DOWNWARD BOUND
The deep blue, glittering skies of the high altitudes were exchanged for
the mist and dulness which have conferred upon SZE CHUAN the name of
“The Cloudy Province,” and with the lower levels came mosquitoes and
sandflies, and a day shade temperature from 82° to 93°, very little
alleviated during the night. I left the capital in a small flat-bottomed
_wupan_, drawing four inches of water, with a mat roof, and without
doors at either end. Yet my cambric curtains were never lifted, and when
I desired it I enjoyed complete privacy at the expense of partial
asphyxiation. At that time, May 20, the water was so low that no bigger
boat could make the passage, and numbers of small, trim house-boats were
aground.
It was the start for a river journey of over 2000 miles, the first
thousand of which were accomplished in this and similar boats. It was a
delightful and most propitious journey, and introduced me to many new
beauties and interests, and to a most attractive area of prosperity. For
the first day the boatmen made more use of their shoulders than of their
oars, lifting and shoving the boat, which “drave heavily” over sand and
shingle and often bumped like a cart over paving stones. For the ascent
of the river breast-poles are used by men wading. From Chengtu Fu to Sui
Fu the Min is called by the Chinese the Fu, from the three Fu cities on
its banks. After Be-dien had shopped for three hours, the result being
only a small bag of charcoal, we dropped down under a fine stone bridge
of several arches to a pretty village with a pagoda, “a sweet place,”
where we tied up for the night.
[Illustration: VILLAGE ON THE MIN.]
We joined the main river, not then more than eighty yards wide, below
the An-shun Bridge, an antiquated or ancient structure, and spent a long
day in battling with the shallows, and with the peasant farmers, who had
thrown many dams of shingle in bamboo cages across the river to keep up
the water for their own purposes. They refused to open a passage, though
this only involved kicking away the stones between the cages and
replacing them, demanded 2000 cash as toll, and seized on my boat, and
with shod poles and much vociferation barred my progress several times.
Native boats were passing through for thirty cash, and some thirty or
forty at each dam were smashing against each other for the first turn.
Eventually, when forty men got hold of my little _wupan_ and tried to
intimidate me, I asked them to show me the paper authorising them to
demand this toll, on which they collapsed.
In a number of places there are rows of gigantic waterwheels, four or
five together, from thirty to forty-five feet in diameter, by which all
the adjacent country is bountifully irrigated. The sleepy hum of these
huge wheels, the richness of the cultivation, and the fresh greens of
the woodland, in which prosperous-looking villages basked drowsily in
the summer sunshine, were all charming. But at times the water was so
shallow that the boatmen had to precede my boat to work a channel for
her, one of them leading her by the nose, and another pushing her from
behind. This dragging, and the quarrels with the peasants about getting
through their dams, occupied the first day.
The next day was a rapture. A river locally called the Nan joins the Min
at Chiang Ku, about sixteen miles below Chengtu, and after the junction
water was abundant. Su-ma-tou, a busy place in lat. 30° 28′ (Baber), is
the limit of navigation for large junks. At Peng-shan Hsien the river
widens out after the union of all its perplexing subdivisions. Below
Meichow, a large and busy place, the country breaks up into picturesque
hills of no great height, divided by fertile valleys, through one of
which I caught a momentary and only glimpse of the unrivalled majesty of
Mount Omi.
Villages embowered in fruit trees, of which the illustration is an
average specimen, adorn the banks of the bright river. Young wheat,
mustard and beans in blossom, with mulberry trees between the fields,
clumps of bamboo, and pines cresting every knoll and hill, made up a
lovely picture—a vision of peace, plenty, and prosperity. Indeed, the
whole river journey from Chengtu to Chungking consists of a series of
beautiful pictures, combined with varied and prosperous industries. It
is a lovely part of China, and the white, timbered houses, the vividly
red soil, and red sandstone rock, the dark, light, blue, and yellow
greens, and the fascination of the smooth, fine lawns, which ofttimes
slope down to the sparkling water, have a very special charm. The
“Cloudy Province” failed to keep up its character, and if the sky was
not very blue, the sunshine was brilliant. The gardenia, often a large
shrub, grows profusely on the slopes, and it and the bean gave forth
delicious odours. Strings of gardenia blossoms hang up at that season in
all houses, every coolie sticks them into his hair, and even the beggars
find a place for them among their rags. For a farthing a large basket of
them can be bought.
I reached Chia-ling Fu (1070 ft.), where I remained for some days, in
eighty hours from Chengtu Fu, including stoppages—the estimated distance
being about 130 miles. The approach to this attractive and important
city from the north is extremely pretty, indeed beautiful. The country
is very hilly, and great, red sandstone bluffs, heavily wooded, with
pagodas and temples, and much carving in rock recesses, with scarlet
azaleas and gardenia blossoming everywhere, would have riveted my
admiration to the left bank had it not been for the overhanging red
sandstone cliff and the picturesque houses of the city on the right.
Chia-ling Fu, said to be a city of 50,000 souls, is a place of great
importance commercially, as three large rivers—the Min, Ya, and
Tatu—there form a junction, and for a brief space the river is like a
lake. It is perhaps the greatest centre of sericulture and silk weaving
in the province, and is also the eastern boundary of the white wax
trade. Its white silks are remarkable for lustre and purity of colour.
It is a rich city, and the capital of one of the most fertile and lovely
regions on earth. It is besides the starting-point for most of the
pilgrims to the temples of Omi-Shan and “The Glory of Buddha.” The city
wall is of bright red sandstone, which is finished with a few courses of
hard grey brick. The south gate was rigidly closed against the Fire God.
A handsome, uphill, residential street, green and peaceful, leads to the
west gate, and on this the China Inland Mission and Canadian Methodists
have their mission houses. In Mr. Endacott’s garden are some specimens
of the singular rock-dwellings so fully described by Mr. Baber in his
papers on Western China. Chia-ling trades in opium and timber as well as
in silk and white wax. Silk and umbrella shops are conspicuous. Every
view from every point is beautiful.
[Illustration: WEST GATE, CHIA-LING FU.]
On the face of the cliff on the opposite side of the river is a figure
in the rock, cut in very high relief, of Maitreya Buddha—truly colossal,
being 380 feet in height. The nose is said to be nearly five feet long,
and the head from thirty to forty feet high. Grass is allowed to grow on
the head, eyebrows, upper lip, and ears, to represent hair. This figure
is unfortunately partly concealed by the redundant vegetation which
surrounds it. It is an interesting specimen of the religious art of
about a thousand years ago.
Leaving the hospitalities of Chia-ling Fu for a boat journey of 345
miles, in a rather old and leaky little _wu-pan_, which, however, did
133 miles in seventeen hours, I halted several times on the way down to
visit some of the remarkable rock dwellings in the cliffs which in many
places border the river. They are difficult of access, and besides
tearing my stout Chinese dress to pieces, I was considerably bruised and
scratched. I took ropes, grippers, and three men with me.[52]
[Illustration: FRIEZE IN ROCK DWELLING, MIN RIVER.]
At a farmhouse where I landed near the hamlet of Sing-an, there was a
sandstone coffer, seven feet long, used as a cistern. The farmer sold me
two axe-heads of a hard, green stone, with a dull polish, which he found
along with the coffer while digging a buffalo pond. To the finest of the
excavated dwellings that I visited, I descended, holding on to trees and
rock projections with hands and grippers, having a rope round my waist.
There was a rock platform in front of the opening, not now accessible
from below. The face of the rock has been smoothed, and eaves which
project two feet have been left. The four times recessed doorway is five
feet six inches high. At one side of this, as well as in the doorways of
the interior, there are the remains of stone pivots on which doors could
be hung. Above the doorway is a frieze as represented in the
illustration, eighteen inches in depth, which is repeated over a stone
altar against the wall, and again over several recesses, one of which is
obviously for a fire, and has a stone shelf above it, and the others
were probably beds. Two doorways give access to rooms, one of which is
14 ft. by 12 ft., the other 12 ft. by 12 ft. The former is nine feet
high, and has a rounded roof, below which runs a deep and well-executed
frieze carved with arabesques and curious human figures, the faces of
which are certainly not Mongolian. In this room are both an altar and a
stone tank. The outer room measures 30 ft. by 20 ft. 7 in., and is 7 ft.
4 in. in height. In another of these singular excavations there are
settees cut into the rock with a fashionable slope of seat and back, the
front being actually rounded for comfort! In a third there is a curious
arrangement resembling pigeon-holes for letters, and the frieze
resembles one figured in Mr. Baber’s paper, and is what is known in
heraldry as the “disc-and-label” pattern—a severe but very decorative
ornament. In that dwelling there was an arrangement of holes in the
doorway, showing that the doors had worked on some description of hinge.
Over the lintel of one doorway is the trident symbol. All the dwellings
(five) visited by me, had what must have been small sleeping chambers
attached to them. The walls of the principal rooms show traces of
careful finish, and some have obviously been panelled. There is a
stately seemliness about these abodes, which implies that those who
constructed and occupied them must have made some advances in
civilisation, and have valued privacy.
[Illustration: BOAT ON THE MIN.]
The finest of them, so far as is known, both in size and decoration, is
a day’s journey only from Sui Fu, but the access involves severe
climbing, and risks which I did not care to run. These dwellings occur
in great numbers, from a point not far above Chia-ling Fu down nearly to
Luchow, a distance of fully 220 miles.
The ever broadening and deepening Min, passing through lovely and
prosperous country, took me rapidly to Sui Fu (Hsu-chow Fu), a large
city with a population, according to the officials, of 150,000. It is
well situated on a high, much wooded, rocky promontory between the Min
or Fu and the Chin-sha, which there unite to form the great river known
by us as the Yangtze, where a temple-crowned point of rock dominates the
busy city. On the opposite side of the Min are fantastic mountains with
singular rock forms, on one of which is the highly picturesque temple of
“The Sleeping Buddha,” approached by steps cut in the rock below.
The Chin-sha is only navigable to Ping-shan, a difficult forty miles
above Sui Fu. It was rising fast, and its great volume of turbid water
contrasted with the clear bright Min, which kept apart from it in
disgust for some time. Sui Fu is a very lively place, being the great
entrepôt of the large transit trade between SZE CHUAN and Northern
YUNNAN, as well as a considerable distributing point.
Above Ping-shan, the Lolo, tribes which the Chinese have failed to
subdue in two thousand years, keep the country in a state of chronic
insecurity, fatal to trade routes. Besides the transit trade, Sui Fu
does a large business in silk, opium, and sugar. The “residential
suburbs” are full of good houses in wooded grounds, extending far up the
Min, their owners reaching their pleasure boats by handsome flights of
stone stairs. The American Baptists and the China Inland Mission do
mission work in Sui-Fu, and a great deal of valuable medical work.
Though “child-eating,” as elsewhere, is believed in, the people are not
unfriendly, and the mandarin was specially courteous. Before I left he
sent round to all the street officers to say that, whether I went
through the city in a chair or on foot, there was to be no crowding,
following, or staring. He sent four _chai-jen_ in official hats to walk
in front of me, and go down with me to Luchow, and two petty officers to
see that no one interfered with my camera, on pain of being beaten.
I left Sui Fu on the glorious evening of a blazing day, and once more,
after a land journey in SZE CHUAN of nearly 1200 miles, was afloat on
the Yangtze—there a deep, broad river, flowing among low, pretty hills,
much wooded, and terraced for cultivation.
[Illustration: TOWN ON THE YANGTZE.]
[Illustration: SUBURB OF SUI FU.]
[Illustration: TSIANG NGAN HSIEN, WITH ENTRANCE TO ROCK DWELLING.]