressing on me too closely. Nothing is ever done privately in the
East, and several men leant over the scribes, reading the
imposing-looking document, when one exclaimed, with an air of
consternation, “She is given rank!” Others exclaimed incredulously, “A
woman can’t have rank!” But the scribes settled the point in my favour;
and then there was a discussion as to how I had got rank—if it were
literary rank, or if I were the wife of a great mandarin in my own
country—a suggestion combated on the ground that I wore poor cotton
clothing, and had no jewels. Wen-chuan is the most hopelessly dull
official town that I saw in China.
The night before, at Shuo-chiao, I was told that after passing Wen-chuan
we should see the villages of the “Barbarians,” on the heights; and I
heard a tale with which travellers bound for the aboriginal tribes have
been plied from Marco Polo down to Captain Gill. The innkeeper said that
these people would offer hospitality, but it was dangerous to eat with
them, for they believed that if they poisoned a rich man his wealth
would come to them without violence, and that they would think that I
was rich (in spite of my poor cotton clothing), and would put poison in
my food, and that in about three months I should die of a disease akin
to dysentery! He also said that these tribes are ruled by a very great
queen, who will not let any stranger enter her territory—obviously the
same woman of whom I had heard rumours at intervals for some months
previously.
At last, and for fifteen _li_ before reaching Weichou, the objects of
interest became novel and plentiful, startling in their novelty.
Singular dwellings made their appearance, crowning hilltops or poised on
ledges—isolated or in clusters. The earlier specimens have high, dead,
stone walls, flat roofs, and an upper storey covering a third of the
roof, but without a front wall. Before long such houses aggregated
themselves into villages on great heights, and without any apparent
means of access, though that they were inhabited was obvious from the
patches of cultivation about them. Among them appear tall towers,
sometimes to the number of seven; they are picturesque and fantastic
beyond all imagination. Of course these are the dwellings of the Man-tze
(Barbarians), supposed by most ethnologists to be the aborigines of
Western China; and it was not a little disappointing, on turning the
glass upon them, to see nothing but Chinese with their queues and blue
cotton, and hobbling women loafing round such extraordinary habitations.
I use the word _loafing_ advisedly. It is usually quite inapplicable to
a Chinese, and among these mountains, as elsewhere, he has plenty of
grit, but population is scanty, and competition has ceased to be keen,
so he has leisure for a lounging study of the welfare of his crops and
his pigs.
So, among villages crowning rocky mountain-tops or clinging to scarcely
accessible mountain-sides, some of them very Tibetan, others with
definite characteristics of their own, the road finds itself at the
small prefectural town of Weichou, at the junction of the Ta Ho and the
Siao Ho (the Great and Little rivers), in a superb situation, much
embellished by the unconscious art of the builder, with _yamens_ on
rocky heights, and the grey city wall following the steep contours of
the hills which surround the town. The north road on the left bank of
the Ta Ho leads to Sung-pan Ting, and the west road, mostly along the
right bank of the Siao Ho, to Li-fan Ting and beyond. Weichou is the
town called by Captain Gill on his map Hsin-Pu-Kuan.
At this point mules for the farther journey should have been engaged.
It is a good sixty-five _li_ from Weichou to Li-fan Ting, and we left at
6 a.m. My expectations were high, but they were more than fulfilled.
From Weichou to Somo there is only one dull bit of about three miles. As
far as Li-fan Ting the scenery is colossal and savage, Tibetan in its
character, resembling somewhat the wild gorges of the Shayok; and,
beyond Tsa-ku-lao, the westernmost official post of China in that
direction, the grandeur and beauty exceed anything I have ever
seen—Switzerland, Kashmir, and Tibet in one.
Outside Weichou there are two suspension bridges, over which I had to
walk. They were “on their last legs,” and were taken down when I came
back. They vibrated, the wind swayed them unpleasantly, and as the loose
planks were only laid at intervals, and some had disappeared, and the
swinging structures hung like inverted arches over boiling surges, the
crossing was not agreeable, and it is as little so when on this road the
chair turns a corner of the narrow path on the edge of a precipice 500
or 600 feet in depth, and hangs for an appreciable interval over the
abyss below.
The day was the most brilliant for three months, and the journey from
first to last was magnificent, but the wind, which I found such a
merciless foe in Central Asia, rose at the same hour, 9 a.m., and blew
half a gale till near sunset, reaching its maximum of force at 2 p.m.,
making photography impossible, several times nearly overturning the
chair and its bearers, and filling eyes, nose, and mouth not only with
gritty dust, but with irritating alkalis. This is the daily routine in
these mountain valleys. On crossing the bridges we entered at once the
gorge of the Siao Ho, or Li-fan River, in which we remained for twelve
hours—a river flashing in cataracts, eddying in rapids, with never a
quiet reach—a deep, clear, olive-green stream, its grand course
accompanied by a deep undertone of a heavy booming in its caverned
depths. Its career is through a rift among mountains, seven, eight, and
nine thousand feet in height, broken up by stupendous chasms and
precipices, and into red-brown, but seldom grey, peaks—the higher like
needles, the lower crested by villages, to all appearance inaccessible;
the mass riven asunder, laterally, in many places in so remarkable a
manner as to show on one side the rock corresponding to the cleavage on
the other, so that if the sides could be brought together they would be
an exact fit.
[Illustration: BAMBOO SUSPENSION BRIDGE, WEICHOU.]
Occasionally the mountains and precipices recede sufficiently from the
river to give scanty space for villages at their feet, with poplars and
scanty crops of bearded wheat on sandy soil, and at the lateral openings
alluvial fans occur, bearing fair crops of wheat and maize, as well as
pear and apricot trees, just providing a scanty subsistence for a scanty
population. Limestone, grey and red sandstone, and a very hard
conglomerate are the predominant formations, but a granite with a pink
tinge makes an occasional innovation, and the potholes in the river,
where it was possible to investigate them, were found to be fashioned of
grey granite. One remarkable feature of the region is the enormous
quantity of nitrate of soda. Its efflorescence in places whitens the
mountains as if with snow, and so checks vegetation as to reduce it to
coarse plants of strong constitutions, with tough fibres and woolly
leaves. Sulphur abounds also, and fragments of an iron ore, which I
afterwards learned is brown hematite. There are nitre works at Weichou,
and sulphur is supplied in small quantities for making powder, but the
cost of land carriage is great, and it is chiefly used locally for
tipping matches.
The road is a great work of modern origin, and must have cost a large
sum. It is in excellent repair. It is cut, not blasted, for much of the
way out of solid rock. In places it is necessary to carry it out over
the river on a wooden framework, supported on timbers driven into the
river-bed, or to “scaffold” it by carrying it out on stakes driven
horizontally into the rock. In one place a fine gallery, decorated with
stone tablets to the man who presented the road to his district, has
been cut through the rock, and wherever steps are necessary, they have
been carefully made. At this distance of 2000 miles from the coast, and
half that from the capital, it is somewhat surprising to find so marked
a sign of civilisation as an excellent road in thorough repair.
I cannot attempt to convey to the reader any idea of the glories and
surprises of that long day’s journey. It was a perfect extravagance of
grandeur of form and beauty of colouring, and the sky approached that of
Central Asia in the brilliancy of its bright pure blue. Every outline
was sharp, but the gorges were filled with a deep blue or purple
atmosphere; the sunlight was intense. There was no dawn of spring on the
bare rock faces of the mountains, no gloom of pine in any rift—grandeur
and vastness are the characteristics of the scenery—peaks and precipices
are piled on each other, and through the rare openings there were
gleamings far away of sunlit cones of unsullied snow.
There are villages on hilltops, on rocky peaks, reached by stairs cut in
the rock, on ledges of precipices, into which the back rooms are
excavated without obvious means of access, and villages where the houses
are three, four, five, and even seven storeys high, clinging to steep
mountain-sides, or hanging on to cliffs above tempestuous streams. These
villages are on heights five, seven, and even nine thousand feet above
the sea—barley and bearded wheat ripening in July at eleven thousand—and
from one to three thousand feet above the Siao Ho. All are built of
stone, all look more or less like fortifications, all have flat roofs,
and most have brown wood rooms or galleries, much decorated with rude
fretwork, supported on carved beams projecting from their upper storeys.
Most of these villages possess mysterious-looking square stone towers,
sloping very gently inwards from base to summit. These are from forty to
ninety feet high. The bases of some of them are thirty feet square; the
sides are pierced by narrow openings, wider, however, than loopholes.
The doors are fifteen feet and upwards from the ground, and I did not
see any with any present means of access. Some have lost many feet of
their height, I suppose from age and weather, but many are perfect, and
have projections near the roofs, which on a small scale are like the
projecting rooms of the modern villages. Three and four in a single
village is not an uncommon number, and occasionally there are as many as
seven. At a distance they give the romantic villages in the ravines the
prosaic aspect of smelting works, but they add a singular dignity and
picturesqueness to those on the heights. They are built without mortar
of blocks of undressed stone, “well and truly laid,” in spite of the
difficulty of the inward slope, and the stones are of sufficient size to
suggest an inquiry as to how they were elevated to their present
positions. Those towers which are still perfect are roofed, which may
account for their preservation. There are great numbers of them between
Weichou and Li-fan Ting, after which they occur but rarely till the
head-waters of the Chin-shuan are reached.
As the Man-tze say that “their fathers and their fathers’ fathers never
remember a time when they were free,” so they cannot remember any
legends regarding the use of these towers, except that in “old times”
fires were lighted on their roofs to recall absent villagers to the
defence of their homes against an approaching enemy. Some think that
they were granaries, but the so-called thinking of people in their stage
of mental development is of little value.
[Illustration: ANCIENT TOWERS AT KANPO.]
Perhaps mine, in the absence of a greater array of facts, is not worth
much more! It appears certain, from a consensus of testimony, that these
buildings have two and three floors, reached by steps, _i.e_. notched
timbers, like those which at this day lead up to Man-tze roofs. Very
large, rough, earthen jars, which might have contained water, were shown
to me as having been found in one of them. It is quite possible that at
a late date the roofs were used for beacon fires, but from certain
indications in a few cases I am inclined to believe that
easily-removable approaches of stone and earth led up to the doors, by
which stores could be taken up and cattle driven in, the final entrance,
after the removal of these slopes, being made by means of notched
timbers, easily drawn up into the building; and that the towers were
refuges, in which the cattle were below and the people above, food for
man and beast being stored in the same building. This theory accounts
for the number of towers often found in the same village. It is quite
possible that the chief or headman and each of the richer villagers
possessed such a refuge. The style of building is far beyond the
capacities of a “barbarous” people.
Along the lower waters of the Siao Ho, all the Man-tze villages which
have not been more or less destroyed—with the exception of a few which
have been deserted, and are ready for occupation to-morrow, with the
lands belonging to them, have been taken possession of by the Chinese,
and evidently with much slaughter, for the number of graves is very
great. Even the villages on the heights above that part of the river
have not escaped Chinese absorption.
At one time, and that not long ago, the aboriginal population must have
been large, both to the south and west of Weichou, but not a Man-tze was
to be seen within forty _li_ of it. Many a blackened ruin of a once
happy Man-tze hamlet stirs the travellers’ wrath, and it is hardly less
aggravating to find Chinese families comfortably living in the
picturesque dwellings of the slaughtered or expatriated aborigines.
There were many tales told of the treachery of the “Barbarians,” and of
the necessity of extirpating them—such tales as are to be heard in
America, Australia, and every land in which the stronger race has ousted
the weaker one. When at Li-fan Ting my farther progress was vehemently
opposed, I had some reason to think that the officials feared that when
I was once fairly among the Man-tze I should hear other versions of
these stories.
About forty _li_ from Weichou, where the lateral clefts in the
precipices are dark and savage, and rocky peaks crowned with fantastic
lama-serais rise abruptly from rocky spurs, the villages on the heights
become more numerous, and the presence for the first time of Man-tze
inhabitants (who are rigid lamaistic Buddhists like the Tibetans) is
denoted by long flags inscribed with Sanskrit characters on tall poles
fluttering gaily in the strong east wind which blows down the canyon all
day long. Occasionally a wooden bridge on the cantilever principle, like
the Sanga bridges in India, of which many specimens are seen between the
Zoji-la and Leh in Ladak, crosses the furious torrent. Most of the
Man-tze villages are on the left bank of the Siao Ho, and by the
destruction of these bridges, which are much out of repair, they could
be rendered impregnable.
These villages are indescribable. The cattle and fodder are kept below,
and the windows and loopholes only begin from fifteen to twenty feet
from the ground. Brown projecting rooms and balconies at a great height,
the gay flutter of red and white prayer-flags, notched timbers giving
access to roof above roof, fuel-stacks on roofs, towers suggesting peril
and defence, and not seldom a headman’s house above, as large as a
feudal castle, which it much resembles; while high above that, looking
like an outgrowth of the rock, and only attained by flights of steep
rock steps, crowning the peak which dominates every village, are almost
invariably the piled-up temples, towers, and buildings of a lama-serai,
with their colour and gloom, the flutter of their prayer-flags, and the
sound of the incessant wild music of horns, drums, and gongs. An air of
mystery pervades the whole, for with all this cheerful flutter of flags
and the sound of music and the signs of industry it was very rarely that
any inhabitants were to be seen, just the glint of a woman’s red
petticoat now and then, or the red frock of a lama in relief against the
grey rock.
These tribes are not Tibetan, though they are down on most maps as
“Tibetan tribes,” but in the extraordinary picturesqueness of their
lama-serais and villages they reminded me vividly of the Shayok, and the
fantastic monasteries of Deskyid and Hundar in the Tibetan Nubra Valley.
It is a temptation to linger on that day’s journey. I did actually
linger on it, for one of my bearers, as I expected, was quite unequal to
his work, and I had to walk a good deal and allow of many halts for
rest. The halting-places were magnificent, but food was scarce and dear,
as every cattie of rice must be brought up from the low country.
Although we ascended on that day 988 feet, the climate became
perceptibly milder, and from what I observed later, it appears quite
possible that in temperature each degree west is equal to a degree
south. Grain crops, poplar, apricot, and pear trees were in their first
vivid green, the silver fern was in its beauty, the golden fern was well
advanced, the bugloss was in bloom, and in places where the canyon
opened a little there were narrow lawns of the finest turf, on which the
Tibetan traders camp in the season, on which red roses with coarse,
woolly calices were already in blossom. There was no traffic, and even
an unloaded pedestrian, unless he were a red lama telling his beads, or
twirling his prayer-cylinder, was a rarity.
In the late afternoon, at an abrupt and superb turn of the river, we
crossed a cantilever bridge high above the torrent, on the other side of
which is a fine village of extraordinary Man-tze houses, clinging to
ledges of a conical peak crowned by a small temple and a very large and
fantastic lama-serai. A tower, ninety feet high, very ancient, and in
good repair, gives dignity to the picturesqueness of Ta-fan. The road
attains the village by a steep, winding stairway of steps cut in the
rock, and passes through a gateway into cool shadow created by high,
massive, stone houses on either side. So massive are they, and so high
are the windows above the ground, that they suggest memories of villages
in the Engadine.
I rested in a large house in which, as in the others, a Chinese was
living with his family. These aborigines had grand ideas of habitations.
I entered into a guest hall panelled with brown wood, with two rooms on
each side and a large room behind. A gallery of brown wood, with rooms
opening from it, runs round the hall at a height of about eight feet
from the floor. It was very cool and clean, and I sat in a Chinese
easy-chair, glad to be out of the bluster. My host, who was the headman,
was a very courteous Chinese, and offered me wheaten cakes, honey, and
tea. He said that all the houses in the canyon were built by “Tibetans,”
though Chinese live in the lower villages; that if a Chinese builds a
new house he builds it after the same fashion, for that nothing but
Tibetan building—specially the inward slope of the very thick walls—can
stand the tremendous winds. The village subsists less by agriculture,
for which there is not sufficient irrigation, than by the Tibetan
traffic in the trading season.
The headman asked me why I was travelling to be murdered by the
“Barbarians,” and evidently attached no value to my statement that it
was to see the country. I wished then and elsewhere that I had been able
to say that it was in order to write a book, for that would have given
me “rank,” and would have been an intelligible explanation.
[Illustration: KAN-CHI.]
After leaving this village the mountains closed in again upon the pass,
their forms growing in wild majesty; there were glimpses of snow-peaks
with pines on their skirts, and where the shadow was bluest and deepest,
and the peaks are loftiest and sharpest, on a small patch of partially
level ground, separated from a very high and bare mountain, with
precipices which Captain Gill estimates at 3000 feet in height, by the
roaring river, stands the wild mountain town of Li-fan Ting, the
residence of a small magistrate, though only possessing a population of
five hundred.
Before we actually reached it waves of sunset gold rolled down the pass,
distant snow-cones blushed red, every peak took on purple or
amethyst—there was a carnival of colour. The wind fell to a dead calm,
there was a touch of frost in the dry air, when suddenly the whole glory
of mountain and chasm died out, and the colour vanished, leaving only
the distant snow-peaks burning red against a sky of tender green.
This small, grey city, on whose expansion Nature places her veto, looks
the final outpost of Chinese civilisation—the end of all things. A
well-built, narrow, crenelated wall runs between Li-fan Ting and the
river, hems it in, and then in a most fantastic way climbs the crests of
two mountain spurs, which wall in a ravine behind the town, bare and
rocky as all else is, looking like great flights of uncannily steep
stairs, following the steep and irregular contour of the ground.
A clear blue torrent, tumbling down at the back, thunders through the
town, and is utilised for many Lilliputian water-mills, mostly with
horizontal wheels, as on the plain. These mills are round, and look like
small Martello towers, and only a man below the average height can stand
upright in them. Poplars, willows, pear, and apricot trees contrast
pleasantly with the bare mountain-sides, and soften the grey outlines of
the small mountain town. Above Li-fan, and 2200 feet higher, is a
Man-tze village, in which the people have made Chinese intermarriages,
and have assimilated themselves to their conquerors.
Li-fan has one long, narrow, grey street of two-storeyed houses, the
upper storey with its balcony being of brown wood. It is very clean, but
cleanliness is not much of a merit—indeed, it is a necessity of that
altitude and in a dry atmosphere. It has no industry or trade of its
own, and subsists almost entirely on the through trade from Tibet at
certain seasons. It has a remarkable _yamen_, which, lacking space for
lateral expansion, has developed skywards; a temple on a rock,
brilliantly coloured; and a fine temple in the narrow street, rich in
effective wood carving, and possessing a huge bas-relief of the Dragon.
The rarefied air is singularly dry, and so it continues until the Pass
of Peh-teo-shan, 70 _li_ to the westward, marks a decided change to
humidity. On the nights of April 22nd and 23rd there were three and four
degrees of frost.
In this quaint town on the first day of the tenth month of each year,
the mandarin, with all the pomp which Li-fan can muster, fires the
biggest gun in the town at the opposite mountain to preserve “the luck
of the place.” It is believed, at least by the people, that if this
ceremony were not performed there would be tumults, followed by plague,
pestilence, and famine, and that the town would be given up to bad luck.
To save the luck some of the lamas make pilgrimages to an image cut in
the rock at the base of the Snow Dragon, a grand mountain to the south
of Li-fan.
The inn, where unwillingly I spent two days, is not bad, and was quite
free from smells. My room was at its extreme end, close to a crashing,
booming torrent, to the mountain, and to the red temple, which, like the
_yamen_, has developed skywards. It had two large holes in the floor,
and two windows under the roof, from which all the paper was torn, so
that the tremendous wind by day found easy entrance.
As soon as we arrived the usual official visit was paid, and with much
politeness of manner obstacles were thrown in the way of my further
progress. Two _chai-jen_ were placed at my door, one of them sleeping
across the threshold. Much consideration for the safety and comfort of a
lady was expressed—a novelty in China. There were neither roads nor
inns, it was said; the people were savages, the tribes were fighting, it
was dangerous to proceed. The next morning the prospect for departure
was badly clouded over. The veneer of politeness had disappeared, and
the official manner had become dictatorial. Senior officials from the
_yamen_ mounted guard, and a sentry was stationed at the inn gate. I was
a prisoner in all but the name. _Chai-jen_ could not be provided, they
said. The mandarin was absent, and no arrangements could be made till
the Viceroy of SZE CHUAN had been communicated with. Going beyond Li-fan
was a thing unheard of. All other foreigners had turned back,[48] they
could not be responsible for me any farther. They bullied and threatened
my men, and forbade the townspeople to give me supplies or porters.
[Illustration: ROCK TEMPLE, LI-FAN TING.]
The other difficulties, which I had foreseen from the first, came to a
head. Owing to the want of a contract I was in the power of the
chair-bearers. One of them was nearly incapable of carrying me, and not
having recovered from the severe blow at Lo-kia-chan I was not capable
of much walking. The only man in Li-fan who could carry a chair was
engaged in that man’s place in the morning, but was “ill” at night. The
authorities had forbidden him to go, and had taken the precaution of
laying the same prohibition on the mules, though if I could have
dispensed with the men I was prepared to make the journey on a pack
saddle. Finally and fatally, Mr. Kay, who was very much in the power of
the servant who had got the team together, when the men said that all
must go or none would go, engaged them all for the whole journey, and
under the circumstances we were then absolutely in their power so far as
going forwards was concerned. Such a tribe of rice-eating men, carrying
their loads from the shoulder, would, under any circumstances, have been
unsuited to the journey. But what was done could not be undone, and
there was “no use in crying over spilt milk.”
The _chai-jen_ smoked their opium pipes across my door, but retained
wits enough to pounce on me if I stirred, and even obtruded their
unwelcome presence when I climbed on the roof to photograph. On the
second evening the officials made a last effort to induce me to wait
till they sent a runner to the capital and back.
The last morning I woke everybody at 4.30, and was ready to leave at
5.30; but it was not to be. The officials were already there frightening
the coolies with stories, intimidating them, and threatening to have
them beaten for disobedience, and there was a violent altercation
between them and Mr. Kay, in which some very strong language was used on
both sides, which did not mend matters. When I came out they tried to
shut me into my room; but I managed to get into my chair. They told the
bearers not to carry me. 1 told them to move on. The officials then
tried to shut us in by closing parts of the outer door of the inn; but
Mr. Kay opened them, and held them open till the frightened porters and
my bearers had passed through. It was but fifty yards to the city gate.
I feared they would close it, but they contented themselves with
following us there, crying out, “We wash our hands of you!” and hurling
at us the epithet “Foreign dogs!” as a parting missile, throwing down
the gauntlet by sending us off without _chai-jen_, telling the brazen
lie that the road I proposed to take was not in China!
From this point there was the pleasurable excitement which attends a
plunge into the unknown, for I had not been able to learn that
missionary zeal, or geographical research, or commercial ambition had
penetrated the regions beyond, or that any English traveller has given
any description of it, and I only regret that my lack of scientific
equipment should make my account of it meagre, and in some respects
unsatisfactory.