LUCHOW TO CHUNG-KING FU
On the brilliant afternoon of the day after leaving Sui Fu, I reached
Luchow, an important trading city, with a reputed population of 130,000.
It is prettily situated on rising ground at the confluence of the
Yangtze and To rivers. The latter drains a considerable area, and by it
and its connections cargo boats of about fifteen tons can reach the
Great River from Kuan Hsien. Luchow appears to be a quiet, fairly well
governed, busy city. One great industry is the making of umbrellas, and
it has a large trade in sugar and other SZE CHUAN products. According to
its own officials, eighty per cent. of its male population are opium
smokers. In good shops, there and elsewhere, opium pipes are supplied
gratuitously to customers in back rooms, just as cups of tea are in
Japan. The China Inland Mission has both men’s and women’s work in
Luchow, and I was hospitably received in the mission house. The mercury
was 93°, and no one could sleep at night.
The people are not what would be called hostile, yet they curse Mr.
James, the missionary, in the streets, and believe that all the five are
“child-eaters,” and that the comeliness of the ladies is preserved by
the use of children’s brains! This scandalous accusation is current
everywhere in SZE CHUAN. Even at quiet Chia-ling Fu, when two beggar
boys were brought into the compound to be photographed, the report
spread like wildfire through the city that they been taken in for the
purpose of being fatted for eating! The hostility to foreigners has
increased rapidly in many parts of the province. Mr. A. J. Little,
writing from SZE CHUAN some years ago, mentions that the phrase “Foreign
devil,” and other opprobrious epithets applied to foreigners elsewhere,
were unknown, and other travellers have mentioned the same thing. Now, a
language rich in abominable terms is ransacked for the worst, to hurl at
the foreigner.
I left Luchow on May 30th in great heat, and contrary to custom,
travelled till nine o’clock, making fast to a snag in a broad reach or
bay of shallow water. The mercury stood at 91° at four p.m., and the men
suffered from the heat. I have observed that sunstroke is far more to be
dreaded in damp than in dry climates. It is common in SZE CHUAN among
the Chinese. The boatmen called it _lei-su_, “death from exhaustion.”
They feared it, and well they might, for their shaven heads were only
protected by small towels. The blue turban, much worn in the province,
may have originated in an instinct of defence. The Chinese suffer
greatly from mosquitoes. I have seen curtains of a heavy, green canvas
even in poor men’s houses, but men as poor as my boatmen have no
protection, and, being compelled by the heat to sleep naked, their
bodies are covered with inflamed lumps from mosquito bites. They are
very patient. They suffered so much from this cause that in the stifling
twilights, when thousands of these pests were abroad, I almost grudged
myself the immunity gained by sitting under a mosquito net made by
attaching a net roof and curtains to a Chinese umbrella frame.
The men fanned themselves as long as they could keep awake. As the heat
increased the use of the fan became universal among men. Coolies fanned
themselves at the treadmill pump, bearers as they ran along with chairs,
porters with loads, travellers on horseback and on foot, men working and
resting, shopkeepers at their doors, mandarins in their chairs and on
the judgment-seat, and sentries on guard. Soldiers marching to meet an
enemy fan themselves on the march, as I saw in Manchuria during the
Japanese war, and the bloody field of Phyong-yang was strewn with the
fans of the dead and dying Chinese. Fan-making is one of the great
industries of China. Nearly 2,000,000 fans were imported into Chung-king
in 1897.
[Illustration: PAGODA NEAR LUCHOW.]
Except for the heat, the downward journey was quite delightful; the
country is so fertile and beautiful, and has such an air of prosperity.
So long as we were in motion there was a draught, as the boat was quite
open, but the still nights were stifling, specially with the curtains
down. The boatmen were harmless, good-natured, obliging fellows. They
tied up whenever I wanted to land if it were at all possible, and though
they were obliged to pass from bow to stern through my “room,” they
always asked leave to do so if the curtains were down. The lovely
country was a very great charm. The variety of scenery, trees, flowers,
and cultivated plants was endless, and new industries were constantly
becoming prominent. The only matter for regret was that the rush of the
fast-rising river carried us all too swiftly past much that was worthy
of observation.
A visit to a coal-mine interested me greatly. The mine was in a
hillside, three miles from the river, and employed eighty men. The
manager said that the output was the equivalent of forty tons daily. The
men got sevenpence per day, with rice, broad beans, cucumbers, and tea.
Each hewer and carrier (in pairs) must deliver at the pit’s mouth daily
the equivalent of a ton. The pay with food comes to tenpence per day,
and the actual cost in labour of a ton is twentypence. The mine is
extremely well ventilated by three revolving fans, which drive the air
into it through bamboo tubing. The men work in two shifts of twelve
hours per day of twenty-four hours, eating their rice in the mine three
times daily. Every tenth day is pay-day and a holiday. Each carrier
burns nine ounces of Tung oil daily, and each hewer six, the lamps being
attached to the brow by a band round the head. There was a bath for the
miners, which in the dim light appeared to be a stone coffer, supplied
with hot water. The tunnel by which the workings are reached, and down
which the coal is carried in wheeled baskets running on a wooden
tramway, is six feet high, and about six hundred feet long. I could do
no more than glance at the workings. The coal seam was about four feet
thick, the galleries very low, and the hewers lay on their sides and
hacked the coal sidewise. It appeared to be a fairly hard bituminous
coal, and there is a great demand for it at the town of Peh-Shi, where,
after land and river transit, it sells at seven shillings per ton. The
manager, an intelligent and fairly polite man, told me that hard coal is
also found in the neighbourhood, but is much more expensive to work.
This coal-mine appeared well appointed, and the miners well fed and
cheery. They seemed to have less consideration for the Dragon’s back
than those on the Paoning route!
The night after leaving Luchow, while tied up to a snag in a broad and
shallow reach, all in my boat were wakened out of a sound sleep by what
might have been the “crack of doom.” There was a sound as if all the
cannon of the universe had been fired close to the _wu-pan_ on either
side, accompanied by a hiss in the water, a glare of blue light, a gust
which lifted the boat, and stripped off some of the mats of the roof,
and then a torrent of rain. By the next morning the Yangtze had risen
twelve feet, and our snag had “gone under,” forcing us to seek the
familiar protection of the shore.
Among many storms, one only, at St. Paul, Minnesota, has fixed itself in
my memory. That was in a hotel lighted by gas and full of people. This
was out in a lonely place in “darkness which could be felt,” among men
of another race and speech, in a frail craft. The thunder, not rolling,
but bursting like explosions; the ceaselessness and vividness of the
forked lightning; the otherwise pitch darkness of the night; the hot and
mephitic atmosphere; the occasional terrific gusts of wind, threatening
to blow the half-unroofed boat to pieces; the roar of the rain, the
loneliness and mystery of our position; the silence from human movement
and speech; the hours it all lasted; the surprise after every tremendous
explosion to find myself alive, and the fear that some of the men were
killed, made that night an awful memory.
During the whole storm no one spoke or moved hand or foot. I felt
paralysed, a sensation, as I afterwards found, common to all Europeans
who passed through the same experience. The boatmen, who were lying in
the water, never stirred. When the explosion gave place to magnificent
rolls, and the rain moderated, the men spent an hour in baling the boat.
All the matches were afloat and much else, and our food was mostly
spoiled. A thousand waterfalls tumbled down the hillsides, the stony or
sandy river banks were no more, of a few riverine villages the roofs
alone were to be seen, fields in numbers with their growing crops had
slid bodily down the slopes, leaving great patches of naked rock behind,
and the Yangtze, a broad, turbid, terra-cotta flood, was rioting over
the submerged confusions of its rocky bed in swirls and violent eddies.
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR’S _WU-PAN_.]
After hurrying through a less beautiful and much devastated region,
landing only at Shih-men, on the left bank, where there is a fine temple
with five green-tiled roofs, and much fishing is done, the scenery again
changed, and for four hundred miles is a succession of indescribably
beautiful pictures, combining hill and valley, rock and woodland, with a
greenery and fertility of which no word-painting could give any idea.
Towns and villages, piled on knolls, looked out from among fruit trees;
and temples and pagodas on heights lent their infinite picturesqueness.
One of the most beautifully situated towns is the unwalled town of
Peh-Shih, with a (reputed) population of 11,000. Timbered white houses
run steeply up diverging limestone cliffs; every outline is broken by
the configuration of the ground; the ornamental and economic trees are
superb; the density of their foliage was phenomenal. The centre of the
town, which has no room for expansion, is picturesquely crowded with
striking temples and guildhalls, much enriched with gold and colour. The
great industry of the town is “wine” making. Wine is exported on a large
scale in forty-gallon jars, which come down on bamboo rafts from
Lu-chien, where they are made, and these afterwards take the wine up the
Ya and other turbulent rivers. A fleet of these quaint constructions and
a great number of junks lay along the shore, and there was an air of
prosperous business about the town.
The roof of my boat had to be refitted with mats, some of which had been
blown off in the storm, and I took a long inland walk, and without
molestation! The cultivation was marvellous. I have no space to dwell
upon the infinite variety of the crops or on the trees of all climates
which were flourishing in juxtaposition,[53] or upon the striking fact
that there, 1600 miles up the river, the social and commercial
organisation, and the arrangements for what the Chinese regard as
comfort and convenience, were as complete as in Che-kiang. A little
later it might have occurred to me that this beautiful and prosperous
region is claimed as in the British “sphere of influence.” Carefulness
and thrift were shown by what was to me a novelty. All along the river
shore people were fishing from rocks with nets, for straws, twigs, and
bits of wood to use for their cooking fires.
[Illustration: METHOD OF CARRYING _CASH_ AND BABIES.]
I reached Chung-king, the westernmost of the treaty ports, and the
commercial metropolis of SZE CHUAN early the next morning (June 1st),
after coming slightly to grief in a rapid above it, and remained there
during three grey, steamy, misty days, in which the mercury was almost
steady at 87°. Between Chung-king and Sui Fu, if not higher, steam
navigation at that season appeared perfectly practicable. The junk and
raft traffic is very large. Coal and lime are found in abundance near
Chung-king, and at Pa-Ko-Shan, five miles below Sui Fu, and also twenty
miles above it. Specimens of this coal brought to England have been
pronounced to be suitable for steam purposes.[54]
[Illustration: FISHING VILLAGE, UPPER YANGTZE.]