Many an Englishman would give much for the Chinese coolie's thirst—so very, very much.

I wonder whether you, reader, were ever thirsty? Probably not. You get a thirst which is not insatiable. Yours is born of nothing extraordinary; yours can be satisfied by a gulp or two of water, or perhaps by a drink—or perhaps two, or perhaps three—of something stronger. The Chinese coolie's thirst arises from the grilling sun, from a dancing glare, from hard hauling, struggling with 120 pounds slung over his shoulders, dangling at the end of a bamboo pole. I have had this thirst of the Chinese coolie—I know it well. It is born of sheer heat and sheer perspiration. Every drop of liquid has been wrung out of my body; I have seemed to have swum in my clothes, and inside my muscles have seemed to shrink to dry sponge and my bones to dry pith. My substance, my strength, my self has drained out of me. I have been conscious of perpetual evaporation and liquefaction. And I have felt that I must stop and wet myself again. I really must wet myself and swell to life again. And here we sit at the tea-shop. People come and stare at me, and wonder what it is. They, too, are thirsty, for they are all coolies and have the coolie thirst.

I wet myself. I pour in cup after cup, and my body, my self sucks it in, draws it in as if it were the water of life. Instantly it gushes out again at every pore. I swill in more, and out it rushes again, madly rushes out as quickly as it can. I swill in more and more, and out it comes defiantly. I can keep none inside me. Useless—I cannot quench my thirst. At last the thirst thinks its conquest assured, taking the hot tea for a signal of surrender; but I pour in more, and gradually feel the tea settling within me. I am a degree less torrid, a shade more substantial.

And then here comes my boy.

"Master, you wantchee makee one drink brandy-and-soda. No can catchee soda this side—have got water. Can do?"

Ah! shall I? Shall I? No! I throw it away from me, fling a bottle of cheap brandy which he had bought for me at Chung-king away from me, and the boy looks forlorn.

Tea is the best of all drinks in China; for the traveler unquestionably the best. Good in the morning, good at midday, good in the evening, good at night, even after the day's toil has been forgotten. To-morrow I shall have more walking, more thirsting, more tea. China tea, thou art a godsend to the wayfarer in that great land!

I endeavored to get the details of the population of the province of Szech'wan, the variability of the reports providing an excellent illustration of the uncertainty impending over everything statistical in China—estimates ranged from thirty-five to eighty millions.

The surface of this province is made up of masses of rugged mountains, through which the Yangtze has cut its deep and narrow channel. The area is everywhere intersected by steep-sided valleys and ravines. The world-famed plain of Chen-tu, the capital, is the only plain of any size in the province, the system of irrigation employed on it being one of the wonders of the world. Every food crop flourishes in Szech'wan, an inexhaustible supply of products of the Chinese pharmacopoeia enrich the stores and destroy the stomachs of the well-to-do; and with the exception of cotton, all that grows in Eastern China grows better in this great Garden of the Empire. Its area is about that of France, its climate is even superior—a land delightfully accidentee. Among the minerals found are gold, silver, cinnabar, copper, iron, coal and petroleum; the chief products being opium, white wax, hemp, yellow silk. Szech'wan is a province rich in salt, obtained from artesian borings, some of which extend 2,500 feet below the surface, and from which for centuries the brine has been laboriously raised by antiquated windlass and water buffalo.

The best conditions of Chinese inns are far and away worse than anything the traveler would be called upon to encounter anywhere in the British Isles, even in the most isolated places in rural Ireland. There can be no comparison. And my reader will understand that there is much which the European misses in the way of general physical comfort and cleanliness. Sanitation is absent in toto. Ordinary decency forbids one putting into print what the uninitiated traveler most desires to know—if he would be saved a severe shock at the outset; but everyone has to go through it, because one cannot write what one sees. All travelers who have had to put up at the caravanseries in Central and Western China will bear me out in my assertion that all of them reek with filth and are overrun by vermin of every description. The traveler whom misfortune has led to travel off the main roads of Russia may probably hesitate in expressing an opinion as to which country carries off the palm for unmitigated filth; but, with this exception, travelers in the Eastern Archipelago, in Central Asia, in Africa among the wildest tribes, are pretty well unanimous that compared with all these for dirt, disease, discomfort, an utter lack of decency and annoyance, the Chinese inn holds its own. And in no part of China more than in Szech'wan and Yuen-nan is greater discomfort experienced.

The usual wooden bedstead stands in the corner of the room with the straw bedding (this, by the way, should on no account be removed if one wishes to sleep in peace), sometimes there is a table, sometimes a couple of chairs. If these are steady it is lucky, if unbroken it is the exception; there are never more. Over the bedstead (more often than not, by the way, it is composed of four planks of varying lengths and thickness, placed across two trestles) I used first to place my oilskin, then my p'u-k'ai, and that little creeper which rhymes with hug did not disturb me much. Rats ran round and over me in profusion, and, of course, the best room being invariably nearest to the pigsties, there were the usual stenches. The floor was Mother Earth, which in wet weather became mud, and quite a common thing it was for my joys to be enhanced during a heavy shower of rain by my having to sleep, almost suffocated, mackintosh over my head, owing to a slight break in the continuity of the roof—my umbrella being unavailable, as one of my men dropped it over a precipice two days out. For many reasons a camp-bed is to Europeans an indispensable part of even the most modest traveling equipment. I was many times sorry that I had none with me.

The inns of Szech'wan, however, are by many degrees better than those of Yuen-nan, which are sometimes indescribable. Earthen floors are saturated with damp filth and smelling decay; there are rarely the paper windows, but merely a sort of opening of woodwork, through which the offensive smells of decaying garbage and human filth waft in almost to choke one; tables collapse under the weight of one's dinner; walls are always in decay and hang inwards threateningly; wicked insects, which crawl and jump and bite, creep over the side of one's rice bowl—and much else. Who can describe it? It makes one ill to think of it.

Throughout my journeyings it was necessary for my toileting, in fact, everything, to be performed in absolute unalloyed publicity. Three days out my boy fixed up a cold bath for me, and barricaded a room which had a certain amount of privacy about it, owing to its secluded position; but even grown men and women, anxious to see what it was like when it had no clothes on, came forward, poked their fingers through the paper in the windows (of course, glass is hardly known in the interior), and greedily peeped in. This and the profound curiosity the people evince in one's every action and movement I found most trying.

It was my misfortune each day at this stage to come into a town or village where market was in progress. Catching a sight of the foreign visage, people opened their eyes widely, turned from me, faced me again with a little less of fear, and then came to me, not in dozens, but in hundreds, with open arms. They shouted and made signs, and walking excitedly by my side, they examined at will the texture of my clothes, and touched my boots with sticks to see whether the feet were encased or not. For the time I was their hero. When I walked into an inn business brightened immediately. Tea was at a premium, and only the richer class could afford nine cash instead of three to drink tea with the bewildered foreigner. The most inquisitive came behind me, rubbing their unshaven pates against the side of my head in enterprising endeavor to see through the sides of my spectacles. They would speak to me, yelling in their coarsest tones thinking my hearing was defective. I would motion then to go away, always politely, cleverly suppressing my sense of indignation at their conduct; and they would do so, only to make room for a worse crowd. The town's business stopped; people left their stalls and shops to glare aimlessly at or to ask inane and unintelligible questions about the barbarian who seemed to have dropped suddenly from the heavens. When I addressed a few words to them in strongest Anglo-Saxon, telling them in the name of all they held sacred to go away and leave me in peace, something like a cheer would go up, and my boy would swear them all down in his choicest. When I slowly rose to move the crowd looked disappointed, but allowed me to go forward on my journey in peace.

* * * * *

Thus the days passed, and things were never dull.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: This refers to the main roads There are many places in isolated and unsurveyed districts where it is extremely difficult and often impossible to get along at all—E.J.D.]

[Footnote F: This rate of four hundred cash per day per man was maintained right up to Tong-ch'uan-fu, although after Chao-t'ong the usual rate paid is a little higher, and the bad cash in that district made it difficult for my men to arrange four hundred "big" cash current in Szech'wan in the Yuen-nan equivalent. After Tong-ch'uan-fu, right on to Burma, the rate of coolie pay varies considerably. Three tsien two fen (thirty-two tael cents) was the highest I paid until I got to Tengyueh, where rupee money came into circulation, and where expense of living was considerably higher.—E.J.D.]



CHAPTER VI.

Szech-wan people a mercenary lot. Adaptability to trading. None but nature lovers should come to Western China. The life of the Nomad. The opening of China, and some impressions. China's position in the eyes of her own people. Industrialism, railways, and the attitude of the populace. Introduction of foreign machinery. Different opinions formed in different provinces. Climate, and what it is responsible for. Recent Governor of Szech-wan's tribute to Christianity. New China and the new student. Revolutionary element in Yuen-nan. Need of a new life, and how China is to get it. Luchow, and a little about it. Fusong from the military. Necessity of the sedan-chair. Cost of lodging. An impudent woman. Choice pidgin-English. Some of the annoyances of travel. Canadian and China Inland missionaries. Exchange of yarns. Exasperating Chinese life, and its effects on Europeans. Men refuse to walk to Sui-fu. Experiences in arranging up-river trip. Unmeaning etiquette of Chinese officials toward foreigners. Rude awakening in the morning. A trying early-morning ordeal. Reckonings do not tally. An eventful day. At the China Inland Mission. Impressions of Sui-fu. Fictitious partnerships.

The people of Szech'wan, compared with other Yangtze provinces, must be called a mercenary, if a go-ahead, one.

Balancing myself on a three-inch form in a tea-shop at a small town midway between Li-shih-ch'ang and Luchow, I am endeavoring to take in the scene around me. The people are so numerous in this province that they must struggle in order to live. Vain is it for the most energetic among them to escape from the shadow of necessity and hunger; all are similarly begirt, so they settle down to devote all their energies to trade. And trade they do, in very earnest.

Everything is labeled, from the earth to the inhabitants; these primitives, these blissfully "heathen" people, have become the most consummate of sharpers. I walk up to buy something of the value of only a few cash, and on all sides are nets and traps, like spider-webs, and the fly that these gentry would catch, as they see me stalk around inspecting their wares, is myself. They seem to lie in wait for one, and for an article for which a coolie would pay a few cash as many dollars are demanded of the foreigner. My boy stands by, however, magnificently proud of his lucrative and important post, yelling precautions to the curious populace to stand away. He hints, he does not declare outright, but by ungentle innuendo allows them to understand that, whatever their private characters may be, to him they are all liars and rogues and thieves. It is all so funny, that one's fatigue is minimized to the last degree by the humor one gets and the novel changes one meets everywhere.

Onward again, my men singing, perhaps quarreling, always swearing. Their language is low and coarse and vulgar, but happily ignorant am I.

The country, too, is fascinating in the extreme. A man must not come to China for pleasure unless he love his mistress Nature when she is most rudely clad. Some of her lovers are fascinated most in by-places, in the cool of forests, on the summit of lofty mountains, high up from the mundane, in the cleft of canons, everywhere that the careless lover is not admitted to her contemplation. It is for such that China holds out an inviting hand, but she offers little else to the Westerner—the student of Nature and of man can alone be happy in the interior. Forgetting time and the life of my own world, I sometimes come to inviolate stillnesses, where Nature opens her arms and bewitchingly promises embraces in soft, unending, undulating vastnesses, where even the watching of a bird building its nest or brooding over its young, or some little groundling at its gracious play, seems to hold one charmed beyond description. It is, some may say, a nomadic life. Yes, it is a nomadic life. But how beautiful to those of us, and there are many, who love less the man-made comforts of our own small life than the entrancing wonders of the God-made world in spots where nothing has changed. Gladly did I quit the dust and din of Western life, the artificialities of dress, and the unnumbered futile affectations of our own maybe not misnamed civilization, to go and breathe freely and peacefully in those far-off nooks of the silent mountain-tops where solitude was broken only by the lulling or the roaring of the winds of heaven. Thank God there are these uninvaded corners. The realm of silence is, after all, vaster than the realm of noise, and the fact brought a consolation, as one watched Nature effecting a sort of coquetry in masking her operations.

And as I look upon it all I wonder—wonder whether with the "Opening of China" this must all change?

The Chinese—I refer to the Chinese of interior provinces such as Szech-wan—are realizing that they hold an obscure position. I have heard educated Chinese remark that they look upon themselves as lost, like shipwrecked sailors, whom a night of tempest has cast on some lonely rock; and now they are having recourse to cries, volleys, all the signals imaginable, to let it be known that they are still there. They have been on this lonely isolated rock as far as history can trace. Now they are launching out towards progress, towards the making of things, towards the buying and selling of things—launching out in trade and in commerce, in politics, in literature, in science, in all that has spelt advance in the West. The modern spirit is spreading speedily into the domains of life everywhere—in places swiftly, in places slowly, but spreading inevitably, si sit prudentia.

Nothing will tend, in this particular part of the country, to turn it upside down and inside out more than the cult of industrialism. In a number of centers in Eastern China, such as Han-yang and Shanghai, foreign mills, iron works, and so on, furnish new employments, but in the interior the machine of the West to the uneducated Celestial seems to be the foe of his own tools; and when railways and steam craft appear—steam has appeared, of course, on the Upper Yangtze, although it has not yet taken much of the junk trade, and Szech'wan has her railways now under construction (the sod was cut at Ichang in 1909)[G]—and a single train and steamer does the work of hundreds of thousands of carters, coolies, and boatmen, it is wholly natural that their imperfect and short-sighted views should lead them to rise against a seeming new peril.

Whilst in the end the Empire will profit greatly by the inventions of the Occident, the period of transition in Szech'wan, especially if machines are introduced too rapidly and unwisely, is one that will disturb the peace. It will be interesting to watch the attitude of the people towards the railway, for Szech'wan is essentially the province of the farmer. Szech'wan was one of the provinces where concessions were demanded, and railways had been planned by European syndicates, and where the gentry and students held mass meetings, feverishly declaring that none shall build Chinese lines but the people themselves. I have no space in a work of this nature to go fully into the question of industrialism, railways, and other matters immediately vital to the interests of China, but if the peace of China is to be maintained, it is incumbent upon every foreigner to "go slowly." Machines of foreign make have before now been scrapped, railways have been pulled up and thrown into the sea, telegraph lines have been torn down and sold, and on every hand among this wonderful people there has always been apparent a distinct hatred to things and ideas foreign. But industrially particularly the benefits of the West are being recognized in Eastern China, and gradually, if foreigners who have to do the pioneering are tactful, trust in the foreign-manufactured machine will spread to Western China, and enlarged industrialism will bring all-round advantages to Western trade.

Thus far there has been little shifting of the population from hamlets and villages to centers of new industries—even in the more forward areas quoted—but when this process begins new elements will enter into the Chinese industrial problem.

As we hear of the New China, so is there a "new people," a people emboldened by the examples of officials in certain areas to show a friendliness towards progress and innovation. They were not friendly a decade ago. It may, perhaps, be said that this "new people" were born after the Boxer troubles, and in Szech'wan they have a large influence.

Cotton mills, silk filatures, flour and rice mills employing western machinery, modern mining plants and other evidences of how China is coming out of her shell, cause one to rejoice in improved conditions. The animosity occasioned by these inventions that are being so gradually and so surely introduced into every nook and cranny of East and North China is very marked; but on close inspection, and after one has made a study of the subject, one is inclined to feel that it is more or less theoretical. So it is to be hoped it will be in Szech'wan and Far Western China.

Readers may wonder at the differences of opinions expressed in the course of these pages—a hundred pages on one may get a totally different impression. But the absolute differences of conditions existing are quite as remarkable. From Chung-king to Sui-fu one breathed an air of progress—after one had made allowance for the antagonistic circumstances under which China lives—a manifest desire on every hand for things foreign, and a most lively and intelligent interest in what the foreigner could bring. In many parts of Yuen-nan, again, conditions were completely reversed; and one finding himself in Yuen-nan, after having lived for some time at a port in the east of the Empire, would assuredly find himself surrounded by everything antagonistic to that to which he has become accustomed, and the people would seem of a different race. This may be due to the differences of climate—climate, indeed, is ultimately the first and the last word in the East; it is the arbiter, the builder, the disintegrator of everything. A leading writer on Eastern affairs says that the "climate is the explanation of all this history of Asia, and the peoples of the East can only be understood and accounted for by the measuring of the heat of the sun's rays. In China, with climate and weather charts in your hands, you may travel from the Red River on the Yuen-nan frontier to the great Sungari in lusty Manchuria, and be able to understand and account for everything."

However that may be, traveling in China, through a wonderful province like Szech'wan, whose chief entrepot is fifteen hundred miles from the coast, convinces one that she has come to the parting of the ways. You can, in any city or village in Szech'wan—or in Yuen-nan, for that matter, in a lesser degree—always find the new nationalism in the form of the "New China" student. Despite the opposition he gets from the old school, and although the old order of things, by being so strong as almost to overwhelm him, allows him to make less progress than he would, this new student, the hope of the Empire, is there. I do not wish to enter into a controversy on this subject, but I should like to quote the following from a speech delivered by Tseh Ch'un Hsuean, when he was leaving his post as Governor of Szech'wan:—

"The officials of China are gradually acquiring a knowledge of the great principles of the religions of Europe and America. And the churches are also laboring night and day to readjust their methods, and to make known their aims in their propagation of religion. Consequently, Chinese and foreigners are coming more and more into cordial relations. This fills me with joy and hopefulness.... My hope is that the teachers of both countries [Great Britain and America] will spread the Gospel more wisely than ever, that hatred may be banished, and disputes dispelled, and that the influence of the Gospel may create boundless happiness for my people of China. And I shall not be the only one to thank you for coming to the front in this good work.... May the Gospel prosper!"

There are various grades of people in China, among which the scholar has always come first, because mind is superior to wealth, and it is the intellect that distinguishes man above the lower order of beings, and enables him to provide food and raiment and shelter for himself and for others. At the time when Europe was thrilled and cut to the quick with news of the massacres of her compatriots in the Boxer revolts, the scholar was a dull, stupid fellow—day in day out, week in week out, month in month out, and year after year he ground at his classics. His classics were the Alpha and Omega; he worshipped them. This era has now passed away.

At the present moment there are upwards of twenty thousand Chinese students in Tokyo[H]—whither they went because Japan is the most convenient country wherein to acquire Western knowledge. The new learning, the new learning—they must have the new learning! No high office is ever again likely to be given but to him who has more of Western knowledge than Chinese knowledge. And mere striplings, nursed in the lap of the mission schools, and there given a good grounding in Western education, these are the men far more likely to pass the new examinations. In Yuen-nan, where little chance exists for the scholars to advance, the new learning has brought with it a revolutionary element, which would soon become dangerous were it by any means common. I have seen an English-speaking fellow, anxious to get on and under the impression that the laws of his country were responsible for keeping him back, write in the back of his exercise book a phrase against the imperial ruler that would have cost him his head had it come to the notice of the high authorities.

One will learn much if he travels across the Empire—facts and figures quite irreconcilable will arise, but even the man of dullest perception will be convinced that much of the reforming spirit in the people is only skin-deep, going no farther than the externals of life. It is at present, perhaps, merely a mad fermentation in the western provinces, wherefrom the fiercer it is the clearer the product will one day evolve itself. Such transitions are full of bewilderment to the European—bewildering to any writer who endeavors to tackle the Empire as a whole. Each province or couple of provinces should be dealt with separately, so diverse are the conditions.

But if China, from the highest to the lowest, will only embrace truth and love her for her own sake, so that she will not abate one jot of allegiance to her; if China will let truth run down through the arteries of everyday commercial, social, and political life as do the waterways through her marvelous country; if China will kill her retardative conservatism, and in its place erect honesty and conscience; if China will let her moral life be quickened—then her transition period, from end to end of the Empire, will soon end. Mineral, agricultural, industrial wealth are hers to a degree which is not true of any other land. Her people have an enduring and expansive power that has stood the test of more than four thousand years of honorable history, and their activity and efficiency outside China make them more to be dreaded, as competitors, than any race or any dozen races of to-day.

But New China must have this new life.

Commerce, science, diplomacy, culture, civilization she will have in ever-increasing measure just in so much as she draws nearer to western peoples. But the new life can come from whence? From within or from without?

Luchow, into which I was led just before noon on the fourth day out of Chung-king, is the most populous and richest city on the Upper Yangtze.

Exceedingly clean for a Chinese city, possessing well-kept streets lined with well-stocked emporiums, bearing every evidence of commercial prosperity, it however lacks one thing. It has no hotel runners! I arrived at midday, crossing the river in a leaky ferry boat, under a blazing sun, my intention being to stop in the town at a tea-house to take a refresher, and then complete a long day's march, farther than the ordinary stage. But owing to some misunderstanding between the fu-song, sent to shadow the foreigner on part of his journey, and my boy, I was led through the busy city out into the open country before I had had a drink. And when I remonstrated they led me back again to the best inn, where I was told I should have to spend the night—there being nothing else, then, to be said.

May I give a word of advice here to any reader contemplating a visit to China under similar conditions? It is the custom of the mandarins to send what is called a fu-song (escort) for you; the escort comes from the military, although their peculiar appearance may lead you to doubt it. I have two of these soldier people with me to-day, and two bigger ragamuffins it has not been my lot to cast eyes on. They are the only two men in the crowd I am afraid of. They are of absolutely no use, more than to eat and to drink, and always come up smiling at the end of their stage for their kumshaw. During the whole of this day I have not seen one of them—they have been behind the caravan all the time; it would be hard to believe that they had sense enough to find the way, and as for escorting me, they have not accompanied me a single li of the way.[I]

Another nuisance, of which I have already spoken, is the necessity of taking a chair to maintain respectability. These things make travel in China not so cheap as one would be led to imagine. Traveling of itself is cheap enough, as cheap as in any country in the world. For accommodation for myself, for a room, rice and as much hot water as I want, the charge is a couple of hundred cash—certainly not expensive. In addition, there is generally a little "cha tsien" (tea money) for the cook. But it is the "face" which makes away with money, much more than it takes to keep you in the luxury that the country can offer—which is not much!

After I had had a bit of a discussion with my boy as to the room they wanted to house me in, a woman, brandishing a huge cabbage stump above her head, and looking menacingly at me, yelled that the room was good enough.

"What does she say, T'ong?"

"Oh, she b'long all same fool. She wantchee makee talkee talk. She have got velly long tongue, makee bad woman. She say one piecee Japan man makee stay here t'ree night. See? She say what makee good one piecee Japan man makee good one piecee English man. See? No have got topside, all same bottomside have got. Master, this no b'long my pidgin—this b'long woman pidgin, and woman b'long all same fool." T'ong ended up with an amusing allusion to the lady's mother, and looked cross because I rebuked him.

Gathering, then, that the lady thought her room good enough for me, I saw no other course open, and as the crowd was gathering, I got inside. Before setting out to call upon the Canadian missionaries stationed at the place, I held a long conversation with a hump-backed old man, an unsightly mass of disease, who seemed to be a traditional link of Luchow. I might say that this scholastic old wag spoke nothing but Chinese, and I, as the reader knows, spoke no Chinese, so that the amount of general knowledge derived one from the other was therefore limited. But he would not go, despite the frequent deprecations of T'ong and my coolies, and my vehement rhetoric in explanation that his presence was distasteful to me, and at the end of the episode I found it imperative for my own safety, and perhaps his, to clear out.

* * * * *

The Canadians I found in their Chinese-built premises, comfortable albeit. Five of them were resident at the time, and they were quite pleased with the work they had done during the last year or so—most of them were new to China. At the China Inland Mission later I found two young Scotsmen getting some exercise by throwing a cricket ball at a stone wall, in a compound about twenty feet square. They were glad to see me, one of them kindly gave me a hair-cut, and at their invitation I stayed the night with them.

What is it in the nature of the Chinese which makes them appear to be so totally oblivious to the best they see in their own country?

It is surely not because they are not as sensitive as other races to the magic of beauty in either nature or art. But I found traveling and living with such apparently unsympathetic creatures exasperating to a degree, and I did not wonder that the European whose lot had been cast in the interior, sometimes, on emerging into Western civilization, appears eccentric to his own countrymen. But this in passing.

I duly arrived at Lan-chi-hsien, and was told that Sui-fu, 120 li away, would be reached the next day, although I had my doubts. A deputation from the local "gwan" waited upon me to learn my wishes and to receive my commands. I was assured that no European ever walked to Sui-fu from Lan-chi-hsien, and that if I attempted to do such a thing I should have to go alone, and that I should never reach there. I remonstrated, but my boy was firm. He took me to him and fathered me. He almost cried over me, to think that I, that I, his master, of all people in the world, should doubt his allegiance to me. "I no 'fraid," he declared. "P'laps master no savee. Sui-fu b'long velly big place, have got plenty European. You wantchee makee go fast, catchee plenty good 'chow.' I think you catchee one piecee boat, makee go up the river. P'laps I think you have got velly tired—no wantchee makee more walkee—that no b'long ploper. That b'long all same fool pidgin."

And at last I melted. There was nothing else to do.

That no one ever walked to Sui-fu from this place the district potentate assured me in a private chit, which I could not read, when he laid his gunboat at my disposal.

This, he said, would take me up very quickly. In his second note, wherein he apologized that indisposition kept him from calling personally upon me—this, of course, was a lie—he said he would feel it an honor if I would be pleased to accept the use of his contemptible boat. But T'ong whispered that the law uses these terms in China, and that nobody would be more disappointed than the Chinese magistrate if I did take advantage of his unmeaning offer. So I took a wu-pan, and the following night, when pulling into the shadows of the Sui-fu pagoda, cold and hungry, I cursed my luck that I had not broken down the useless etiquette which these Chinese officials extend towards foreigners, and taken the fellow's gunboat.

The wu-pan, they swore to me, would be ready to leave at 3:30 a.m. the day following. My boy did not venture to sleep at all. He stayed up outside my bedroom door—I say bedroom, but actually it was an apartment which in Europe I would not put a horse into, and the door was merely a wide, worm-eaten board placed on end. In the middle of the night I heard a noise—yea, a rattle. The said board fell down, inwards, almost upon me. A light was flashed swiftly into my eyes, and desultory remarks which suddenly escaped me were rudely interrupted by shrill screams. My boy was singing.

"Master," he cried, pulling hard-heartedly at my left big toe to wake me, "come on, come on; you wantchee makee get up. Have got two o'clock. Get up; p'laps me no wakee you, no makee sleep—no b'long ploper. One man makee go bottomside—have catchee boat. This morning no have got tea—no can catch hot water makee boil."

And soon we were ready to start. Punctually to the appointed hour we were at the bottom of the steep, dark incline leading down to the river bank.

But my reckonings were bad.

The laoban and the other two youthful members of the half-witted crew had not yet taken their "chow," and this, added to many little discrepancies in their reckoning and in mine, kept me in a boiling rage until half-past six, when at last they pushed off, and nearly capsized the boat at the outset. The details of that early morning, and the happenings throughout the long, sad day, I think I can never forget—from the breaking of tow-lines to frequent stranding on the rocks and sticking on sandbanks, the orders wrongly given, the narrow escape of fire on board, the bland thick-headedness of the ass of a captain, the collisions, and all the most profound examples of savage ignorance displayed when one has foolish Chinese to deal with. We reached half-way at 4:30 p.m., with sixty li to do against a wind. Hour after hour they toiled, making little headway with their misdirected labor, wasting their energies in doing the right things at the wrong time, and wrong things always, and long after sundown Sui-fu's pagoda loomed in the distance. At 11:00 p.m., stiff and hungry, and mad with rage, I was groping my way on all fours up the slippery steps through unspeakable slime and filth at the quayhead, only to be led to a disgusting inn as dirty as anything I had yet encountered. It was hard lines, for I could get no food.

An invitation, however, was given me by the Rev. R. McIntyre, who with his charming wife conducts the China Inland Mission in this city, to come and stay with them. The next morning, after a sleepless night of twisting and turning on a bug-infested bed, I was glad to take advantage of the missionary's kindness. I could not have been given a kindlier welcome.

Sui-fu has a population of roughly 150,000, and the overcrowding question is not the least important. It is situated to advantage on the right bank of the Yangtze, and does an immense trade in medicines, opium, silk, furs, silverwork, and white wax, which are the chief exports. Gunboats regularly come to Sui-fu during the heavy rains.

Just outside the city, a large area is taken up with grave mounds—common with nearly every Chinese city. Mr. McIntyre and Mr. Herbert, who was passing through Sui-fu en route for Ta-chien-lu, where he is now working, showed me around the city one afternoon, and one could see everything typical of the social life of two thousand years ago. The same narrow lanes succeed each other, and the conviction is gradually impressed upon the mind that such is the general trend of the character of the city and its people. There were the same busy mechanics, barbers, traders, wayside cooks, traveling fortune-tellers, and lusty coolies; the wag doctor, the bane of the gullible, was there to drive his iniquitous living; now and then the scene's monotony was disturbed by the presence of the chair and the retinue of a city mandarin. Yet with all the hurry and din, the hurrying and the scurrying in doing and driving for making money, seldom was there an accident or interruption of good nature. There was the same romance in the streets that one reads of at school—so much alike and yet so different from what one meets in the Chinese places at the coast or in Hong-Kong or Singapore. In Sui-fu, more than in any other town in Western China which I visited, had the native artist seemed to have lavished his ingenuity on the street signboards. Their caligraphy gave the most humorous intimation of the superiority of the wares on sale; many of them contained some fictitious emblem, adopted as the name of the shop, similar to the practice adopted in London two centuries ago, and so common now in the Straits Settlements, where bankrupts are allowed considerable more freedom than would be possible if fictitious registration were not allowed. I refer to the Registration of Partnerships.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote G: I inspected the railway at Ichang in December, 1910, and found that a remarkable scheme was making very creditable progress. Around the main station centre there was an air of bustle and excitement, some 20,000 coolies were in employment there, all the buildings and equipment bore evidences of thoroughness, and the scheme seemed to be going on well. But in January of this year (1911) a meeting was held at Chen-tu, the proposed destination of the line, and the gentry then decided that as nothing was being done at that end the company should be requested to stop work at Ichang, and start laying the line from Chen-tu, at the other end. "All the money will be spent," they cried, "and we shall get nothing up this end!" If the money ran out and left the central portion of the line incomplete, it did not matter so long as each city had something for its money!—E.J.D.]

[Footnote H: This is not true to-day. There has been a great falling off in numbers.—E.J.D., February, 1911.]

[Footnote I: This should not be taken to apply to the fu-song everywhere. I have found them to be the most useful on other occasions, but the above was written at Luchow as my experience of that particular day.—E.J.D.]



FOURTH JOURNEY.

SUI-FU TO CHAO-T'ONG-FU (VIA LAO-WA-T'AN).



CHAPTER VII.

Chinese and simplicity of speech. Author and his caravan stopped. Advice to travelers. Farewell to Sui-fu. The postal service and tribute to I.P.O. Rushing the stages. Details of journey. Description of road to Chao-t'ong-fu. Coolie's pay. My boy steals vegetables. Remarks on roads and railways. The real Opening of China. How the foreigner will win the confidence of the Chinese. Distances and their variability. Calculations uprooted. Author in a dilemma. The scenery. Hard going. A wayside toilet, and some embarrassment. Filth inseparable from Chinese humanity. About Chinese inns. Typewriter causes some fun. Soldiers guard my doorway. Man's own "inner room." One hundred and forty li in a day. Grandeur and solitude. Wisdom of traveling alone. Coolie nearly cuts his toe off. Street scene at Puerh-tu. The "dying" coolie. A manacled prisoner. Entertained by mandarins. How plans do not work out.

He who would make most abundant excuses for the Chinese could not say that he is simple in his speech.

That speech is the chief revelation of the mind, the first visible form that it takes, is undoubtedly true: as the thought, so the speech. All social relations with us have their roots in mutual trust, and this trust is maintained by each man's sincerity of thought and speech. Apparently not so in China. There is so much craft, so much diplomacy, so much subtle legerdemain that, if he chooses, the Chinese may give you no end of trouble to inform yourself on the simplest subject. The Chinese, like so many cavillers and calumniators, all glib of tongue, who know better than any nation on earth how to turn voice and pen to account, have taken the utmost advantage of extended means of circulating thought, with the result that an Englishman such as myself, even were I a deep scholar of their language, would have the greatest difficulty in getting at the truth about their own affairs.

As I was going out of Sui-fu my caravan and myself were delayed by some fellow, who held the attention of my men for a full quarter of an hour. I listened, understanding nothing. After another five minutes, by which time the conversation had assumed what I considered dangerous proportions, having the safety of my boy at heart, I asked—

"T'ong, what is it?"

"Half a sec.," he replied (having learnt this phrase from the gunboat men down the river). He did not, however, take his eyes from the man with whom he was holding the conversation. He then dived into my food-basket, wrenched off the top of a tin, and pulled therefrom two beautifully-marked live pigeons, which flapped their wings helplessly to get away, and resumed the conversation. Talk waxed furious, the birds were placed by the side of the road, and T'ong, now white with seeming rage, threatened to hit the man. It turned out that the plaintiff was the seller of the birds, and that T'ong had got them too cheap.

"That man no savee. He thinkee you, master, have got plenty money. He b'long all same rogue. I no b'long fool. I know, I know."

As the cover of the food-basket was closed down I noticed a cooked fowl, two live pheasants with their legs tied together, a pair of my own muddy boots, a pair of dancing pumps, and a dirty collar, all in addition to my little luxuries and the two pigeons aforesaid. Reader, if thou would'st travel in China, peep not into thy hoh shih lan tsi if thou would'st feed well.

T'ong, laughing derisively, waved fond and fantastic salutations to the disappointed vendor of pigeons, and moved backwards on tiptoe till he could see him no more; then we went noiselessly down a steep incline out into an open space of distracted and dishevelled beauty on our way to Chao-t'ong-fu.

From Chung-king I had stuck to the regular stages. I had done no hustling, but I decided to rush it to Chao-t'ong if I could, as the reports I heard about being overtaken by the rains in Yuen-nan were rather disquieting. I had taken to Sui-fu three times as long as the regular mail time, the service of which is excellent. Chung-king has no less than six local deliveries daily, thus eliminating delays after the delivery of the mails, and a daily service to the coast has also been established. A fast overland service to Wan Hsien now exists, by which the coast mails are transmitted between that port and Chung-king in the hitherto unheard-of time of two days—a traveler considers himself fortunate if he covers the same distance in eight days. There are fast daily services to Luchow (380 li distant) in one day, Sui-fu (655 li) in two days, Hochow (180 li) in one night, and Chen-tu (1,020 li) in three days. It is creditable to the Chinese Imperial Post Office that a letter posted at Sui-fu will be delivered in Great Britain in a month's time.

It was a dull, chilly morning that I left Sui-fu, leading my little procession through the city on my way to Anpien, which was to be reached before sundown. My coolies—probably owing to having derived more pecuniary advantage than they expected during the journey from Chung-king—decided to re-engage, and promised to complete the fourteen-day tramp to Chao-t'ong-fu, two hundred and ninety miles distant, if weather permitted, in eleven days. We were to travel by the following stages:—

Length of Height above stage sea

1st day—Anpien 90 li —— 2nd day—Huan-chiang 55 li —— 3rd day—Fan-ih-ts'uen 70 li —— 4th day—T'an-t'eo 70 li —— 5th day—Lao-wa-t'an 140 li 1,140 ft. 6th day—Teo-sha-kwan 60 li 4,000 ft. 7th day—Ch'i-li-p'u 60 li 1,900 ft. 8th day—Ta-wan-tsi 70 li —— 9th day—Ta-kwan-ting 70 li 3,700 ft. 10th day—Wuchai 60 li 7,000 ft. 11th day—Chao-t'ong-fu 100 li 6,400 ft.

I knew that I was in for a very hard journey. The nature of the country as far as T'an-t'eo, ten li this side of which the Szech'wan border is reached, is not exhausting, although the traveler is offered some rough and wild climbing. The next day's stage, to Lao-wa-t'an, is miserably bad. At certain places it is cut out of the rock, at others it runs in the bed of the river, which is dotted everywhere with roaring rapids (as we are ascending very quickly), and when the water is high these roads are submerged and often impassable. In some places it was a six-inch path along the mountain slope, with a gradient of from sixty to seventy degrees, and landslips and rains are ever changing the path.

Lao-wa-t'an is the most important point on the route. One of the largest Customs stations in the province of Yuen-nan is here situated at the east end of a one-span suspension bridge, about one hundred and fifty feet in length. No ponies carrying loads are allowed to cross the bridge, the roads east of this being unfit for beasts of burden. There is then a fearful climb to a place called Teo-sha-kwan, a stage of only sixty li. The reader should not mentally reduce this to English miles, for the march was more like fifty miles than thirty, if we consider the physical exertion required to scale the treacherous roads. Over a broad, zigzagging, roughly-paved road, said to have no less than ninety-eight curves from bottom to top, we ascend for thirty li, and then descend for the remainder of the journey through a narrow defile along the northern bank of the river, the opposite side being a vertical sheet of rock rising to at least a thousand feet sheer up, very similar to the gorges of the Mekong at the western end of the province, which I crossed in due course.

To Ch'i-li-p'u, high up on the mountain banks, the first twenty-five li is by the river. At the half-way place a fearful ascent is experienced, the most notable precipice on the route between Sui-fu and Yuen-nan-fu, up a broad zigzag path, and as I sat at dinner I could see neither top nor bottom owing to the overhanging masses of rock: this is after having negotiated an ascent quite as steep, but smaller. To Ta-kwan-hsien a few natural obstacles occur, although the road is always high up on the hill-sides. I crossed a miserable suspension bridge of two spans. The southern span is about thirty feet, the northern span eighty feet; the center is supported by a buttress of splendid blocks of squared stone, resting on the rock in the bed of the river, one side being considerably worn away by the action of the water. The longer span was hung very slack, the woodwork forming the pathway was not too safe, and the general shaky appearance was particularly uninviting.

From Ta-kwan-hsien to Wuchai is steady pulling. Once in an opening in the hill we passed along and then ascended an exceedingly steep spur on one side of a narrow and very deep natural amphitheatre, formed by surrounding mountains. We then came to a lagoon, and eventually the brow of the hill was reached. Thus the Wuchai Valley is arrived at, where, owing to a collection of water, the road is often impassable to man and beast. Often during the rainy season there is a lagoon of mud or water formed by the drainage from the mountains, which finds no escape but by percolating through the earth and rock to a valley on the east of, and below, the mountains forming the eastern boundary of the Wuchai Valley. To Chao-t'ong is fairly level going.

Considering the road, it was not unnatural that my men gibbed a little at the eleven-day accomplishment. I had a long parley with them, however, and agreed to reward them to the extent of one thousand cash among the three if they did it. Their pay for the journey, over admittedly some of the worst roads in the Empire, was to be four hundred cash per man as before, with three hundred and thirty-three cash extra if the rain did not prevent them from getting in in eleven days. They were in good spirits, and so was I, as we walked along the river-bank, where the poppy was to be seen in full flower, and the unending beds of rape alternated with peas and beans and tobacco. T'ong would persist in stealing the peas and beans to feed me on, and for the life of me I could not get him to see that he should not do this sort of thing. But how continually one was impressed with the great need of roads in Western China! It is natural that, walking the whole distance, I should notice this more than other travelers have done, and, to my mind, roads in this part of the country rank in importance before the railways.

To the foreign mind it is more to the interests of China that railways should be well and serviceably built than that the money should be squandered to no purpose. If the railway has rails, then in China it can be called a railway, and China is satisfied. So with the roads. If there is any passage at all, then the Chinese call it a road, and China is satisfied.

As one meanders through the country, watching a people who are equalled nowhere in the world for their industry, plodding away over the worst roads any civilized country possesses, he cannot but think, even looking at the question from the Chinese standpoint so far as he is able, that, were free scope once given for the infusion of Western energy and methods into an active, trade-loving people like the Chinese, China would rival the United States in wealth and natural resources. The Chinese knows that his country, the natural resources of the country and the people, will allow him to do things on a scale which will by and by completely overbalance the doings of countries less favored by Nature than his own. He knows that when properly developed his country will be one of the richest in the world, yet even when he is filled with such ideas he is just as cunctative as he has ever been. He has the idea that he should not commence to exhaust the wealth of his country before it is absolutely necessary.

Above all, he has now made up his mind that he himself, unaided by the foreigner, is going to develop it just as he likes and just when he likes.

The day of the foreign concession is gone. The Chinese now is paddling his own canoe, and it is only by cultivating his friendship, by proving to him by acts, and not by words, that the intrusion of privileged enterprises—such as great mining concessions and railway concessions, in which the foreigner demands that he be the only principal—is no longer contemplated, that the day will be won. But it is equally true that only by combining European and Chinese interests on the modern company system, the real Opening of China can be effected.

* * * * *

Distances are as variable as the wind in the Middle Kingdom.

The first forty li on this journey were much shorter than the last thirty, which took about twice as long to cover. I dragged along over the narrow path through the wheat fields, and, making for an old man, who looked as if he should know, I asked him the distance to my destination. His reply of twenty li I accepted as accurate, and I reckoned that I could cover this easily in a couple of hours. But at the end of this time we had, according to a casual wayfarer, five more li, and when we had covered at least four another rustic said it was "two and a bit." This answer we got from four different people on the way, and I was glad when I had completed the journey. One does not mind the two li so much—it is the "bit" which upsets one's calculations.

The following day, on the road to Huan-chiang, I lost myself—that is, I lost my men, and did not know the road. I got away into some quaint, secluded garden and sat down, tired and hot, under a tree in the shade, where a faint wind swung the heavy foliage with a solemn sound, and the subdued and soothing music of a brook running between two banks of moss and turf must have sent me to sleep. It was with a dreary sense of ominous foreboding that I woke, as if in expectation of some disaster. Not a living creature was visible, and I doubted the possibility of finding anyone in such a spot. Never, surely, was there a silence anywhere as here! Seized with a solemn fear, my presence there seemed to me a strange intrusion. I looked around, moved forward a little, hastened my steps to get away, but whence or how I knew not. I knew this was a country of erratic distances—it was now getting on for sunset—and the continuous toiling up and down the sides of the difficult mountains had tired me. All of a sudden I heard a noise, heard someone fall, looked round and beheld T'ong, perspiration pouring down his back and front.

"Oh, master, this b'long velly much bobbery. I makee velly frightened. I think p'laps master wantchee makee run away." And then, after a time: "You no wantchee catch 'chow'?"

"Chow?"

No, I could easily have gone without food for that night. I was lost, and now was found. I had no money, could not speak the language, was fatigued beyond words. What would have become of me?

Miniature turret-like hills hemmed us in as in a huge park, with a narrow winding pathway, steep as the side of a house, leading to the top of the mountain beyond, and then descending quite as rapidly to Fan-ih-ts'uen. The coolies told me the next day the road would be worse, and so it turned out to be.

At 5:00 a.m. a thick drizzly rain was falling, just sufficient to make the flagstones slippery as ice, and the European contrivances which covered my feet stood no chance at all compared with the straw sandals of the native. I could not get any big enough around here to put over my boots. My carriers had gone ahead, and as I was passing a paddy field one leg went from under me, and I was up to my middle in thin wet mud. In this I had to trudge seven miles before I could get other garments from the coolie, changing my trousers behind a piece of matting held up in front of me by my boy! All enjoyed the fun—except myself. Little boys tried to peer around the side of the matting, and, as T'ong tried to kick them away, the matting would drop and expose me to public view. But I had to change, and that was most important to me.

Later on, my ugly coolie—the ugliest man in or out of China, I should think, ugly beyond description—dropped my bedding as he was crossing the river, and I had the pleasure of sleeping on a wet bed at T'an-teo.

I must ask the reader's pardon for again referring to Chinese inns. I should not have made any remark upon this awful hovel had not the man laid a scheme to charge me three times as much as he should—a scheme, be it said, in which my boy took no part. It was truly a fearful den, where man and beast lived in promiscuous and insupportable filth. The dung-heap charms the sight of this agricultural people, without in the slightest wounding their olfactory nerves, and these utilitarians think there is no use seeking privacy to do what they regard as beneficial and productive work. The bed here was the worst I had had offered me. The mattress, upon which every previous traveler for many years had left his tribute of vermin, was not fit for use, there were myriads of filthy insects, and I found myself obliged to stop and have some clothes boiled, and for comfort's sake rubbed my body with Chinese wine. Filth there was everywhere. It seemed inseparable from the people, and a total apathy as regards matter in the wrong place pervaded all classes, from the highest to the lowest. The spring is opening, and my hard-worked coolies doff their heavy padded winter clothing, parade their naked skin, and are quite unconscious of any disgrace attending the exhibition of the itch sores which disfigure them.

I remember, however, that I am in China, and must not be disgusted.

And should any reader be disgusted at the disjointed character of this particular portion of my common chronicle, I would only say in apology that I am writing under the gaze of a mystified crowd, each of whom has a word to say about my typewriter—the first, undoubtedly, that he has ever seen. This machine has caused the greatest surprise all along the route, and it is on occasions when the Chinese sees for the first time things of this intimate mechanical nature that he gives one the impression that he is a little boy. The people crowd into my room; they cannot be kept out, although at the present moment I have stationed my two soldiers in the doorway where I am writing, so as to get a little light, to keep them from crowding actually upon me.

It has been said that all of us have an innermost room, wherein we conceal our own secret affairs. In China everything is so open, and so much must be done in public, that it would surprise one to know that the Chinese have an inner room. The European traveler in this region must have no inner room, either, for the people seem to see down deep into one's very soul. But it is when one wanders on alone, as I have done to-day, doing two days in one, no less than one hundred and forty li of terrible road through the most isolated country, that one can enjoy the comfort of one's own loneliness and own inner room. The scenery was picturesque, much like Scotland, but the solitude was the best of all. I had left office and books and manuscripts, and was on a lonely walk, enjoying a solitude from which I could not escape, a reverie which was passed not nearly so much in thinking as in feeling, a feeling to nature-lovers which can never be completely expressed in words. It was indeed a refuge from the storms of life, and a veritable chamber of peace. And this, to my mind, is the way to spend a holiday. Robert Louis Stevenson tells us in one of his early books what a complete world two congenial friends make for themselves in the midst of a foreign population; all the hum and the stir goes on, and these two strangers exchange glances, and are filled with an infinite content Some of us would rather be alone, perhaps; for on a trip such as I am making now, in order to be happy with a companion you must have one who is thoroughly congenial and sympathetic, one who understands your unspoken thought, who is willing to let you have your way on the concession of the same privilege. Selfishness in the slightest degree should not enter in. But such a man is difficult to find, so I wander on alone, happy in my own solitude. Here I have liberty, perfect liberty.

I was stopped on my way to Lao-wa-t'an at a small town called Puerh-tu, the first place of importance after having come into Yuen-nan. A few li before reaching this town, one of my men cut the large toe of his left foot on a sharp rock, lacerating the flesh to the bone. I attended to him as best I could on the road, paid him four days' extra pay, and then had a bit of a row with him because he would not go back. He avowed that carrying for the foreigner was such a good thing that he feared leaving it! Upon entering Puerh-tu, however, he fell in the roadway. A crowd gathered, a loud cry went up from the multitude, and in the consternation and confusion which ensued the people divided themselves into various sections.

Some rushed to proffer assistance to the fallen man (this was done because I was about; he would have been left had a foreigner not been there), others gathered around me with outrageous adulation and seeming words of welcome. Meanwhile, I thought the coolie was dying, and, fearful and unnatural as it seems, it is nevertheless true that at all ages the Chinese find a peculiar and awful satisfaction in watching the agonies of the dying. By far the larger part of the mob was watching him dying, as they thought. But no, he was still worth many dead men! He slowly opened his eyes, smiled, rose up, and immediately recognized a poor manacled wretch, then passing under escort of several soldiers, who stopped a little farther down, followed by a mandarin in a chair.

On this particular day, more than a customary morbid diversion was thus apparent among the motley-garbed mass of men and women, and the ignominious way in which that prisoner was treated was horrible to look upon. The perpetual hum of voices sounded like the noise made by a thousand swarming bees. The band of soldiers guarding the prisoner suddenly halted, whilst the mandarin conferred with the chief, after which he advanced slowly towards me.

I was on the point of telling him in English that I had done nothing against the law, so far as I knew.

He bowed solemnly, during which time I, attempting the same, had much trouble from bursting out laughing in his face. He beckoned to me, and then rushed me bodily into a house, where, in the best room, I found another official and his two sons. T'ong followed as interpreter. The mandarin explained that I was wanted to stay the night, that a theatrical entertainment had been arranged particularly for my benefit, that he wished I would take their photographs, that one of them would like a cigarette tin with some cigarettes in it, and that one of them would like to sell me a thoroughbred, hard-working, magnificently-shaped, without-a-single-vice black pony, which they would part with for my benefit for the consideration of one hundred taels down (four times its value), which awaited my inspection without. I stood up and fronted them, and replied, through T'ong, that I could not stay the night, that I would be pleased to tolerate the howling of the theatre for one half of an hour, that it would have given me the greatest pleasure to take their photographs, but, alas! my films were not many. I handed them a cigarette tin, but quite forgot that they asked for cigarettes as well (I had none), and I explained that horse-riding was not one of my accomplishments, so that their quadruped would be of no use to me.

They looked glum, I smiled serenely. This is Chinesey.



CHAPTER VIII

Szech-wan and Yuen-nan. Coolies and their loads. Exports and imports. Hints to English exporters. Food at famine rates. A wretched inn at Wuchai. Author prevents murder. Sleeping in the rain. The foreign cigarette trade. Poverty of Chao-t'ong. Simplicity of life. Possible advantages of Chinese in struggle of yellow and white races. Foreign goods in Yuen-nan and Szech'wan. Thousands of beggars die. Supposed lime poisoning. Content of the people. Opium not grown. Prices of prepared drug in Tong-ch'uan-fu compared. Smuggling from Kwei-chow. Opium and tin of Yuen-nan. Remarkable bonfire at Yuen-nan-fu. Infanticide at Chao-t'ong. Selling of female children into slavery. Author's horse steps on human skull.

Were one uninformed, small observance would be necessary to detect the borderline of Szech'wan and Yuen-nan. The latter is supposed to be one of the most ill-nurtured and desolate provinces of the Empire, mountainous, void of cultivation when compared with Szech'wan, one mass of high hills conditioned now as Nature made them; and the people, too, ashamed of their own wretchedness, are ill-fed and ill-clad.

The greater part of the roads to be traversed now were constructed on projecting slopes above rivers and torrents, affluents of the Yangtze, and cross a region upon which the troubled appearance of the mountains that bristle over it stamps the impress of a severe kind of beauty. Such roads would not be tolerated in any country but China—I doubt if any but the ancient Chinese could have had the patience to build them. One could not walk with comfort; it was an impossible task. Far away over the earth, winding into all the natural trends of the mountain base, ran the highway, merrily tripping over huge boulders, into hollows and out of them, almost underground, but always, with its long white extended finger, beckoning me on by the narrow ribbon in the distance. True, although I was absolutely destitute of company, I had always the road with me, yet ever far from me. I could not catch it up, and sometimes, dreaming triumphantly that I had now come even with it where it seemed to end in some disordered stony mass, it would trip mischievously out again into view, bounding away into some tricky bend far down to the edge of the river, and rounding out of sight once more until the point of vantage was attained. Its twisting and turning, up and down, inwards, outwards, made humor for the full long day. With it I could not quarrel, for it did its best to help me with my weary men onwards over the now darkened landscape, and ever took the lead to urge us forward. If it came to a great upstanding mountain, with marked politeness it ran round by a circuitous route, more easily if of greater length; at other times it scaled clear up, nimbly and straight, turning not once to us in its self-appointed task, and at the top, standing like some fairy on a steeple-point, beckoned us on encouragingly. At times it became exhausted and stretched itself wearisomely out, measuring in width to only a few small inches, and overlooked the river at great height, telling us to ponder well our footsteps ere we go forward. To part company with the road would mean to die, for elsewhere was no foothold possible. So in this narrow faithful ledge, torn up by the heavy tread of countless horses' feet beyond Lao-wa-t'an (where horse traffic starts), we carefully ordered every step. Looking down, sheer down as from some lofty palace window, I saw the green snake waiting, waiting for me. Slipping, there would be no hope—death and the river alone lay down that treacherous mountain-side. And then, at times, pursuing that white-faced wriggling demon which stretched out far over the mist-swept landscape in incessant writhing and annoying contortions, we quite gave up the chase. It seemed leading me on to some unknown destiny. I knew not whither; only this I knew—that I must follow.

And so each hour and every hour was fraught with peril which seemed imminent. But He who guards the fatherless and helpless, feeds the poor and friendless, guarded the traveler in those days. Mishaps I had none, and when at night I reached those tiny mountain seats, perched majestically high for the most part and swept by all the winds of heaven, I seemed to be the lonely spectator and companionless watcher over mighty mountain-tops, which appeared every moment to be hesitating to take a gigantic dive into the roaring river several hundred feet below our lofty resting-place.

Some of the larger villages had the arrogant look of old feudal fortresses, and up the paths leading to them, cut out in a defile in the vertical cliffs, we passed with difficulty coolies carrying on their backs the enormous loads, which are the wonder of all who have seen them, their backs straining under the boomerang-shaped frames to which the merchandise was lashed. Hundreds passed us on their toilsome journey with tea, lamp-oil, skins, hides, copper, lead, coal and white wax from Yuen-nan, and with salt, English cotton, Chinese porcelain, fans and so on from Szech'wan. One false step, one slight slip, and they would have been hurled down the ravine, where far below, in the roaring cataract, dwarfed to the size of a toy boat, was a junk being cleverly taken down-stream. And down there also, one false move and the huge junk would have been dashed against the rocks, and banks strewn with the corpses of the crew. As it was, they were mere specks of blue in a background of white foam, their vociferating and yelling being drowned by the roar of the waters. On the road, passing and re-passing, I saw coolies on the way to Yuen-nan-fu with German cartridges and Japanese guns, the packing, so different generally to British goods which come into China, being particularly good. This is one of the cries of the importer in China against the British manufacturer; and if the latter knew more of Chinese transport and the manner in which the goods are handled in changing from place to place, one would meet fewer broken packages on the road in this land of long distances.

A friend of mine, needing a typewriter, wrote home explicit instructions as to the packing. "Pack it ready to ship," he wrote, "then take it to the top of your office stairs, throw it down the stairs, take machine out and inspect, and if it is undamaged re-pack and send to me. If damaged, pack another machine, subject to the same treatment until you are convinced that it can stand being thus handled and escape injury." This is how goods coming to Western China should be sent away.

Gradually the days brought harder toil. The mountains grew higher, some covered with forests of pine trees, which natural ornament completely changed the aspect of the country. Torrents foamed noisily down the gorges, veiled by the curtain of great trees; sometimes, on a ridge, a field of buckwheat, shining in the sun, looked like the beginning of the eternal snows.

Food was at famine rates. Eggs there were in abundance, pork also; but it was not to be wondered at that the traveler, having seen the conditions under which the pigs are reared, refrained from the luxury of Yuen-nan roast pig. My men fed on maize. The faces of the people were pinched and wan, unpleasant to look upon, bearing unmistakable signs of poverty and misery, and they seemed too concerned in keeping the wolf from the door to attend to me. At Ta-kwan they treated themselves to a sheng of rice apiece—here the sheng is 1.8 catties, as against 11 catties in the capital of the province.

At Wuchai, the last stage before reaching Chao-t'ong-fu, the room of the inn had three walls only, and two of these were composed of kerosene tins, laced together with bamboo stripping. (Probably the oil tins had been stolen from the mission premises at Chao-t'ong.) Through the whole night it rained as it had never rained before, but, instead of feeling miserable, I tried to see the humor of the situation. One can get humor from the most embarrassing circumstances, and my chief amusement arose from a small business deal between one of my coolies, who had sublet his contract to a poor fellow returning in the rain, who had arranged to carry the ninety catties ninety li for a fourth of the original price arranged between my coolie and myself. For one full hour they argued at a terrible speed as to the rate of exchange in the Szech'wan large and the Yuen-nan small cash, and this was only interrupted when a poor man, deaf and dumb, and of hideous appearance, seeing the foreigner in his contemptible town, rushed in with a carrying pole and felled his grumbling townsman at my feet.

My intervention probably averted murder—at any rate, it seemed as though murder would have taken place very soon but for my interference. The whole populace gathered, of course, and the fight waged fiercely until well on into the night. But wrapping myself in my mackintosh, and putting my paper umbrella at the right angle, I went to sleep with the rain dripping on me as they were indulging in final pleasantries regarding each other's ancestry.

The first thing I saw at Chao-t'ong the next day was the foreign cigarette, sold at a wayside stall by a vendor of monkey nuts and marrow seeds. No trade has prospered in Yuen-nan during the past two years more than the foreign cigarette trade, and the growing evil among the children of the common people, both male and female, is viewed with alarm. From Tachien-lu to Mengtsz, from Chung-king to Bhamo, one is rarely out of sight of the well-known flaring posters in the Chinese characters advertising the British cigarette. Some months ago a couple of Europeans were sent out to advertise, and they stuck their poster decorations on the walls of temples, on private houses and official residences, with the result that the people were piqued so much as to tear down the bills immediately. In Yuen-nan, especially since the exit of opium, this common cigarette is smoked by high and low, rich and poor. I have been offered them at small feasts, and when calling upon high officials at the capital have been offered a packet of cigarettes instead of a whiff of opium, as would have been done formerly. One is not, of course, prepared to say whether such a trade is desirable or not, but it merely needs to be made known that towards the middle of the present year (1910) a proclamation was issued from the Viceroy's yamen at Yuen-nan-fu speaking in strongest terms against the increasing habit of smoking foreign cigarettes, to show the trend of official opinion on the subject. After having referred to the enormous advances made in the imports of cigarettes, the proclamation deplored the general tendency of the people to support such an undesirable trade, and exhorted the citizens to turn from their evil ways. We cannot stop the importation of cigarettes, it read, but there is no need for our people to buy.

* * * * *

At Chao-t'ong I stayed with the Rev. Dr. Savin, and spent a very pleasant two days' rest here in his hospitable hands. It was in this district I first came across goitre, the first time I had seen it in my life. It is a terrible disfigurement.

Poor indeed is the whole of this neighborhood. Poverty, thin and wanting food to eat, stalks abroad dressed in a rag or two, armed with a staff to keep away the snarling dogs, and a broken bowl to gather garbage.

Even the better class, who manage to afford their maize and bean curds, are to be praised for the extreme simplicity which everywhere vividly marks their monotonous lives. Indeed, this is true of the whole area through which I have traveled. No furniture brings confusion to their rooms, no machinery distresses the ear with its groaning or the eye with its unsightliness, no factories belch out smoke and blacken the beauty of the sky, no trains screech to disturb sleepers and frighten babies. The simplest of simple beds—in most cases merely a few boards with a straw mattress placed thereon—the straw sandal on the foot, wooden chopsticks in place of knives and forks, the small variety of foods and of cooking utensils, the simple homespun cotton clothing—much of this finds favor in the eye of the English traveler. The Chinese, of all Orientals, teach us how to live without furniture, without impedimenta, with the least possible amount of clothing in the case of the poorer classes, and I could not fail to be impressed by the advantage thus held by this great nation in the struggle of life. It may serve them in good stead in the struggle of the Yellow Man against the White Man, to which I refer at a later period in this book; also does it incidentally show up the real character of some of the weaknesses of our own civilization, and when one is in China, living near the people, one is forced to reflect upon the useless multiplicity of our daily wants. We must have our daily stock of bread and butter and meats, glass windows and fires, hats, white shirts and woolen underwear, boots and shoes, trunks, bags and boxes, bedsteads, mattresses, sheets and blankets—most of which a Chinese can do without, and indeed is actually better off without.[J]

This is not true in every class, however; for whilst there is no denying the charm of the simpler civilization, many of the Chinese of Szech'wan and Yuen-nan glory in goods of foreign manufacture, no matter if to them is not disclosed the proper purpose of any particular article adopted.

Rice will not grow here in great quantities, owing to the scarcity of water; therefore the people feed on maize, and are thankful to get it.

Chao-t'ong is the centre of a large district devastated by recurring seasons of plague, rebellion and famine, when thousands die annually from starvation in the town and on the level uplands surrounding it. The beggars on one occasion, becoming so numerous, were driven from the streets, confined within the walls of the temple and grounds beyond the South Gate, and there fed by common charity. Huddled together in disease and rags and unspeakable misery, they died in thousands, and the Chinese say that of five thousand who crossed the temple threshold two thousand never came out alive.

This happened some twenty years ago. The unfortunate victims had for their food a rice porridge, mixed with which was a subtance alleged to have been lime, the common belief being that the majority of those who perished died from the effect of poisoning. Outside the city boundary hundreds of the dead were flung into huge pits, and even now the inhabitants refer to the time when children were exchanged ad libitum for a handful of rice or even less.

During my stay in this city, I heard on all hands some of the most blood-curdling stories of the dire distress which, like a dark cloud, still menaces the people, some of which are too dreadful for public print.

But I suppose these poor people are content. If they are, they possess a virtue which produces, in some measure at all events, all those effects which the alchemist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher's stone; and if their content does not bring riches, it banishes the desire for them. Years ago the people could entertain some small hope of prosperity now and again. If the opium crop were good, money was plentiful. But now no opium is grown, and the misery-stricken people have lost all hope of better times, and seem to have sunk in many instances to the lowest pangs of distressful poverty.[K]

Reader, alarm not yourself! I am not here to lead you into a long harangue on opium—it presents too thorny a subject for me to handle. I am not a partisan in the opium traffic; my mission is not essentially to denounce it; I am not impelled by an irresistible desire to investigate facts and put them before you. There is practically no opium in Yuen-nan to talk about.

This is absolute fact—not a Chinese fact, but good old British truth (although British truth when it touches upon opium has been very, very perverted since we first commenced to transact opium trade with this great country). With the exception of one small patch, some ten miles away from the main road between Yuen-nan-fu and Tali-fu, I saw no poppy whatever in the province. This does not mean, however, that no opium is to be had.

During the past three weeks[L] no less than five cases of attempted suicide by opium poisoning have come under my personal notice in the town in which I am residing, and there have doubtless been fifty more which have not. If there is no opium, where do the people so easily secure it in endeavors to take their lives upon the slightest provocation? Last year the price of opium here on the streets, although its sale was "illegal," was over three tsien (about nine-pence) the Chinese ounce of prepared opium. At the present time, in the same city, many men would be willing to do a deal for any quantity you like for less than two tsien. Cases of smuggling are frequent. One gets accustomed to hear of large quantities being smuggled through in most cunning ways, and it all goes to show that the people of Yuen-nan are not, as some of China's enlightened statesmen and some of the ranting faddists of England and America would have us believe, falling over one another in their zeal to free the province from the drug.

The other day some men passed through several towns, on the way to the capital, carrying three coffins. In the first was a corpse, the other two were packed with opium. Being suspected at Yuen-nan-fu, the first coffin was opened, and the carriers, making as much row as they could because their coffin had been burst open, secured a fair "squeeze" to hold their tongues, and the second and third coffins were passed unexamined. Quite common is it for men to travel in armed bands from the province of Kwei-chow, traveling by night over the mountains by lantern-light, and hiding by day from any possible official searchers.

Opium, which is and always has been so heavily taxed, does not in general follow the ordinary trade routes on which likin stations are numerous, but is carried by these armed bands over roads where the native Customs stations are few, and so poorly equipped as to yield readily to superior force, where the men are compelled to accept a composition much below the official rate.

Opium smoking is still common in Western China among people who can afford it. At the time of the crusade against it, wealthy people laid in stocks enough to last them for years; and, so long as there is smuggling from other provinces, which do grow it, into those which do not, there will be no danger of the absolute extermination being carried successfully into effect. Kwei-chow, in common with the western provinces, has undeservedly secured the credit for having practically abolished the poppy; but at the present moment (December, 1909) she is at a loss to know what to do with her supply, and that is the reason why people of Yuen-nan are making bargains in opium smuggled over the border. Much has yet to be done. To prevent the growth of a plant which has been in China for at least twelve centuries, which has had medicinal uses for nine, and whose medicinal properties have been put in the capsule for six, is not an easy matter, far more difficult, in fact, than the average Englishman and even those who rant so much about the whole business upon little knowledge can imagine. Opium has been made in China for four centuries, and although used then with tobacco, has been smoked since the middle of the seventeenth century.[M]

A few years ago Yuen-nan had only two articles of importance with which to pay for extra provincial products consumed, namely, opium and tin. The latter came from a spot twenty miles from Mengtsz, and the value of the output now runs to approximately three million taels. Opium came from all parts of the province and went in all directions, that portion sent to the Opium Regie at Tonkin sometimes being close to three thousand piculs, and the quantity going by land into China being very much greater. Yuen-nan opium was known at Canton and Chin-kiang in 1863. In 1879, the production was variously estimated at from twelve thousand to twenty-two thousand piculs; in 1887 it had risen to approximately twenty-seven thousand piculs, and since then to the time of the reform no less certainly than thirty thousand piculs.

One afternoon, in November of 1909, the execution ground of Yuen-nan-fu was the scene of a remarkably daring proceeding by the officials in the campaign for the total suppression of opium in the province. No less than 20,040 ounces of prepared opium were publicly destroyed by fire in the presence of an enormous crowd of people. The officials of the city were present in person, and everywhere the event was looked upon as the greatest public demonstration that the people had ever seen.

The missionary of whom I inquired denied that the infanticide at Chao-t'ong was very great—things must be improving!

Previous to my arrival at the city I had instructed my English-speaking boy to make inquiries in the city, and to let me know afterwards, whether girls were still sold publicly.

"Have got plenty," he exclaimed, in describing this wholesale selling of female children into slavery. "I know, I know; you wantchee makee buy. Can do! You wantchee catch one piecee small baby, can catchee two, three tael. Wantchee one piecee very much tall, big piecee, can catch fifty dollar."

Continuing, he told me that prices were fairly high, a girl who could boast good looks and who had reached an age when her charms were naturally the strongest fetching the alarming amount of three hundred taels. This was the highest figure reached, whilst small children could be had for anything up to twenty. This wholesale disposal of young girls, although the traffic was in some quarters emphatically denied to exist—a denial, however, which was all moonshine—is one of the chief sorrows of the district. And well it might be; for thousands of children are disposed of in the course of a year for a few taels by heartless parents, who watch them being carried away, like so much merchandise, to be converted into silver, in many cases in this poverty-stricken district merely to satisfy the craving for opium of some sodden wretch of a man who calls himself a father. Time and time again, long after I myself passed through Chao-t'ong, did I see little girls from three to ten years of age being conveyed by pack-horse to the capital, balanced in baskets on either side of the animal. This and the terrible infanticide which exists in all poor districts of China menaces the lives of all well-wishers of the entire province of Yuen-nan.

In the particular district of which I speak it is not an uncommon sight to see little children being torn to pieces by dogs, the scavengers of the Empire, perhaps by the very dogs that had been their playmates from birth. I have been riding many times and found that my horse had stepped on a human skull, and near by were the bones the dogs had left as the remains of the corpse.

* * * * *

NOTE.—I should mention that, since the above was written, I have lived and travelled a good deal around Chao-t'ong-fu, being the only European traveller who has ever penetrated the country to the east of the main road, by which I had now come down.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote J: Anyone who contemplates a tramp across China must not get the idea that he can still continue the uses of civilization. For the most part he will have to live pretty well as a Chinese the whole time, and he will find, as I found, that it is easy to give up a thing when you know the impossibility of getting it.—E.J.D.]

[Footnote K: This was written later. I have altered my views since I have traveled from end to end of Yuen-nan. The disappearance of opium, on the contrary, apart from the moral advantage to the people, has done much to place them in a better position financially. In Tali-fu I found not a single shop on the main street "to let," and the trade of the place had gone ahead considerably, and this was a city which people generally supposed would suffer most on account of the non-growth of opium.—E.J.D.]

[Footnote L: May, 1910. As a matter of fact the date makes no difference, because unfortunately the number of suicides from opium does not seem to have decreased materially in Western China since the opium crusade was started. Upon the slightest provocation a Chinese woman in Yuen-nan will take her life, and it is probable that for the five cases which came to my notice through the mission house there were treble that number which did not—E.J.D.]

[Footnote M: This was written at the end of 1909 Now, in July, 1910, things are changed wonderfully. The rapidity with which China is driving out the poppy from province after province is truly remarkable. In Szech'wan, in April, 1909, I passed through miles and miles of poppy along the main road—to-day there is none to be seen It is to be hoped that Great Britain will do her part as faithfully as China is doing hers.]



CHAPTER IX.

THE CHAO-T'ONG REBELLION OF 1910

Digression from travel. How rebellions start in China. Famous Boxer motto. Way of escape shut off. Riots expected before West can be won into the confidence of China. Boxerism and students of the Government Reform Movement. Author's impressions formed within the danger zone. More Boxerism in China than we know of. Causes of the Chao-t'ong Rebellion. Halley's Comet brings things to a climax. Start of the rioting. Arrival of the military. Number of the rebels. They hold three impregnable positions, and block the main roads. European ladies travel to the city in the dead of night. A new ch'en-tai takes the matter in hand. Rumors and suspense. Stations of the rebels. A night attack. Sixteen rebels decapitated. Officials alter their tactics. Fighting on main road. Superstition regarding soldiers. One of the leaders captured by a headman. Chapel burnt down and caretaker rescued by military. Li the Invincible under arms. Huang taken prisoner. Two leaders killed. Rising among the Miao. Mission work at a standstill. Child-stealing, and the Yuen-nan Railway rumor. Barbaric punishment. Tribute to Chinese officials. British Consul-General. Resume of the position. An unfortunate incident.