SAL aS o8 US TO Gaornell University Gibrary Dthaca, New York CHARLES WILLIAM WASON COLLECTION CHINA AND THE CHINESE THE GIFT OF CHARLES WILLIAM WASON CLASS OF 1876 1918 Date Due Cornell University Library DS 710.D58 iii 3 1924 023 237 070 us /Ol, an: ey ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT LIFE IN THE INTERIOR AND THE REFORM MOVEMENT BY EDWIN J. DINGLE WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Igit @ eORArs | W aso DST Ped K | All vighbs reserved \ 2922 Printed and Published in Great Britain by J. W. ArrowsmitH Lrp., BristoL, ENGLAND IN GRATEFUL ESTEEM. DURING MY TRAVELS IN INTERIOR CHINA I ONCE LAY AT THE POINT OF DEATH. FOR THEIR UNREMITTING KINDNESS DURING A LONG ILLNESS, I NOW AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME TO MY FRIENDS, Mr. AND Mrs. A. EVANS, OF TONG- CH’UAN-FU, YUN-NAN, SOUTH-WEST CHINA, TO WHOSE DEVOTED NURSING AND UNTIRING CARE I OWE MY LIFE. AUTHOR’S NOTE. ; To travel in China is easy. To walk across China, over roads acknowledgedly worse than are met with in any civilised country in the two hemispheres, and having accommodation unequalled for crudeness and insanitation, is not easy. In deciding to travel in China, I determined to cross overland from the head of the Yangtze Gorges to British Burma on foot ; and, although the strain nearly cost me my life, no conveyance was used in any part of my journey other than at two points described in the course of the narrative. For several days during my travels I lay at the point of death. The arduousness of constant mountaineering—for such is ordinary travel in most parts of Western China—laid the foundation of a long illness, rendering it impossible for me to continue my walking, and as a consequence I resided in the interior of China during a period of convalescence of several months duration, at the end of which I continued my cross-country tramp. Subsequently I returned into Yiin-nan from Burma, lived again in Tong-ch’uan-fu and Chao-t’ong-fu, rand travelled in the wilds of the surrounding country. Whilst travelling I lived on Chinese food, vii AUTHOR’S NOTE. and in the Miao country, where rice could not be got, subsisted for many days on maize only. My sole object in going to China was a personal desire to see China from the inside. My trip was undertaken for no other purpose. I carried no instruments (with the exception of an aneroid), and did not even make a single survey of the untrodden country through which I occasionally passed. So far as I know, I am the only traveller, apart from members of the missionary community, who has ever resided far away in the interior of the Celestial Empire for so long a time. Most of the manuscript for this book was written as I went along—a good deal of it actually by the - roadside in rural China. When my journey was completed, the following news paragraph in the North China Daily News (of Shanghai) was brought to my notice :— “ All the Legations (at Peking) have received anonymous letters from alleged revolutionaries in Shanghai, containing the warning that an extensive anti-dynastic uprising is imminent. If they do not assist the Manchus, foreigners will not be harmed ; otherwise, they will be destroyed in a general massacre. “The missives were delivered mysteriously, bearing obliterated postmarks. “In view of the recent similar warnings received by the Consuls, uneasiness has been created.” The above appeared in the journal quoted on June 3rd, 1910. The reader, in perusing my vill AUTHOR’S NOTE. previously written remarks on the spirit of reform and how far it has penetrated into the innermost comers of the empire, should bear this paragraph in mind, for there is more Boxerism and unrest in China than we know of. My account of the Hankow Riots of January, 1911, through which I myself went, will, with my experience of rebellions in Yiin-nan, justify my assertion. I should like to thank all those missionaries who entertained me as I proceeded through China, especially Mr. John Graham and Mr. C. A. Fleisch- mann, of the China Inland Mission, who transacted a good deal of business for me and took all trouble uncomplainingly. I am also indebted to Dr. Clark, of Tali-fu, and to the Revs. H. Parsons and S. Pollard, for several photographs illustrating that section of this book dealing with the tribes of Yiin-nan. I wish to express my acknowledgments to several well-known writers on far Eastern topics, notably to Dr. G. E. Morrison, of Peking, the Rev. Sidney L. Hulick, M.A., D.D., and Mr. H. B. Morse, whose works are quoted. Much information was also gleaned from other sources. My thanks are also due to Mr. W. Brayton Slater and to my brother, Mr. W. R. Dingle, for their kindness in having negotiated with my publishers in my absence in Inland China; and to the latter, for unfailing courtesy and patience, I am under considerable obligation. Across China on Foot ix AUTHOR’S NOTE. would have appeared in the autumn of 1910 had the printers’ proofs, which were several times sent to me to different addresses in China, but which dodged me repeatedly, come sooner to hand. EDWIN J. DINGLE. Hankow, HuPeu, CHINA. eit CONTENTS. BOOK I. FROM THE STRAITS TO SHANGHAI— INTRODUCTORY . j FIRST JOURNEY. CHAPTER J. From SHANGHAI UP THE LowER YANGTZE TO ICHANG SECOND JOURNEY—ICHANG TO CHUNG-KING THROUGH THE YANGTZE GORGES. CHAPTER II. THe IcHsanGc GorGE i III. THE Yanctze Rapips . “9 IV. THe YEH T’an” Rapip. ARRIVAL AT KwEIFU. THIRD JOURNEY—CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU (VIA LUCHOW). CHAPTER V. BEGINNING OF THE OVERLAND JOURNEY. o VI. THE PEOPLE OF SZECH’WAN . FOURTH JOURNEY—SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG- FU (VIA LAO-WA-T’AN). CHAPTER VII. DEscRIPTION OF JOURNEY FROM SUI-FU . “i VIII. SzscH’wan AND YUN-NAN THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF gio. CHAPTER IX. THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN, AND MISSION WORK AMONG THEM. CHAPTER xX. . 3 3 3 ‘ xi Page II 21 32 37 48 63 80 95 IIo 126 CONTENTS. Page FIFTH JOURNEY—CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG- CH’UAN-FU. CHAPTER XI. AuTHoR MEETS WITH ACCI- DENT ; 3 * j 157 rr XII. Ywun-Nan’s CHEQUERED CAREER. ILLNESS OF AUTHOR . é 173 BOOK II. FIRST JOURNEY—TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. CHAPTER XIII. DEPARTURE FOR BuRMA. DiscoMFORTS OF TRAVEL . 187 i XIV. YiNn-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL . 209 . SECOND JOURNEY—YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI- FU (VIA CH’U-HSIONG-FU). CHAPTER XV.—Dors CHINA WANT THE FOREIGNER ? . - : 226 sy XVI. Lu-FENG-HSIEN. MOUNTAIN- ous CouNTRY. CHINESE UNTRUTHFULNESS . =» 242 8 XVII. KwanG-TUNG-HSIEN TO SHA- CHIAO-KAI 3 3 . 256 a XVIII. Storm in THE MOUNTAINS. At HunGay . é - 270 ff XIX. THe ReErormM MovEMENT IN YUN-NAN. ARRIVAL AT TALI-FU : ‘i é 290 THIRD JOURNEY—TALI-FU TO THE MEKONG VALLEY. CHAPTER XX. HarpEstT ParT OF THE JOURNEY. HWAN-LIEN-P’U 306 es XXI. THE Mountains or Yiun- NAN. SHAYUNG. OPIUM SMOKING 3 5 - 325 Xil CONTENTS. FOURTH JOURNEY—THE MEKONG VALLEY TO TENGYUEH. CHAPTER XXII. THE RIvER MEKONG. a XXIII. THROUGH THE SALWEN VAL- LEY TO TENGYUEH . 4 XXIV. THe Li-su TRIBE OF THE SALWEN VALLEY FIFTH JOURNEY—TENGYUEH ((MOMIEN) TO BHAMO IN UPPER BURMA. CHAPTER XXV. SHANS AND KACHINS be XXVI. Enp oF LonG JouRNEY. ARRIVAL IN BURMA APPENDIX_A. AUTHOR’S ITINERARY Fe B. VAGARIES OF CHINESE WEIGHTS AND MEASURES GOITRE IN WESTERN CHINA THe Hanxow Riot oF JANUARY, IQII . . 5 = . THE TOoNKIN- YUN-NAN RalILway, AND OTHER SCHEMES . MILITARY PROGRESS IN CHINA. PEEPS INTO YUN-NAN HISTORY THE FRENCH IN YUN-NAN Fi BuDDHISM AND ROMAN CATHOLICISM CopPpER COINAGE. VARIATIONS OF THE Low ty “CasH” ‘ ANTI-FOOTBINDING CAMPAIGN IN WESTERN CHINA vo & 1 PF AO INDEX xili Page 336 353 364 369 378 391 399 403 404 409 415 420 425 429 431 436 439 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Face page FRONTISPIECE. SINGAPORE HARBOUR . 2 3 SCENE ON THE BUND DURING THE HANKow Riots oF I9gIlII . 14 BritTIsH BLUEJACKETS AND VoLUNTEERS GUARDING Main Exit FROM NATIVE CITY DURING THE Hankow RIoTs OF I9QII . : ¥ ‘ ‘ 15 A CoupLE OF ARISTOCRATIC TRACKERS. ‘ . 20 PECULIAR CRAFT AT ICHANG 4 z : ‘ 20 Port oF IcHANG 3 ‘5 ‘ 3 21 Tue AuTHoR’s HovuseE- Boat (Wu-Pay). i ‘i 21 THE FACTOTUM OF THE TRIP : é ‘ ‘ 32 AN Up-RIVER Customs STATION . ‘ ‘ : 32 A TREACHEROUS SPOT IN THE GORGES . ‘ ‘ 33 OUTSIDE CHUNG-KING . : , . : 48 PLOUGHING THE RICE-FIELDS IN SzECH’WAN . ; 48 ON THE MaIN ROAD IN SZECH’WAN_. . ‘ 49 TEA CARRIERS, CARRYING TEA INTO TIBET . - 49 ORNAMENTAL ARCHWAY IN THE GARDENS OF THE YUN-NAN GUILD, AT SUI-FU, SZECH’WAN : 74 CHINESE METHOD OF TORTURE . A 74 TEMPLE AT SUI-FU, OVERLOOKING THE YANGTZE , 75 Hi_t SCENERY PAST SUI-FU ‘ j . ‘ 82 Minor Ipots IN A WaySIDE TEMPLE . . 82 A SCENE ON THE HENG-CHIANG BELOW T’AN- v EO. 83 OFF THE Main RoapD TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. . ; 94 In ‘ Miao-Lanp ”’ ‘ , ‘ 95 How THE TRIBES WENT FORTH TO BATTLE ‘ Z I12 A Farr SAMPLE OF THE DIFFICULT COUNTRY THE REBELS HAD TO NEGOTIATE ‘ i I12 CHARACTERISTIC REPRESENTATIVES OF THE " Mrao FAcTION OF REBELLING PARTY : : ; 113 THE MEETING PLACE OF THE REBELS, NEAR CHAO- T’ONG-FU . ‘ ‘ i ‘ ‘ 120 A SCENE IN THE DANGER ZonE 3 i 3 . I2t CwH’In M1tao MEN oF KwWEI-cHOW é 7 3 128 CuH’1In Miao WoMEN OF KwEI-cHOoW , . , 128 Mrao WoMAN OF CENTRAL YUN-NAN . ‘ » 129 xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Face page SuHuI-Hst Miao WoMEN e 3 5 . ‘ I29 Hua Miao at DINNER ‘ F ‘i a ; 132 A CHINESE FaMILy. s 132 TypicaL MIAO VILLAGE OF N ORTH-EAST “Yun- 'NAN : 133 Hey Miao Woman _. 140 Ca’1In Miao WoMEN SPEEDING THE PARTING Guest 140 Hua Miao aT CHAO-T’ONG-FU és < é - I41 A GROUP OF COLPORTEURS . 4 I4l Group oF Hua Miao CHRISTIANS AT Surn- MEN- K’AN 152 Hua Miao Boys on Ho.ipasy IN UNITED METHODIST Mission HovusE IN NorTH-EAsT YUN-NAN. . 152 ITINERATING IN THE VILLAGES . P ‘ Z 153 Coat MINE é , ‘ : x 160 KIANGTI SUSPENSION BRIDGE ‘ * 161 MountTAIN SCENERY IN NorTH-EAST Yun- NAN 5 161 Tue AUTHOR WITH A BROKEN ARM, AND THE Pony THAT DID IT. : r é : : - 176 CuInEsSE Home Lire . : - 176 A Nortu-East YUN-NAN Tower OF REFUGE & 197 CLotH DyYERS IN WESTERN CHINA . . 186 OUTSIDE THE City WALL oF TONG-CH’UAN- FU 5 186 ConFuCcIAN TEMPLE, TONG-CH’UAN-FU : » 187 THE WAYSIDE LODGING-HOUSE OF YUN-NAN , 192 THE AUTHOR’S, CARAVAN ON LaAI-T’EO-P’o HI, 9,300 FEET ABOVE THE SEA ‘ ‘ : : 192 Two Days FROM TONG-CH’UAN-FU é ; - 193 MAN AND BEAST OF YUN-NAN s 200 CHARCOAL CARRIERS ON THE WAY TO Yun- NAN- FU 200 Looxinc Towarps Hsiao Lone T’an (NEAR KoNGSsHAN) ‘i . 201 SCENE IN UNSURVEYED CounTRY TO THE Nortu- WEST OF TONG-CH’UAN-FU , 208 A NATIVE CHRISTIAN AND His WIFE AT Dex- “TSAO- SHAN, ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE TONG-CH’UAN- FU PLAIN i ‘ : ‘ i . 209 A City IN WESTERN Cura. . 209 ENTRANCE TO MILITARY TRAINING Grounp AT YUN-NAN-FU. : 3 5 ; - 216 GENERAL VIEW OF YUN- -NAN-FU zi : ; . 216 New Po.ice Force oF YUN-NAN-FU . é « 297 SCORES OF THESE PAGODAS ARE MET WITH IN YUN-NAN 3 ; % 228 FInE SPECIMEN OF A CHINESE PaGopa. 5 ‘ 228 A VILLAGE GATHERING IN YUN-NAN.. 229 ENTRANCE TO A GOVERNMENT SCHOOL IN WESTERN CHINA. . ‘ 229 FUNERAL SCENE IN WESTERN Cuma ‘ ‘ 236 STOPPING-PLACE FOR HorsSE CARAVANS . » 236 CHINESE Gop oF Music : i : ‘ s 237 Buppuist Priest aT MUMMERY . ‘ ‘ : 237 Xv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Face page THE AUTHOR AT DINNER BY THE ROADSIDE IN YUN-NAN 5 ‘ 5 é é 3 : A CELESTIAL TRIO 3 . j ‘ . PROFESSIONAL CHINESE BEGGARS 3 ‘ ‘i . WAYSIDE TIFFIN PLACE IN SZECH’WAN . 3 . WAYSIDE TIFFIN PLACE IN YUN-NAN. e . A WAYSIDE SNACK IN YUN-NAN . , GROUP OF CHINESE FEASTING OVER THE GRAVES OF THEIR ANCESTORS . * s i é . REARING Ducks IN CHINA . : F ‘ 7 CHINESE METHOD OF FISHING - 3 . MowunTAaIn FoREST OF WESTERN Yun- NAN : 7 “WHEN EVENING COMETH . . .’—SUNSET AT TALI-FU, YUN-NAN . 3 ‘ ‘ 3 ; MAIN STREET OF TALI-FU . ss : 3 . MontTHLy MarRKET AT TALI-FU. . UNDULATING COUNTRY JUST BEYOND Taur- -FU i THE SHUN-PI BEYOND YANG-PI. . : ‘i CoMING OUT OF HWAN-LIEN-P’U . > TYPICAL SCENERY, SHOWING HOW THE Hits DROP TO THE VALLEYS AND RIVERS . é ‘ ‘ THE MEKONG BRIDGE . - ‘ . ‘ THE MOUNTAINS OPPOSITE TALI- -SHAO 3 : : A TRIO OF TIBETANS SNAPPED IN YUN-NAN . . YUNG-CH’ANG-FU, THE WESTERNMOST PREFECTURE OF THE CHINESE EMPIRE . . : Ban-cHIAO BRIDGE, NEAR YUNG-CH "ANG ‘ ‘i Group OF YUN-NAN MOHAMMEDANS < 3 GENERAL VIEW SHOWING METHOD OF IRRIGATION IN SZECH’WAN AND YUN-NAN - a Two Days BEFORE REACHING YUNG- -cH "ANG - THE TENGYUEH WATERFALL e , 7 . Li-su OF WESTERN YUN-NAN - : . 3 Li-su OF THE UPPER SALWEN * ‘ : - THE RIVER TAPING NEAR MANYUEN . . . THE AUTHOR’S CARAVAN, Four Days FROM THE JouRNEY’s END . THE Last MARKET TOWN IN CHINA BEFORE ENTERING BuRMA . é $ ‘ , : THE First DAxk- BUNGALOW MET WITH ON COMING INTO BURMA FROM CHINA é - A MarKET SCENE NOT FAR FROM Hsrao SINGAI ‘ BURMESE AND KACHINS AT THE ANNUAL FESTIVAL, 1910, OF THE AMERICAN Baptist MISSION IN Burma . ‘ 3 . 3 a é F KacHINS OF UPPER BURMA . ‘ ' : zs KacHINs OF UPPER Burma . . ‘ 7 . Map or AUTHOR’sS ITINERARY ‘ { 5 ‘ Xvi 256 256 257 272 272 273 273 288 288 289 304 395 395 316 316 317 320 320 321 336 336 337 356 356 357 364 365 365 368 368 369 369 384 384 385 385 446 BOOK I. “Anogav yy adogvaurs Across China on Foot. FROM THE STRAITS TO SHANGHAI. INTRODUCTORY. The scheme. Why I am walking across Interior China. Leaving Singapore. Ignorance of life and travel in China. The ‘‘ China for the Chinese’ cry. The New China and the determination of the Government. The voice of the people. The province of Yin-nan and the forward movement. A prophecy. Impvessions of Saigon. Comparison of French and English methods. At Hong-Kong. Cold sail up the Whang-poo. Disembarkation. Foreign population of Shanghai. Congestion in the city. Wonderful Shanghat. THrouGH China from end to end. From Shanghai, 1,500 miles by river and 1,600 miles walking overland, from the greatest port of the Chinese Empire to the frontier of British Burma, That is my scheme.* cd * * * I am a journalist, one of the army of the hard- worked who go down early to the Valley. I state this because I would that the truth be told; for whilst engaged in the project with which this book has mainly to deal I was subjected to peculiar designations, such as “explorer ’’ and other news- paper extravagances, and it were well, perhaps, * See Appendix A. 3 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. for my reader to know once for all that the writer is merely a newspaper man, at the time on holiday. The rather extreme idea of walking across this Flowery Land came to me early in the year 1909, although for many years I had cherished the hope of seeing Interior China ere modernity had robbed her and her wonderful people of their isolation and antediluvianism, and ever since childhood my interest in China has always been considerable. A little prior to the Chinese New Year, a friend of mine dined with me at my rooms in Singapore, in the Straits Settlements, and the conversation about China resulted in our decision then and there to travel through the Empire on holiday. He, because at the time he had little else to do; the author, because he thought that a few months’ travel in mid-China would, from a journalistic standpoint, be passed profitably, the intention being to arrive home in dear old England late in the summer of the same year. We agreed to cross China on foot, and accordingly on February 22, 1909, just as the sun was sinking over the beautiful harbour of Singapore—that most valuable strategic Gate of the Far East, where Crown Colonial administration, however, is allowed by a lethargic British Government to become more and more bungled every year—we settled down on board the French mail steamer Nera, bound for Shanghai. My friends, good fellows, in reluctantly speeding me on my way, prophesied that this would prove to be my last long voyage to a last long rest, that the Chinese would never allow me to come out of China alive, Such is the ignorance of the average man concerning the 4 INTRODUCTORY. conditions of life and travel in the interior of this Land of Night. * * * Ld Here, then, was I on my way to that land towards which all the world was straining its eyes, whose nation, above all nations of the earth, was altering for better things, and coming out of its historic shell. “Reform, reform, reform,’’ was the echo, and I myself was on the way to hear it. At the time I started for China the cry of ‘‘ China for the Chinese ’”’ was heard in all countries, among all peoples. Statesmen were startled by it, editors wrote the phrase to death, magazines were filled with copy—good, bad and indifferent—mostly written, be it said, by men whose knowledge of the question was by no means complete: editorial opinion, and contradiction of that opinion, were printed side by side in journals having a good name. To one who endeavoured actually to understand what was being done, and whither these broad tendencies and strange cravings of the Chinese were leading a people who formerly were so indifferent to progress, it seemed essential that he should go to the country, and there on the spot make a study of the problem. Was the reform, if genuine at all, universal in China? Did it reach to the ends of the Empire ? That a New China had come into being, and was working astounding results in the enlightened provinces above the Yangtze and those connected with the capital by railway, was common knowledge ; but one found it hard to believe that the west and the south-west of the empire were moved by the same spirit of Europeanism, and it will be seen that China in the west moves, if at all, but at a snail’s 5 / ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. pace: the second part of this volume deals with that portion of the subject. And it may be that the New China, as we know it in the more forward spheres of activity, will only take her proper place in the family of nations after fresh upheavals.* Rivers of blood may yet have to flow as a sickening libation to the gods who have guided the nation for forty centuries before she will be able to attain her ambition of standing line to line with the other powers of the eastern and western worlds. But it seems that no matter what the cost, no matter what she may have to suffer financially and nationally, no matter how great the obstinacy of the people towards the reform movement, the change is coming, has already come with alarming rapidity, and has come to stay. China is changing— let so much be granted ; and although the movement may be hampered by a thousand general difficulties, presented by the ancient civilisation of a people whose customs and manners and ideas have stood the test of time since the days contemporary with those of Solomon, and at one time bade fair to test eternity, the Government cry of “China for the Chinese” is going to win. Chinese civilisation has for ages been allowed to get into a very bad state of repair, and official corruption and deceit have prevented the Government from making an effectual move towards present-day aims; but that she is now making an honest endeavour to rectify her faults in the face of tremendous odds must, so it appears to the writer, be apparent to all beholders. That is the Government view-point. It isimportant to note this. In China, however, the Government is not the * The reader’s attention is drawn at this juncture to an account in Appendix D of the 1911 riots at Hankow. 6 INTRODUCTORY. people. It never has been. It is not to be expected that great political and social reforms can be intro- duced into such an enormous country as China, and among her four hundred and thirty millions of people, merely by the issue of a few imperial edicts. The masses have to be convinced that any given thing is for the public good before they accept, despite the proclamations, and in thus convincing her own people China has yet to go through the fire of a terrible ordeal. Especially will this be seen in the second part of this volume, where in Yiin-nan there are huge areas absolutely untouched by the forward movement, and where the people are living the same life of disease, distress and dirt, of official, social, and moral degradation as they lived when the Westerner re- mained still in the primeval forest stage. But despite the scepticism and the cynicism of certain writers, whose pessimism is due to a lack of foresight, and despite the fact that she is being constantly _ accused of having in the past ignominiously failed at the crucial moment in endeavours towards minor reforms, I am one of those who believe that in China we shall see arising a Government whose power will be paramount in the East, and upon the integrity of whose people will depend the peace of Europe. It is much to say. We shall not see it, but our children will. The Government is going to conquer the people. She has done so already in certain provinces, and in a few years the reform—deep and real, not the make-believe we see in many parts of the Empire to-day—will be universal. * * * * Between Singapore and Shanghai the opportunity occurred of calling at Saigon and Hong-Kong, two 7 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. cities offering instructive contrasts of French and British administration in the Far East. Saigon is not troubled much by the Britisher. The nationally-exacting Frenchman has brought it to represent fairly his loved Paris in the East. The approach to the city, through the dirty brown mud of the treacherous Mekong, which is swept down vigorously to the China Sea between stretches of monotonous mangrove, with no habitation of man anywhere visible, is distinctly unpicturesque; but Saigon itself, apart from the exorbitance of the charges (especially so to the spendthrift Englishman), is worth the dreary journey of numberless twists and quick turns up-river, annoying to the most patient pilot. In the daytime, Saigon is as hot as that last bourne whence all evil-doers wander—Englishmen and dogs alone are seen abroad between nine and one. But in the soothing cool of the soft tropical evening, gay-lit boulevards, a magnificent State- subsidised opera-house, alfresco cafés where dawdle the domino-playing absinth drinkers, the fierce- moustached gendarmes, and innumerable features typically and picturesquely French, induced me easily to believe myself back in the bewildering whirl of the Boulevard des Capucines or des Italiennes. Whether the narrow streets of the native city are clean or dirty, whether garbage heaps lie festering in the broiling sun, sending their disgusting effluvia out to annoy the sense of smell at every turn, the municipality cares not a little bit. Indifference to the well-being of the native pervades it; there is present no progressive prosperity. Every second person I met was, or seemed to be, a Government official. He was dressed in immaculate 8 INTRODUCTORY. white clothes of the typical ugly French cut, trimmed elaborately with an ad libitum decoration of gold braid and brass buttons. All was so different to Singapore and Hong-Kong, and one did not feel, in surroundings which made strongly for the Jatssez- faire of the Frenchman in the East, ashamed of the fact that he was an Englishman. Three days north lies Hong-Kong, an all-important link in the armed chain of Britain’s empire east of Suez, bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of Great Britain beyond the seas. The history of this island, ceded to us in 1842 by the Treaty of Nanking, is known to everyone in Europe, or should be. Four and a half days more, and we anchored at Woo-sung ; and a few hours later, after a terribly cold run up the river in the teeth of a terrific wind, we arrived at Shanghai (31° 14’ N., 12° 29’ E.). The average man in Europe and America does not know that this great metropolis of the Far East is far removed from salt water, and that it is the first point on entering the Yangtze-kiang at which a port could be established. It is twelve miles up the Whang-poo. Junks whirled past with curious tattered brown sails, resembling dilapidated verandah blinds, merchantmen were there flying the flags of the nations of the world, all churning up the yellow stream as they hurried to catch the flood-tide at the bar. Then came the din of disembarkation. Enthu- siastic hotel-runners, ill-worked coolies, rickshaw men, professional Chinese beggars, and the inevitable hangers-on of a large eastern city crowded around me to turn an honest or a dishonest penny. Some tude, rough-hewn lout, covered with grease and coal- dush, pushed bang against me and hurled me without ceremony from his path. My baggage, meantime, 9. ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. s thrown on to a two-wheeled van, drawn by four those poor human beasts of burden—how horrible havé been born a Chinese coolie !—and I was irled away to my hotel for tucker. The French il had given us coffee and rolls at six, but the itement of landing at a foreign port does not lally produce the net amount of satisfaction to or ke for the sustenance of the inner man of the egmatic Englishman, as with the wilder-natured mchman. Therefore were our spirits ruffled. ITowever, we fed later. iubsequently to this we agreed not to be drawn che clubs or mix in the social life of Shanghai, but consider ourselves as two beings entirely apart n the sixteen thousand and twenty-three tishers, Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Rus- is, Danes, Portuguese, and other sundry inter- ionals at that moment at Shanghai. They lived re: we were soon to leave. ‘he city was suffering from the abnormal conges- t common to the Orient, with a big dash of the st. Trams, motors, rickshaws, the peculiar Chinese ‘elbarrow, horrid public shaky landaus in minia- :, conveyances of all kinds, and the swarming ises of coolie humanity carrying or hauling mer- ndise amid incessant jabbering, yelling, and iferating, made intense bewilderment before ikfast. 7onderful Shanghai ! 10 FIRST JOURNEY. FROM SHANGHAI UP THE LOWER YANGTZE TO ICHANG. CHAPTER I. To Ichang, an everyday trip. Start from Shanghat, and the city’s appearance. At Hankow. Meaning of the name. Trio of strategic and military points of the empive. Han- yang and Wu-ch’ang. Commercial and industrial future of Hankow. Getting our passports. Britishers in the city. The commercial Chinaman. The native city: some impressions. Clothing of the people. Cotton and wool. Indifference to comfort. Surprise at our daring project. At Ichang. British gunboat and early morning routine. Our vain quest for aid. Laying in stoves and com- missioning our boat. Ceremonies at starting gorges trip. Raising anchor, and our departure. LET no one who has been so far as Ichang, a thousand miles from the sea, imagine that he has been into the interior of China. It is quite an everyday trip. Modern steamers, with every modern convenience and luxury, pro- bably as comfortable as any river steamers in the world, ply regularly in their two services between Shanghai and this port, at the foot of the Gorges. The Whang-poo looked like the Thames, and the Shanghai Bund like the Embankment, when I em- barked on board a Jap boat en route for Hankow, and thence to Ichang by a smaller steamer, on a dark, bitterly cold Saturday night, March 6th, II ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 1909. I was to travel fifteen hundred miles up that greatest artery of China. The Yangtze surpasses in importance to the Celestial Empire what the Mississippi is to America, and yet even in China there are thousands of resident foreigners who know no more about this great river than the average Smithfield butcher. Ask ten men in Fleet Street or in Wall Street where Ichang is, and nine will be unable to tell you. Yet it is a port of great importance, when one considers that the handling of China’s vast river-borne trade has been opened to foreign trade and residence since the Chefoo Convention was signed in 1876, is a city of forty thousand souls, and has a gross total of imports of nearly forty millions of taels. Of Hankow, however, where we landed after a four days’ run, and had to wait five days before the shallower-bottomed steamer for the higher journey had come in, owing to the low water, more is known. The city is made up of foreign concessions, as in other treaty ports, but away in the native quarter there is the real China, with her selfish rush, her squalidness and filth among the teeming thousands. There dwell together, literally side by side, but yet eternally apart, all the conflicting elements of East and West which go to make up a city in the Far East, and particularly on the China coast. Hankow means literally Han Mouth, being situated at the juncture of the Han River and the Yangtze. Across the way, as I write, I can see Han-yang, with its iron works belching out black curls of smoke, where the arsenal turns out one hundred Mauser rifles daily. (This is but a fraction of the total work done.) It is, I believe, the only steel-rolling mill in China. Long before the foreigner set foot 12 SHANGHAI TO ICHANG. so far up the Yangtze, Hankow was a city of great importance—the Chinese used to call it the centre of the world. Ten years ago I should have been thirty days’ hard travel from Peking; at the present moment I might pack my bag and be in Peking within thirty-six hours. Hankow, with Tientsin and Nanking, makes up the trio of principal strategic points of the Empire, the trio of centres also of greatest military activity. On the opposite bank of the river I can see Wu-ch’ang, the provincial capital, the seat of the Viceroyalty of two of the most turbulent and important provinces of the whole eighteen. Hankow, Han-yang, and Wu-ch’ang have a population of something like two million people, and it is safe to prophesy that no other centre in the whole world has a greater commercial and industrial future than Hankow.* Here we registered as British subjects, and secured our Chinese passports, resembling naval ensigns more than anything else, for the four provinces of Hu-peh, Kwei-chow, Szech’wan, and Yiin-nan. The Consul- General and his assistants helped us in many ways, disillusioning us of the many distorted reports which have got into print regarding the indifference shown to British travellers by their own consuls at these ports. We found the brethren at the Hankow Club a happy band, with every luxury around them for which hand and heart could wish; so that it were perhaps ludicrous to look upon them as exiles, men out in the outposts of Britain beyond the seas, building up the trade of the Empire. Yet such they undoubtedly were, and most of them having a much better time than they would at home. There is not * See Appendix D. 13 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. ° the roughing required in Hankow which is necessary in other parts of the empire, as in British East Africa and in the jungles of the Federated Malay States, for instance. Building the Empire where there is an abundance of the straw wherewith to make the bricks, is a matter of no difficulty. And then the Chinaman is a good man to manage in trade, and in business dealings his word is his bond, generally speaking, although we do not forget that not long ago a branch in North China of the Hong- kong and Shanghai Bank was swindled seriously by a shroff who had done honest duty for a great number of years. It cannot, however, be said that it is a common thing among the commercial class of Chinese. My personal experience has been that John does what he says he will do, and for years he will go on doing that one thing; but it should not surprise you if one fine morning, with the infinite sagacity of his race, he ceases to do this when you are least expecting it—and he “‘ does”” you. Keep an eye on him, and the Chinaman to be found in Hankow having dealings with Europeans in business is as good as the best of men. We wended our way one morning intothenativecity, and agreed that few inconveniences of the Celestial Empire make upon the western mind a more speedy impression than the entire absence of sanitation. In Hankow we were in mental suspense as to which was the filthier native city—Hankow or Shanghai. But we are probably like other travellers, who find each city visited worse than the last. Should there arise in their midst a man anxious to confer an everlasting blessing upon his fellow Chinamen, no better work could he do than to institute a system approaching what to our Western mind is sanitation. 14 Scene on The Bund during the Hankow Riots of 1977. This picture shows the camp of a picket of Chinese soldiers from the Hu-peh Model Army. ‘raydeisoyoyd ayy Aq UMOYS JOU COO'OS JO PALOIO sNoLIOUa iv Yyouq Suidaay ataM srOpUajyp BY} ING ‘sUoIssvouoD [sNoLvA sy Wo paray es pry xouq ay} yL Udes pMOs sy “YPSUT UL SoflU doIYZ SE AAAI VY Buooprv yooars 9PM IL, "LLOL fo SJOUY wLoylD ET ay} SUANp Any IQYD NT most fiv9 UDUt aurpavus SAIIUNIO A piv syayvlang YSdVA SHANGHAI TO ICHANG. We arrived, of course, in the winter, and, having seen it at a time when the sun could do but little in in- creasing the stenches, we leave it to the imagination as to what it would be in the summer, in a city which for heat is not excelled by Aden.* During the summer of 1908 no less than twenty-eight foreigners succumbed to cholera, and the native deaths were numberless. The people were suffering very much from the cold, and it struck me as one of the unaccountable phenomena of their civilisation that in their in- genuity in using the gifts of Nature they have never learned to weave wool, and to employ it in clothing— that is, in a general sense. There are a few exceptions in the Empire. The nation is almost entirely de- pendent upon cotton for clothing, which in winter is padded with a cheap wadding to an abnormal thickness. The common people wear no under- clothing whatever. When they sleep they strip to the skin, and wrap themselves bodily in a single wadded blanket, sleeping the sleep of the tired people their excessive labour makes them. And, although their clothes might be the height of discomfort, they show their famous indifference to comfort by never com- plaining. These burdensome clothes hang around them like so many bags, with wide gaps here and there where the wind whistles in to the flesh. Itisa national characteristic that they are immune to personal inconveniences, a philosophy which I found to be universal, from the highest to the lowest. Everybody we met, from the British Consul- General downward, was surprised to know that we * This was written at the time I was in Hankow. When I revised my copy, after I had spent a year and a half rubbing along with the natives in the interior, I could not suppress a smile at my impressions of a great city like Hankow. Since then I have seen more native life, and—more native dirt !—E. J. D. 15 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. had no knowledge of the Chinese language, and seemed to look lightly upon our chances of ever getting through. It was true. Neither my companion nor myself knew three words of the language, but went forward simply believing in the good faith of the Chinese people, with our passports alone to protect us. That we should encounter difficulties innumerable, that we should be called upon to put up with the greatest hardships of life, when viewed from the standard to which one had been accustomed, and that we should be put to great physical endurance, we could not doubt. But we believed in the Chinese, and believed that should any evil befall us it would be the out- come of our own lack of forbearance, or of our own direct seeking. We knew that to the Chinese we should at once be “ foreign devils” and “ barba- rians,”’ that if not holding us actually in contempt, they would feel some condescension in dealing and mixing with us; but I was personally of the opinion that it was easier for us to walk through China than it would be for two Chinese, dressed as Chinese, to walk through Great Britain or America, What would the canny Highlander or the rural English rustic think of two pig-tailed men tramping through their countryside ? We anchored at Ichang at 7.30 a.m. on March roth. I fell up against a boatman who offered to take us ashore. An uglier fellow I had never seen in the East. He had some affection of the nose, rendering it like a burnt india-rubber tube, and he had tooth- less jaws. The morning sunshine soon dried the decks of the gunboat Kinsha (then stationed in the river for the defence of the port) which English 16 SHANGHAI TO ICHANG. jack-tars were swabbing in a half-hearted sort of way, and all looked rosy enough.* But for the author, who with his companion was a literal ‘‘ babe in the wood,” the day was most eventful and trying to one’s personal serenity. We had asked questions of all and sundry respecting our proposed tramp and the way we should get to work in making preparations. Each individual person seemed vigorously to do his best to induce us to turn back and follow callings of respectable members of society. From Shanghai upwards we might have believed ourselves watched by a secret society, which had for its motto, ‘“‘ Return, oh, wanderer, return!” Hardly a person knew aught of the actual conditions of the interior of the country in which he lived and laboured, and everyone tried to dissuade us from our project. Coming ashore in good spirits, we called at the Consulate, at the back of the city graveyard, and were smoking his cigars and giving his boy an examina- tion in elementary English, when the Consul came down. It was not possible, however, for us to get much more information than we had read up, and the Consul suggested that the most likely person to be of use to us would be the missionary at the China Inland Mission. Thither we repaired, following a sturdy employé of Britain, but we found that the C. I. M. representative was not to be found—despite our repairing. So off we trotted to the chief business house of the town, at the entrance to which we were met by a Chinese, who bowed gravely, asked whether we had eaten our rice, and told us, quietly but pointedly, that our passing up the rough stone steps * The Kinsha was the first British gunboat on the Upper Yangtze. 17 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. would be of no use, as the manager was out. A few minutes later I stood reading the inscription on the gravestone near the church, whilst my brave com- panion, The Other Man, endeavoured fruitlessly to pacify a fierce dog in the doorway of the Scottish Society’s missionary premises—but that missionary, too, was out! What, then, was the little game? Were all the foreigners resident in this town dodging us, afraid of us—or what ? “The latter, the blithering idiots!” yelled The Other Man. He was infuriated. ‘‘ Two Englishmen with English tongues in their heads, and unable to direct their own movements. Preposterous!’”’ And then, making an observation which I will not print, he suggested mildly that we might fix up all matters ourselves. Within an hour an English-speaking “ one piecee cook ” had secured the berth, which carried a salary of twenty-five dollars per month, we were well on ‘the way with the engaging of our boat for the Gorges trip, and one by one our troubles vanished. Laying in stores, however, was not the lightest of sundry perplexities. Curry and rice had been suggested as the staple diet for the river journey; and we ordered, with no thought to the contrary, a picul of best rice, various brands of curries, which were raked from behind the shelves of a dingy little store in a back street, and presented to us at alarming prices—enough to last a regiment of soldiers for pretty well the number of days we two were to travel; and, for luxuries, we laid in a few tinned meats. All was practically settled, when The Other Man, settling his eyes dead upon me, yelled— “Dingle, you ve forgotten the milk!”’ And then, 18 SHANGHAI TO ICHANG. after a moment, ‘‘ Oh, well, we can surely do without milk; it’s no use coming on a journey like this unless one can rough it a bit.” And he ended up with a rude reference to the disgusting sticky con- densed milk tins, and we wandered on. Suddenly he stopped, did The Other Man. He looked at a small stone on the pavement for a long time, eventually cruelly blurting out, directly at me, as if it were all my misdoing: ‘“ The sugar, the sugar! We must have sugar, man.’ I said nothing, with the exception of a slight remark that we might do without sugar, as we were to do without milk. Then there was a pause. Then, raising his stick in the air, The Other Man perorated: “‘ Now, I have no wish to quarrel” (and he put his nose nearer to mine), “‘ you know that, of course. But to think we can do without sugar is quite unreasonable, and I had no idea you were such a cantankerous man We have sugar, or—I go back.” We had sugar. It was brought on board in upwards of twenty small packets of that detestable thin Chinese paper, and The Other Man, with com- mendable meekness, withdrew several pleasantries he had unwittingly dropped anent deficiencies in my upbringing. Fifty pounds of this sugar were ordered, and sugar—that dirty, brown sticky stuff—got into everything on board—my fingers are sticky even as I write—and no less than exactly one-half went down to the bottom of the Yangtze. Travellers by house- boat on the Upper Yangtze should have some knowledge of commissariat. * * * * Getting away was a tedious business. Later, the fellows pressed us to spend a good deal 19 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. of time in the small, dingy, ill-lighted apartment they are pleased to call their club; and the skipper had to re-commission his boat, get in provisions for the voyage, engage his crew, pay off debts, and attend to a thousand and one minute details—all to be done after the contract to carry the madcap passengers had been signed and sealed, added to the more practical triviality of three-fourths of the charge being paid down. And then our captain, to add to the dilemma, vociferously yelled to us, in some unknown jargon which got on our nerves terribly, that he was waiting for a “lucky” day to raise anchor. However, we did, as the reader will be able to imagine, eventually get away, after having watched the sacrifice of a cock to the God of the River, with the invocation that we might be kept in safety, amid the firing of countless deafening crackers. Poling and rowing through a maze of junks, our little float- ing caravan, with the two magnates on board, and their picul of rice, their curry and their sugar, and slenderest outfits, bowled along under plain sail, the fore-deck packed with a motley team of somewhat dirty and ill-fed trackers, who whistled and halloed the peculiar hallo of the Upper Yangtze for more wind. The little township of Ichang was soon left astern, and we entered speedily to all intents and purposes into a new world, a world untrammelled by con- ventionalism and the spirit of the West. 20 A couple of avistocratic trachers. Port of Ichang. Showing the Customs boat in right-hand corner. The Author's House-boat (wu-pan). In which he passed eighteen days on the river. The man at the stern and the two men at the bow keep her off the rocks with long bamboo boat-hooks. SECOND JOURNEY. ICHANG TO CHUNG-KING, THROUGH THE YANGTZE GORGES. CHAPTER II. Gloom in Ichang Gorge. Lightning's effect. Travellers’ fear. Impressive introduction to the Gorges. Boat gets into Yangtze fashion. Storm and its weird effects. Wu-pan : what itis. Heavenly electricity and tts vagaries. Beautiful evening scene, despite heavy rain. Bedding soaked. Sleep in a@ Burberry. Gorges and Niagara Falls compared. Bad descriptions of Yangtze. World of eternity. Man’s significant insignificance. Life on board briefly described. Philosophy of travel. Houseboat life not luxurious. Lose our only wash-basin. Remarks on the “boy.” A change tn the kitchen : questionable soup. Fairly low temperature. Troubles in the larder. General arrangements on board. Crew’s sleeping-place. Sacking makes a curtain. Journalistic labours not easy. Rats preponderate. Gorges described statistically. DEEPER and deeper drooped the dull grey gloom, like a curtain falling slowly and impenetrably over all things. A vivid but broken flash of lightning, blazing in a flare of blue and amber, poured livid reflections, and illuminated with dreadful distinctness, if only for one ghastly moment, the stupendous cliffs of the Ichang Gorge, whose wall-like steepness suddenly became darkened as black as ink. Thus, with a grand impressiveness, this great gully in the mountains assumed hugely gigantic propor- tions, stretching interminably from east to west, up to heaven and down to earth, silhouetted to the north 2I ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. against a small remaining patch of golden purple, whose weird glamour seemed awesomely to herald the coming of a new world into being, lasting but for a moment longer, until again the blue blaze quickly cut up the sky into a thousand shreds and tiny silver bars. And then, suddenly, with a vast down swoop, as if some colossal bird were taking the earth under her far-outstretching wings, dense darkness fell—impenetrable, sooty darkness, that in a moment shut out all light, all power of sight. Then from out the sombre heavens deep thunder boomed ominously as the reverberating roar of a pack of hunger-ridden lions, and the two men, aliens in an alien land, stood beneath the tattered matting awn- ing with a peculiar fear and some foreboding. We were tied in fast to the darkened sides of the great Ichang Gorge—a magnificent sixteen-mile stretch, opening up the famous gorges on the fourth of the great rivers of the world, which had cleaved its course through a chain of hills, and whose perpen- dicular cliffs form wonderful rock-bound banks, dispelling all thought of the monotony of the Lower Yangtze. Upstream we had glided merrily upon a fresh breeze, which bore the warning of a storm. All on board was speedily settling down into Yangtze fashion, and the barbaric human clamour of our trackers, which now mutteringly died away, was suddenly taken up, as above recorded, and all unexpectedly answered by a grander uproar—a deep threatening boom of far-off thunder. In circling tones and semitones of wrath it volleyed gradually through the dark ravines, and, startled by the sound, the two travellers, roused for the first time from their natural engrossment in the common doings 22 ICHANG TO CHUNG-KING. of the wu-pan,* saw the shadow of the sun on the waters, now turned to a livid murkiness, deepen with a threatening ink-like aspect as the river rushed voluminously past our tiny floating haven. Strangely silenced were we by this weird terror, and watched and listened, chained to the deck by a thousand mingled fears and fascinations, which breathed upon our nerves like a chill wind. As we became accustomed then to the yellow darkness, we beheld about the land- scape a spectral look, and the sepulchral sound of the moving thunder seemed the half-muffled clang of some great iron-tongued funeral bell. Then came the rain, introduced swiftly by the deafening clatter of another thunder crash that made one stagger like a ship in a wild sea, and we strained our eyes to gaze into a visionary chasm cleaved in twain by the furious lightning. Playing upon the face of the unruffied river, with a brilliancy at once so awful and enchanting, this singular flitting and wavering of the heavenly electricity, as it flashed haphazardly around all things, threw about one an illumination quite indescribable. For hours we sat upon a beam athwart the after- deck, in silence drinking in the strange phenomenon. We watched, after a small feed of curry and rice, long into the dark hours, when the thunder had passed us by, and in the distant booming one could now imagine the lower notes streaming forth from some great solemn organ symphony. The fierce light- ning twitched, as it danced in and out the crevices— inwards, outwards, upwards, then finally lost in one downward swoop towards the river, tearing open * A wu-pan (literally wu of five and pan of boards) is a small boat, the smallest used by travellers on the Upper Yangtze. They are of various shapes, made according to the nature of the part of the river on which they ply.—E. J. D. 23 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. the liquid blackness with its crystal blade of fire. The rain ceased not. Butsoon the moon, peeping out from the tops of a jagged wall above us, looking like a soiled, half-melted snowball, shone full down the far- stretching gorge, and now its broad lustre shed itself, like powdered silver, over the whole scene, so that one could have imagined oneself in the living splendour of some eternal sphere of ethereal sweetness. Andso it might have been had the rain abated—a curious accompaniment toa moonlight night. Down it came, straight and determined and businesslike, in the wind- less silence, dancing like a shower of diamonds of purest brilliance on the background of the placid waters. Very beautiful, reader, for a time. But would that the rain had been all moonshine ! Glorious was it to revel in for a time. But, during the weary night watches, in a bed long since soaked through, and one’s safest nightclothes now the stolid Burberry, with face protected by a twelve- cent. umbrella, even one’s curry and rice saturated to sap with the constant drip, and everything around one rendered cold and uncomfortable enough through a perforation in its slenderest part of the worn-out bamboo matting—ah, it was then, then that one would have foregone with alacrity the dreams of the nomadic life of the wu-pan. Our introdustion, therefore, to the great Gorges of the Upper Yangtze—to China what the Niagara Falls are to America—was not remarkable for its placidity, albeit taken with as much complacency as the occasion allowed. I do not, however, intend to weary or to entertain the reader, as may be, by a long description of the Yangtze gorges. Time and time again have they fallen to the imaginative pens:of travellers—mostly bad or 24 ICHANG TO CHUNG-KING. indifferent descriptions, few good; none better, perhaps, than Mrs. Bishop’s. But at best they are imaginative—they lack reality. It has been said that the world of imagination is the world of eternity, and as of eternity, so of the Gorges—they cannot be adequately described. As I write now in the Ichang Gorge, I seem veritably to have reached eternity. I seem to have arrived at the bosom of an after-life, where one’s body has ceased to vegetate, and where, in an infinite and eternal world of imagination, one’s soul expands with fullest freedom. There seems to exist in this eternal world of unending rock and in- vulnerable precipice permanent realities which stand from eternity to eternity. As the oak dies and leaves. its eternal image in the seed which never dies, so these grand river-forced ravines, abused and dis- abused as may be, go on for ever, despite the scrib- blers, and one finds the best in his imagination return- ing by some back-lane to contemplative thought. But as a casual traveller, may I say that the first ex- perience I had of the gorges made me modest, patient, single-minded, conscious of man’s significant in- significance, conscious of the unspeakable, wondrous. grandeur of this unvisited corner of the world— a spot in which blustering, selfish, self-conceited persons will not fare well? Humility and patience are the first requisites in travelling on the Upper Yangtze, Reader, for your sake I refrain from a description. But may I, for perhaps your sake too, if you would wander hither ere the charm of things as they were in the beginning is still unrobbed and unmolested, give you some few impressions of a little of the life—grave, gay, but never unhappy—which I spent with my excellent co-voyager, The Other Man. It is a part of wisdom, when starting the journey, 25 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. not to look forward to the end with too much eager- ness: hear my gentle whisper that you may never get there, and if you do, congratulate yourself ; interest yourself in the progress of the journey, for the present only is yours. Each day has its tasks, its rapids, its perils, its glories, its fascinations, its surprises, and—if you will live as we did, its ourry and vice. Then, if you are travelling with a com- panion, remember that it is better to yield a little than to quarrel a great deal. Most disagreeable and undignified is it anywhere to get into the habit of standing up for what people are pleased to call their little rights, but nowhere more so than on the Upper Yangtze houseboat, under the gaze of a Yangtze crew. Life is really too short for continual bicker- ing, and to my way of thinking it is far quieter, happier, more prudent and productive of more peace, if one could yield a little of those precious little rights than to incessantly squabble to maintainthem. There- fore, from the beginning to the end of the trip, make the best of everything in every day, and I can assure you, if you are not ill-tempered and suffer not from ‘your liver, Nature will open her bosom and lead you by these strange by-ways into her hidden charms cand unadorned recesses of sublime beauty, uneclipsed for their kind anywhere in the world. Think not that the life will be luxurious—house- ‘boat life on the Upper Yangtze is decidedly not luxurious. Were it not for the magnificence of the ‘scenery and ever-changing outdoor surroundings, as a matter of fact, the long river journey would pro- bably become unbearably dull. * * * * Our wu-pan was to get through the Gorges in as Short a time as was possible, and for that reason we 26 ICHANG TO CHUNG-KING. travelled in the discomfort of the smallest boat used to face the rapids. People entertaining the smallest idea of doing things travel in nothing short of a kwadze, the orthodox houseboat, with several rooms and ordinary conveniences. Ours was a wu-pan—literally five boards. We had no conveniences whatever, and the second morning out we were left without even a wash- basin. As I was standing in the stern, I saw it swirling away from us, and inquiring through a peep-hole, heard the perplexing explanation of my boy. Gesticulating violently, he told us how, with the wash-basin in his hand, he had been pushed by one of the crew, and how, loosened from his grasp, my toilet ware had been gripped by the river—and now appeared far down the stream like a large bead. The Other Man was alarmed at the boy’s discomfiture, ejaculated something about the loss being quite irreparable, and with a loud laugh and quite natural hilarity proceeded quietly to use a saucepan as a combined shaving-pot and wash-basin. It did quite well for this in the morning, and during the day resumed its duty as seat for me at the type- writer. Our boy, apart from this small misfortune, com- ported himself pretty well. His English was under- standable, and he could cook anything. He dished us up excellent soup in enamelled cups and, as we hhad no ingredients on board so far as we knew to make soup, and as The Other Man had that day lost an old Spanish tam-o’-shanter, we naturally con- cluded that he had used the old hat for the making of the soup, and at once christened it as “‘ consommé a la maotsi ’’—and we can recommend it. After we had grown somewhat tired of the eternal curry and 27 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. rice, we asked him quietly if he could not make us something else, fearing a rebuff. He stood hesi- tatingly before us, gazing into nothingness. His face was pallid, his lips hard set, and his stooping figure looking curiously stiff and lifeless on that frozen morning—the temperature wa3 36 degrees below freezing point, and our noses were red too! “God bless the man, you no savee! I wantchee good chow. Why in the name of goodness can’t you give us something decent! What on earth did you come for?” “ Alas!” he shouted, for we were at a rapid, “my savee makee good chow. No have got nothing!”” | ‘No have got nothing! No have got nothing!” Mysterious words, what could they mean? Where, then, was our picul of rice, and our curry, and our sugar ? “ The fellow ’s a swindler!’’ cried The Other Man in an angry semitone. But that’s all very well. ‘No have got nothing!’”’ Ah, there lay the secret. Pre- sently The Other Man, head of the general com- missariat, spoke again with touching eloquence. He gave the boy to understand that we were power- less to alter or soften the conditions of the larder, that we were victims of a horrible destiny, that we entertained no stinging malice towards him per- sonally—but . . . could he doit? Either a great wrath or a great sorrow overcame the boy; he skulked past, asked us to lie down on our shelves, where we had our beds, to give him room, and then set to work. In twenty-five minutes we had a three-course meal (all out of the same pot, but no matter), and onwards to our destination we fed royally. In 28 ICHANG TO CHUNG-KING. parting with the men after our safe arrival at Chung- king, we left with them about seven-eighths of the picul—and were not at all regretful. I should not like to assert—because I am telling the truth here—that our boat was bewilderingly roomy. As a matter of fact, its length was some forty feet, its width seven feet, its depth much less, and it drew eight inches of water. Yet in it we had our bed- rooms, our dressing-rooms, our dining-rooms, our library, our occasional medicine-room, our cooking- room—and all else. If we stood bolt upright in the saloonamidships we bumped our heads on the bamboo matting which formed an arched roof. On the nose of the boat slept seven men—you may question it, reader, but they did; in the stern, on either side of a great rudder, slept our boy and a friend of:his; and between them and us, laid out flat on the top of a cellar (used by the ship’s cook for the storing of rice, cabbage, and other uneatables, and the breeding-cage of hundreds of rats, which swarm all around one) were the captain and com- modore—a fat, fresh-complexioned, jocose creature, strenuous at opium smoking. Through the holes in the curtain—a piece of sacking, but one would not wish this to be known—dividing them from us, we could see him preparing his globules to smoke before turning in for the night, and despite our frequent taving objections, our words ringing with vibrating abuse, it continued all the way to Chung-king: he certainly gazed in disguised wonderment, but we could not get him to say anything bearing upon the matter. Temperature during the day stood at about 50 degrees, and at night went down to about 30 degrees below freezing point. Rains were frequent. Journalistic labours, seated upon 29 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. the upturned saucepan aforesaid, without a cushion, went hard. At night the Chinese candle, much wick and little wax, stuck in the centre of an empty “Three Castles” tin, which the boy had used for some days as a pudding dish, gave us light. We generally slept in our overcoats, and as many others as we happened to have. Rats crawled over our uncurtained bodies, and woke us a dozen times each night by either nibbling our ears or falling bodily from the roof on to our faces. Our joys came not to us—they were made on board. The following are the Gorges, with a remark or , two about each, to be passed through before one reaches Kweifu :— NAME OF GORGE. LENGTH. REMARKS. Ichang Gorge .. 16 miles .. First and probably one of the finest of the Gorges. Niu Kan Ma Fee 4 miles .. An hour’s journey (or Ox Liver after coming out Gorge) of the Ichang Gorge, if the breeze be favour- able ; an arduous day’s journey during high river, with no wind. Mi Tsang (or Rice 2 miles .. Finest view is ob- Granary Gorge) tained from wes- tern extremity ; exceedingly pre- cipitous. 30 / ICHANG TO CHUNG-KING. NAME OF GORGE. Niu Kou = (or — Buffalo Mouth Reach) Urishan Hsia (or _— Gloomy Moun- tain Gorge) Fang Hsian Hsia _— (or | Windbox Gorge) 31 LENGTH. REMARKS, Very quiet in low- water season ;. wild stretch dur- ing high river. At the head of this reach H.M.S. Woodlark came to grief on her maiden trip (see page 42). Over thirty miles in length. Grandest and highest gorge en route to Chung- king. Half-way through is the boundary be-- tween Hu-peh. and Szech’wan. Last of the gorges ; just beyond is the city of Kweifu. CHAPTER III. THE YANGTZE RAPIDS. THE following is a rough list of the principal rapids to be negotiated on the river upward from Ichang. One of the chief discomforts the traveller first experiences is due to a total ignorance of the vicinity of the main rapids, and often, therefore, when he is least expecting it perhaps, he is called upon by the Jaoban to go ashore. He has then to pack up the things he values, is dragged ashore himself, his gear follows, and one who has no knowledge of the language and does not know the ropes is, therefore, never quite happy for fear of some rapid turning up. By comparing the rapids with the Gorges the traveller would, however, from the lists given, be able easily to trace the whereabouts of the more dangerous tushes; which are distributed with alarming frequency on the river between Ichang and Kweifu. TA TONG T’AN (OTTER CAVE RAPID). Low water rapid. Swirling volume of coffee and milk colour ; round about a maze of rapids and races, in the Yao-cha Ho reach. TONG LING RAPID. At the foot of the Ox Liver Gorge. An enormous black rock lies amid stream some forty feet below, or perhaps as much above the surface, but unless ex- perienced at low water will not appeal to the 32 er are eis epee Seiya 32 An up-viver Customs station. ‘padzauiqns Ayamqua ore JowWUNs at[} UT sy902q "saB4or) ayy ur gods snoadyouvadg W traveller as a rapid; passage dangerous, dreaded during low-water season. On Dec. 28th, 1900, the German steamer, Sui-Hsiang was lost here. She foundered in twenty-five fathoms of water, with an immense hole ripped in her bottom by the black rock ; all on board saved by the red boats, with the exception of the captain. HSIN T’AN RAPIDS (OR CHIN T’AN RAPIDS). During winter quite formidable ; the head, second and third rapids situated in close proximity, the head rapid being far the worst to negotiate. On a bright winter’s day one of the finest spectacles on the Upper Yangtze. Wrecks frequent. Just at head of Ox Liver Gorge. YEH T’AN (OR WILD RAPID). River reduced suddenly to half its width by an enormous detritus of boulders, taking the form of a huge jagged tongue, with curling on edges ; commonly said to be high when the Hsin T’an is low. At its worst during early summer and autumn. Wrecks frequent, after Mi Tsang Gorge is passed, eight miles from Kwei-chow. NIU K’EO T’AN (BUFFALO MOUTH RAPID). Situated at the head of Buffalo Mouth Reach, said to be more difficult to approach than even the Yeh T’an, because of the great swirls in the bay below. H.M.S. Woodlark came to grief here on her maiden trip up river (see page 42). HSIN MA T’AN (OR DISMOUNT HORSE RAPID). Encountered through the Urishan Hsia or Gloomy Mountain Gorge, particularly nasty during mid-river 33 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. season. Just about here, in 1906, the French gun- boat Olvy came within an ace of destruction by losing her rudder. Immediately, like a riderless horse, she dashed off headlong for the rocky shore ; but at the same instant her engines were working astern for all they were worth, and fortunately succeeded in taking the way off her just as her nose grazed the rocks, and she slid back undamaged into the swirly bay, only to be waltzed round and tossed to and fro by the violent whirlpools. However, by good luck and management she was kept from dashing her brains out on the reefs, and eventually brought in to a friendly sand patch and safely moored, whilst a wooden jury rudder was rigged, with which she eventually reached her destination. HEH SHiH T’AN (OR BLACK ROCK RAPID). Almost at the end of the Wind Box Gorge. HSIN LONG T’AN (OR NEW DRAGON RAPID). Twenty-five miles below Wan Hsien. Sometimes styled Glorious Dragon Rapid, it constitutes the last formidable stepping-stone during low river on- ward to Chung-king. Worst during the months of February and March. It was formed by a landslip as recently as 1896, when the whole side of a hill falling into the stream reduced its breadth to less than a fourth of what it was previously, and produced this roaring rapid. This pent-up volume of water, always endeavour- ing to break away the rocky bonds which have harnessed it, rushes roaring as a huge, tongue-shaped, tumbling mass between its confines of rock and reef, Breaking into swift back-wash and swirls in the bay below, it lashes back in a white fury at its obstacles, 34 i1llnk LAINUGULSZO NATL). Fortunately for the junk traffic, it improves rapidly with the advent of the early spring freshets, and at mid-level entirely disappears. The rapid is at its worst during the months of February and March, when it certainly merits the appellation of ‘‘ Glorious Dragon Rapid,” presenting a fine spectacle, though perhaps a somewhat fearsome one to the traveller, who is about to tackle it with his frail barque. A hundred or more wretched-looking trackers, mostly women and children, are tailed on to the three stout bamboo hausers, and amid a mighty din of rushing water, beating drums, cries of pilots and boatmen, the boat is hauled slowly and painfully over. Accord- ing to Chinese myths, the landslip, which produced the rapid was caused by the following circum- stance. The ova of a dragon being deposited in the bowels of the earth at this particular spot, in due course became hatched out in some mysterious manner. The baby dragon grew and grew, but re- mained in a dormant state until quite full grown, when, as is the habit of the dragon, it became active, and at the first awakening shook down the hill-side by a mighty effort, freed himself from the bowels of the earth, and made his way down river to the sea; hence the landslip, the rapid, and its name. FUH T’AN RAPID (OR TIGER RAPID). Eight miles beyond Wan Hsien. Very savage during summer months, but does not exist during low-water season. Beyond this point river widens considerably. Twenty-five miles further on travellers should look out for Shih Pao Chai, or Precious Stone Castle, a remarkable cliff some 250 or 300 feet high. A curious eleven-storied pavilion, built up the face of the cliff, contains the stairway to the summit, on 35 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. which stands a Buddhist temple. There is a legend attached to this remarkable rock that savours very much of the goose with the golden eggs. Once upon a time, from a small natural aperture near the summit, a supply of rice sufficient for the needs of the priests flowed daily into a basin-shaped hole, just large enough to hold the day’s supply. The priests, however, thinking to get a larger daily supply, chiselled out the basin-shaped hole to twice its original size, since when the flow of rice ceased. KWAN iN T’AN (OR GODDESS OF MERCY RAPID). Two miles beyond the town of Feng T’ou. Like the Fuh T’an, is an obstacle to navigation only during the summer months, when junks are often obliged to wait for several days for a favourable opportunity to cross the rapid. 36 CHAPTER IV. Scene at the Rapid. Dangers of the Yeh T’an. Gear taken ashore. Intense cold. Further preparation. Engaging the trackers. Fever of excitement. Her nose ts put to it. § Struggles for mastery. Author saves boatman. Fifteen- knot current. Terrific labour on shore. Man nearly falls overboard. Straining hawsers carry us over safely. The merriment among the men. The thundering cataract. Trackers’ chanting. Their life. ‘‘ Pioneer” at the Yeh T’an. The Buffalo Mouth Reach. Story of the ‘‘ Woodlark.’”’ « How she was saved. Arrival at Kwetfu. Difficulty in landing. Laying in provisions. Author laid up with malaria. Survey of trade in Shanghai and Hong-Kong. Where and why the Britisher fails. Comparison with Germans. Three western provinces and pack-horse traffic. Advaniages of new vatlway. Yangize likely to be abandoned. East India Company. French and British interests. Hint to Hong-Kong Chamber of Commerce. WILD shrieking, frantic yelling, exhausted groaning, confusion and clamour,—one long, deafening din. A bewildering, maddening mob of reckless, terrified human beings rush hither and thither, unseeingly and distractedly. Will she go? Yes! No! Yes! Then comes the screeching, the scrunching, the straining, and then—a final snap! Back we go, sheering helplessly, swayed to and fro most danger- ously by the foaming waters, and almost, but not quite, turn turtle. The red boat follows us anxiously, and watches our timid little craft bump against the rock-strewn coast. But we are safe, and raise un- consciously a cry of gratitude to the deity of the river. We were at the Yeh T’an, or the Wild Rapid, some distance on from the Ichang Gorge, were almost 37 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. over the growling monster, when the tow-line, strain- ing to its utmost limit, snapped suddenly with little warning, and we drifted in a moment or two away down to last night’s anchorage, far below, where we were obliged to bring up the last of the long tier of boats of which we were this morning the first. And now we are ready again to take our turn. Our gear is all taken ashore. Seated on a stone on shore, watching operations, is The Other Man. The sun vainly tries to get through, and the intense cold is almost unendurable. No hitch is to occur this time. The toughest and stoutest bamboo hawsers are dexterously brought out, their inboard ends bound in a flash firmly round the mast close down to the deck, washed by the great waves of the rapid, just in front of the ’midships pole through which I breathlessly watch proceedings. I want to feel again the sensation. The captain, in essentially the Chinese way, is engaging a crew of demon-faced trackers to haul her over. Pouring towards the boat, ina fever of excitement that rises higher every moment, the natural elements of hunger and con- stant struggle against the great river swell their fury; they bellow like wild beasts, they are like beasts, for they have known nothing but struggle all their lives; they have always, since they were tiny children, been fighting this roaring water monster— they know noneelse. And now, as I say, they bellow like beasts, each man ravenously eager to be among the number chosen to earn a few cash.* The arrange- ment at last is made, and the discordant hubbub, instead of lessening, grows more and more deafening. * Cash, a small brass coin with a hole through the middle. Nominally 1,000 cash to the dollar. See Appendix K. 38 THE YANGTZE RAPIDS. It is a miserable, desperate, wholly panic-stricken crowd that then harnesses up with their great hooks joined to a rough waist-belt, with which they connect themselves to the straining tow-lines. And now her nose is put into the teeth of this trough of treachery—a veritable boiling cauldron, stirring up all past mysteries. Waves rush furiously towards us, with the growl of a thousand demons, whose anger is only swelled by the thousands of miles of her course from far-away Tibet. It seems as if they must instantly devour her, and that we must now go under to swell the number of their victims. But they only beat her back, for she rides gracefully, faltering timidly with frightened creaks and groans, whilst the waters shiver her frail bulwarks with their cruel message of destruction, which might mean her very death-rattle. I get landed in the stomach with the end of a gigantic bamboo boat-hook, used by one of the man standing in the bows whose duty is to fend her off the rocks. He falls towards the river. I grab his single garment, give one swift pull, and he comes up again with a jerky little laugh and asks if he has hurt me—yelling through his hands in my ears, for the noise is terrible. To look out over the side makes me giddy, for the fifteen-knot current, blustering and bubbling and foaming and leaping, gives one the feeling that he is in an express train tearing through the sea. On shore, far ahead, I can see the trackers—straggling forms of men and women, touching each other, grasping each other, wrestling furiously and mightily, straining on all fours, now gripping a boulder to aid them forward, now to the right, now to the left, always fighting for one more inch, and engaged in a task which to one seeing it for the first time looks as if it were quite beyond 39 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. human effort. Fagged and famished beings are these trackers, whose life day after day, week in week out, is harder than the average costermonger’s donkey. They throw up their hands in a dumb frenzy of protest and futile appeal to the presiding deity; and here on the river, depending entirely on those men on the shore, slowly, inch by inch, the little craft, feeling her own weakness, forges ahead against the leaping current in the gapway in the reef. None come to offer assistance to our crowd, who are now turned facing us, and strain almost flat on their backs, giving the strength of every drop of blood and fibre of their being ; and the scene, now lit up by a momentary glimmer of feeble sunlight, assumes a wonderful and terrible picturesqueness. I am chained to the spot by a horrible fascination, and I find myself unconsciously saying, “I fear she will not go. I fear——’’ Buta man has fallen exhausted, he almost fell overboard, and now leans against the mast in utter weariness and fatigue, brought on by the morning’s exertions. He is in- stantly relieved by a bull-dog fellow of enormous strength. Now comes the culminating point, a truly terrifying moment, the very anguish of which frightened me, as I looked around for the lifeboat, and I saw that it disturbed even the commodore’s cold and self-satisfied dignity. The hawsers strain again. Creak, crack! creak crack! The lifeboat watches and comes nearer to us. There is a mighty yell. We cannot go! Yes, we can! There is a mighty pull, and you feel the boat almost torn asunder. Another mighty pull, a tremendous quiver of the timbers, and you turn to see the angry water, which sounds as if a hundred hounds are beating under us for entry at the barred door. 40 THE YANGTZE RAPIDS. There is another deafening yell, the men tear away like frightened horses. Another mighty pull, and. another, and another, and we slide over into smooth water. Then I breathe freely, and yell myself. The little boat seems to gasp for breath like a drowning man, saved in the nick of time, shuddering in every limb with pain and fear. As we tied up in smooth water, all the men, from. the aoban to the meanest tracker, laughed and yelled. and told each other how it was done. We baled the water out of the boat, and one was glad to pull away from the deafening hum of the thundering cataract. A faulty tow-line, a slippery hitch, one false step, one- false manceuvre, and the shore might have been by that time strewn with our corpses. As it was, we: were safe and happy. But the trackers are strange creatures. At times. they are a quarter of amile ahead. Soft echoes of their coarse chanting came down the confines of the gully, after the rapid had been passed, and in round- ing a rocky promontory mid-stream, one would catch sight of them bending their bodies in pulling steadily against the current of the river. Occasionally one of these poor fellows slips ; there is a shriek, his body is dashed unmercifully against the jagged cliffs in its. last journey to the river, which carries the mutilated. corpse away. And yet these men, engaged in this. terrific toil, with utmost danger to their lives, live almost exclusively on boiled rice and dirty cabbage, and receive the merest pittance in money at the journey’s end. Some idea of the force of this enormous volume of water may be given by mentioning the exploits of the steamer Pioneer, which on three consecutive 41 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. “occasions attacked the Yeh T’an when at its worst, and, though steaming a good fourteen knots, failed ‘to ascend. She was obliged to lay out a long steel- wire hawser, and heave herself over by means of her windlass, the engines working at full speed at the same time. Hard and heavy was the heave, gaining foot by foot, with a tension on the hawser almost to breaking strain in a veritable battle against the dragon of the river. Yet so complete are the ‘changes which are wrought by the great variation in the level of the river, that this formidable mid-level Tapid completely disappears at high level. After we had left this rapid—and right glad were we to get away—we came, after a couple of hours’ run, to the Niu K’eo, or Buffalo Mouth Reach, quiet enough during the-low water season, but a wild Stretch during high river, where many a junk is caught by the violently gyrating swirls, rendered unmanageable, and dashed to atoms in as short a ‘space of time as it takes to write it, on some rocky promontory or boulder pile. It was here that the Woodlark, one of the magnificent gunboats which patrol the river to safeguard the interests of the Union Jack in this region, came to grief on her Maiden trip to Chung-king. One of these strong Swirls caught the ship’s stern, rendering her rudders useless for the moment, and causing her to sheer ‘broadside into the foaming rapid. The engines were immediately reversed to full speed astern; but the swift current, combined with the momentum of the ship, carried her willy-nilly to the rockbound coast, on which she crumpled her bows as if they were made ‘of tin. Fortunately she was built in water-tight -sections ; her engineers removed the forward section, ‘straightened out the crumpled plates, riveted them 42 THE YANGTZE RAPIDS. together, and bolted the section back into its place again so well, that on arrival at Chung-king not a trace of the accident was visible. * * * * Upon arrival at Kweifu one bids farewell to the Gorges. This town, formerly a considerable coaling centre, overlooks magnificently pretty hillocks, with cottage gardens cultivated in every accessible corner, and a wide sweep of the river. We landed with difficulty. ‘“‘ Chor, chor!” yelled the trackers, who marked time to their cry, swinging their arms to and fro at each short step; but they almost gave up the ghost. However, we did land, and so did our boy, who bought excellent provisions and meat, which, alas! too soon disappeared. The mutton and beef gradually grew less and daily blackened, wrapped up in opposite corners of the cabin, under the protection from the wet of a couple of sheets of the “ Pink ’Un.” From Kweifu to Wan Hsien there was the same kind of scenery—the clear river winding among sand-flats and gravel-banks, with occasional stiff rapids. But after having been in a wu-pan for ‘several days, suffering that which has been detailed, and much besides, the journey got a bit dreary. These, however, are ordinary circumstances; but when one has been laid up on a bench of a bed for three days with a high temperature, a legacy of several years in the humid tropics, the physical discomfort baffles description. Malaria, as all sufferers know, has a tendency to cause trouble as soon as one gets into cold weather, and in my case, as will be seen in subse- quent parts of this book, it held faithfully to its best traditions. Fever on the Yangtze in a wu-pan 43 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. would require a chapter to itself, not to mention the kindly eccentricities of a companion whose knowledge of malaria was most elementary and whose knowledge of nursing absolutely ni. But I refrain. As also do I of further talk about the Yangtze gorges and the rapids. From Kweifu to Wan Hsien is a tedious journey. The country opens out, and is more or less monotonously flat. The majority of the dangers and difficulties, however, are over, and one is able to settle down in comparative peace. Fortunately for the author, nothing untoward happened, but travel- lers are warned not to be too sanguine. Wrecks have happened within a few miles of the destination, generally to be accounted for by the unhappy knack the Chinese boatman has of taking all precautions where the dangerous rapids exist, and leaving all to chance elsewhere. Some two years later, as I was coming down the river from Chung-king in December, T counted no less than nine wrecks, one boat having on board a cargo for the China Inland Mission authorities of no less than 480 boxes. The contents. were spread out on the banks to dry, while the boat was tured upside down and repaired on the spot. * * * * A hopeless cry is continually ascending in Hong- Kong and Shanghai that trade is bad, that the palmy days are gone, and that one might as well leave business to take care of itself. And it is not to be denied that increased trade in the Far East does not of necessity mean increased. profits. Competition has rendered buying and selling,. if they are to show increased dividends, a much harder task than some of the older merchants had. 44 THE YANGTZE RAPIDS. when they built up their businesses twenty or thirty ‘years ago. There is no comparison. But Hong- Kong, by virtue of her remarkably favourable posi- tion geographically, should always be able to hold ther own; and now that the railway has pierced the great province of Yiin-nan, and brought the provinces beyond the navigable Yangtze nearer to the ‘outside world, she should be able to reap a big ‘harvest in Western China, if merchants will move at the right time. More often than not the Britisher loses his trade, not on account of the alleged reason that business is not to be done, but because, content ‘with his club life, and with playing games when he should be doing business, he allows the German to tush past him, and this man, an alien in the colony, ‘by persistent plodding and other more or less com- mendable traits of business which I should like to detail, but for which I have no space, takes away the trade while the Britisher looks on. The whole of the trade of the three western pro- -vinces—Yiin-nan, Kwei-chow and Szech’wan—has for all time been handled by Shanghai, going into the interior by the extremely hazardous route of these Yangtze rapids, and then over the mountains ‘by coolie or pack-horse. This has gone on for centuries. But now the time has come for the Hong- Kong trader to step in and carry away the lion share of the greatly increasing foreign trade for those three provinces by means of the advantage the new Tonkin-Yiin-nan Railway* has given him. The railway runs from Haiphong in Indo-China to Yiin-nan-fu, the capital of Yiin-nan province. And it appears certain to the writer that, with such * For further information respecting this new railway the reader is referred to Appendix E. 45 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. an important town three or four days from the coast, shippers will not be content to continue to ship via the Yangtze, with all its risk. British and Ameri- can merchants, who carry the greater part of the imports to Western China, will send their goods direct to Hong-Kong, where transhipment will be made to Haiphong, and thence shipped by rail to Yiin-nan Fu, the distributing centre for inland trade. To my mind, Hong-Kong merchants might control the whole of the British trade of Western China if they will only push, for although the tariff of Tonkin may be heavy, it would be compensated by the fact that transit would be so much quicker and safer.* But it needs push. The history of our intercourse with China, from the days of the East India Company till now, ‘is nothing but a record of a continuous struggle to open up and develope trade. Opening up trade, too, with a people who have something pathetic in the honest persistency with which their officials have vainly struggled to keep themselves uncontaminated from the outside world. Trade in China cannot be left to take care of itself, as is done in Western coun- tries. However invidious it may seem, we must admit the fact that past progress has been due to pressure. Therefore, if the opportunities were placed near at hand to the Hong-Kong shipper, he would be an unenterprising person indeed were he not to avail himself of the opportunity. Shanghai has held the trump card formerly. This cannot be denied. * This is taking it for granted that the new railway will be so successful as to break down the pack-horse transport. One imagines that it will, but the line has not been opened ae enough for one to hazard a guess even. (June, 1910.) No very great advance has been made, and pack-horse eaite remains practically unaffected. (February, 1911.) E.J.D. 46 THE YANGTZE RAPIDS. But I think the railway is destined to turn the trade route to the other side of the empire. It is merely a question as to who is to get the trade—the French or the British. The French are on the alert. They cannot get territory ; now they are after the trade. It is my opinion that it would be to the advantage of the colony of Hong-Kong were the Chamber of Commerce there to investigate the matter thoroughly. Now is the time. 47 THIRD JOURNEY. CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU (VIA LUCHOW). CHAPTER V. Beginning of the overland journey. The official halo around the cavavan. The people’s goodbyes. Stages to Sui-fu. A persistent coolie. My boy’s indignation, and the sequel. Kindness of the people of Chung-king. The Chung-hing Consulate. Need of keeping fit in travelling in China. Walking tabooed. The question of “‘ face,” and what tt means. Author runs the gauntlet. Carrying coolie’s rate of pay. The so-called great paved highways of China, anda few remarks thereon. The gavden of China. Magnificence of the scenery of Western China. The tea-shops. The Chinese coolie’s thirst and how the author drank. Population of Szech’wan. Minerals found. Salt and other things. The Chinese inn: how tt holds the palm for unmitigated filth. Description of the rooms. Szech’wan and Yiin-nan cavavan- sevats. Need of a camp bed. Totleting in unsecluded publicity. How the author was met at market towns. How the days do not get duil. In a manner admirably befitting to my rank as an English traveller, apart from the fact that I was the man who was endeavouring to cross China on foot, I was led out of Chung-king en route for Bhamo alone, my companion having had to leave me here. It was Easter Sunday, a crisp spring morning. First came a public sedan-chair, bravely borne by ‘three of the finest fellows in all China, at the head of which on either side were two uniformed persons called soldiers—incomprehensible to one who has no knowledge of the interior, for they bore no marks 48 Outside Chung-hing. How the Author ‘saved his face.” The chair, carried by three men, avas taken simply for the honour and glory it added to one’s caravan. Ploughing the vive-felds in Ssech’wan. On the main voad in Szech’wan. The fellow who has his hand over his face created a disturbance because the author was snapping the picture; but he had no means of escape. On both sides were rice fields,, and he did not care to take the risk. Tea carriers, carrying tea into Tibet. Each bundle weighs 250 lbs. CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. whatever of the military—whilst uniformed men also solemnly guarded the back. Then came the grinning coolies, carrying that meagre portion of my worldly goods which I had anticipated would have been engulfed in the Yangtze. And at the head of all, leading them on like captains do the Salvation Army, was I myself, walking along triumphantly, undoubtedly looking a person of weight, but somehow peculiarly unable to get out of my head that little adage apropos the fact that when the blind shall lead the blind both shall fall into a ditch! But Chinese decorum forbade me falling behind. I had determined to walk across China, every inch of the way or not at all; and the chair coolies, unaware of my intentions presumably, thought it a great joke when at the western gate, through which I departed, I gave instructions that one hundred cash be doled out to each man for his graciousness in escorting me through the town. All the people were in the middle of the streets— those slippery streets of interminable steps—to give me at parting their blessings or their curses, and only with difficulty and considerable pouting and pushing could I sufficiently take their attention from the array of official and civil servants who made up my caravan as to effect an exit. The following were to be the stages :-— Ist day—Ts’eo-ma-k’ang .. 8oli. and day—Uin-ch’uan hsien .. 120,, 3rd day—Li-shih-ch’ang .. 105,, 4th day—Luchow .. .. .. 755 5th day—Lan-ching-ch’ang .. 80,, 6th day—Lan-chi-hsien a 5s 7th day—Sui-flu .. .. .. 120,, 49 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. In my plainest English and with many cruel gestures, four miles from the town, I told a man that he narrowly escaped being knocked down, owing to his extremely rude persistence in accosting me and obstructing my way. He acquiesced, opened his large mouth to the widest proportions, seemed thoroughly to understand, but continued more noisily to prevent me from going onwards, yelling something at the top of his husky voice—a voice more like a fog-horn than a human voice—which made me fear that I had done something very wrong, but which later I interpreted ignorantly as impudent humour. . I owed nothing; so far as I knew, I had done nothing wrong. i “Hi, fellow! come out of the way! Reverse your carcass a bit, old chap! Get ! What the —— who the ——?” “Oh, master, he wantchee makee much bobbery. He no b’long my pidgin, d——- rogue! He wantchee catch one more hunderd cash! He b’long one piecee chairman !” This to me from my boy in apologetic explana- tion. Then, turning wildly upon the man, after the manner of his kind raising his little fat body to the tops of his toes and effectively assuming the attitude of the stage actor, he cursed loudly to the uttermost of eternity the impudent fellow’s ten thousand rela- tives and ancestry ; which, although it called forth more mutual confidences of a like nature, and made T’ong (my boy) foam at the mouth with rage at such an inopportune proceeding happening so early in his career, rendering it necessary for him to push the man in the right jaw, incidentally allowed him to 5° CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. show his master just a little that he could do. The man had been dumped against the wall, but he was still undaunted. With thin mud dropping from one leg of his flimsy pantaloons, he came forward again, did this chair coolie, whom I had just paid off—for it was assuredly one of the trio—leading out again one of those little wiry, shaggy ponies, and wished to do another deal. He had, however, struck a snag. We did not come to terms. I merely lifted the quadruped bodily from my path and walked on. Chung-king people treated us well, and had it not been for their kindness the terrible three days spent still in our wu-pan on the crowded beach would have been more terrible still. At the Consulate we found Mr. Phillips, the Acting-Consul, ready packed up to go down to Shanghai, and Mr. H. E. Sly, whom we had met in Shanghai, was due to relieve him. Mr. J. L. Smith, of the Consular Service, was here also, just reaching a state of convalescence after an attack of measles, and was to go to Chen-tu to take up duty as soon as he was fit. But despite the topsy-turvydom, we were made welcome, and both Phillips and Smith did their best to entertain. Chung-king Consulate is probably the finest—certainly one of the finest— in China, built on a commanding site overlooking the river and the city, with the bungalow part over in the hills. It possesses remarkably fine grounds, has every modern convenience, not the least attrac- tive features being the cement tennis-court and a small polo ground adjoining. I had hoped to see polo on those little rats of ponies, but it could not be arranged. I should have liked to take a stick as a farewell. 51 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. People were shocked indeed that I was going to walk across China. Let me say here that travel in the Middle Kingdom is quite possible anywhere provided that you are fit. You have merely to learn and to maintain untold patience, and you are able to get where you like, if you have got the money to pay your way ; * but walking is a very different thing. It is probable that never previously has a traveller actually walked across China, if we except the Rev. J. McCarthy, of the China Inland Mission, who some thirty years or so ago did walk across to Burma, although he went through K wei-chow province over a considerably easier country. Not because it is by any means physically impossible, but because the custom of the country— and a cursed custom too—is that one has to keep what is called his “ face.” And to walk tends to make a man lose “ face.” A quiet jaunt through China on foot was, I was told, quite out of the question; the uneclipsed audacity of a man mentioning it, and especially a man such as I was, was marvelled at. Did I not know that the foreigner must have a chair? (This was corroborated by my boy, on his oath, because he would have to pay the men.) Did I not know that no traveller in Western China, who at any rate had any sense of self-respect, would travel without a chair, not necessarily as a conveyance, but for the honour and glory of the thing? And did I not know that, unfurnished with this undeniable token of respect, I should be liable to be thrust aside on the highway, to be kept waiting at ferries, to be * 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. : 52 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. relegated to the worst inn’s worst room, and to be generally treated with indignity? This idea of mine of crossing China on foot was preposterous ! Even Mr. Hudson Broomhall, of the China Inland Mission, who with Mrs. Broomhall was extremely kind, and did all he could to fit me up for the journey (it is such remembrances that make the trip one which I would not mind doing again), was sur- prised to know that I was walking, and tried to persuade me to take a chair. But I flew in the face of it all. These good people certainly impressed me, but I decided to run the gauntlet and take the risk. The question of “ face ” is always merely one of theory, never of fact, and the principles that govern “ face” and its attainment were wholly beyond my apprehension. “I shall probably be more concerned in saving my life than in saving my face,” I thought. Therefore it was that when I reached a place called Fu-to-gwan I discarded all superfluities of dress, and strode forward, just at that time in the early morning when the sun was gilding the dew- drops on the hedgerows with a grandeur which breathed encouragement to the traveller, in a flannel shirt and flannel pants—a terrible breach of foreign etiquette, no doubt, but very comfortable to one who was facing the first eighty li he had ever walked on China’s soil. My three coolies—the typical Chinese coolie of Szech’wan, but very good fellows with all their faults—were to land me at Sui-fu, 230 miles distant (some 650 li), in seven days’ time. They were to receive four hundred cash per man per day, were to find themselves, and if I reached Sui-fu within the 53 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. specified time I agreed to kumshaw them to the extent of an extra thousand.* They carried, accord- ing to arrangement, ninety catties apiece, and their rate of pay I did not consider excessive until I found that each man sublet his contract for a fourth of his pay, and trotted along light-heartedly and merry at my side; then I regretted that I had not thought twice before closing with them. It is probable that the solidity of the great paved highways of China have been exaggerated. I have not been on the North China highways, but have had considerable experience of them in Western China, Szech’wan and Yiin-nan particularly, and have very little praise to lavish upon them. Certain it is that the road to Sui-fu does not deserve the nice things said about it by various travellers. The whole route from Chung-king to Sui-fu, paved with flagstones varying in width from three to six or seven feet—the only main road, of course—is credit- ably regular in some places, whilst other portions, especially over the mountains, are extremely bad and uneven. In some places I could hardly get along at all, and my boy would call out as he came along in his chair behind me— “Master, I thinkee you makee catch two piecee men makee carry. This b’long no proper road. P’raps your makee bad feet come.” And truly my feet were shamefully blistered. * This rate of four hundred cash per day per man was main- tained 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 Yiin-nan equivalent (see Appendix K on currency at the end of the book). 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. 54 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. One had to step from stone to stone with considerable agility. In places bridges had fallen in, nobody had attempted to put them into a decent state of repair—though this is never done in China—and one of the features of every day was the wonderful fashion in which those mountain ponies picked their way over the broken route ; they are as sure-footed as goats. As I gazed admiringly along the miles and miles of ripening wheat and golden rape, pink-flowering beans, interspersed everywhere with the inevitable poppy, swaying gently as in a sea of all the dainty colours of the rainbow, I did not wonder that Szech’wan had been called the Garden of China. Greater or denser cultivation I had never seen. The amphitheatre-like hills smiled joyously in the first gentle touches of spring and enriching green, each terrace being irrigated from the one below by a small stream of water regulated in the most primitive manner (the windlass driven by man power), and not a square inch lost. Even the mud banks dividing these fertile areas are made to yield on the sides cabbages and lettuces and on the tops wheat and poppy. There are no fences. You see before you a forest of mountains, made a dark leaden colour by thick mists, from out of which gradually come the never-ending pictures-of green and purple and brown and yellow and gold, which roll hither and thither under a cloudy sky in in- describable confusion. The chain may commence in the south or the north in two or three soft, slow-rising undulations, which trend away from you and form a vapoury background to the landscape. From these (I see such a picture even as I write, seated on the stone steps in the middle of a mountain 55 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. path), at once united and peculiarly distinct, rise five masses with rugged crests, rough, and cut into shady hollows on the sides, a faint pale aureola from the sun on the mists rising over the summits and sharp outlines. Looking to the north, an immense curved line shows itself, growing ever greater, open- ing like the arch of a gigantic bridge, and binding this first group to a second, more complicated, each peak of which has a form of its own, and does in some sort as it pleases without troubling itself about its neighbour. The most remarkable point about these mountains is the life they seem to possess. It is an incredible confusion. Angles are thrown fantastically by some mad geometer, it would seem. Splendid banyan trees shelter one after toiling up the unending steps, and dotted over the landscape, indiscriminately in magnificent picturesqueness, are pretty farmhouses nestling almost out of sight in groves of sacred trees. Oftentimes perpendicular mountains stand sheer up for three thousand feet or more, their sides to the very summits ablaze with colour coming from the smiling face of sunny Nature, in spots at times where only a twelve-inch cultivation is possible. A dome raises its head curiously over the leaning shoulder of a round hill, and a pyramid reverses itself, as if to the music of some wild orchestra, whose symphonies are heard in the mountain winds. Seen nearer and in detail, these mountains are all in delicious keeping with all of what the imagination in love with the fantastic, attracted by their more distant forms, could dream. Valleys, gorges, sombre gaps, walls cut perpendicularly, rough or polished by water, cavities festooned with hanging stalac- tites and notched like Gothic sculptures—all make 56 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. up a strange sight which cannot but excite ad- miration. Every mile or so there are tea-houses, and for a couple of cash a coolie can get a cup of tea, with leaves sufficient to make a dozen cups, and as much boiling water as he wants. Szech’wan, the country, its people, their ways and methods, and much information thereto appertaining, is already in print. It were useless to give more of it here —and, reader, you will thank me! But of the thirst of Szech’wan—that thirst which is unique in the whole of the Empire, and eclipsed nowhere on the face of the earth, except perhaps on the Sahara— one does not hear about. 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 in- satiable. 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 poie. 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 per- petual evaporation and liquefaction. And I have felt that I must stop and wet myself again. L 57 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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. Iswill in more, and out it rushes again, madly tushes 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 to 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. Cando?” 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 traveller 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 thirst- ing, more tea. China tea, thou art a godsend to the wayfarer in that great land ! I endeavoured to get the details of the population of the province of Szech’wan, the variability of the reports providing an excellent illustration of the uncer- tainty impending over everything statistical in China —estimates ranged from thirty-five to eighty millions. 58 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. The surface of this province is made up of masses of rugged mountains, through which the Yangtze has cut its deep and narrow channel, and which 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 pharmacopceia 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 accidentée. 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 traveller 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 im toto. Ordinary decency forbids one putting into print what the uninitiated traveller most desires to * This is not now true of opium, owing to the remarkable decrease in the growth.—E, J. D. 59 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 travellers who have had to put up at the caravanserais 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 traveller 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, travellers 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, dis- comfort, 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 Yiin-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, some- times 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 #’w-A’at, 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 the pigsties, there were the usual stenches. The floor was Mother Earth, which in wet weather became mud, and quite a common thing was it for™ my joys to be enhanced during a heavy shower of 60 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. rain by having to sleep, almost suffocated, with my mackintosh over my head, owing toa 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 travelling equipment. I was many times sorry that I had none with me. The inns in Szech’wan, however, are by many degrees better than those of Yiin-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 absolutely unsecluded 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 little boys and grown men, 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 61 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 more inquisitive came behind me, rubbing their unshaven pates against the side of my head in enterprising endeavour 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 them 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 unintelli- gible questions about the barbarian who seemed to have dropped suddenly from the heavens. When I addressed a few words to them in strongest Saxon- English, 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 I was never dull. 62 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. Indusivialism, vatlways, and the attitude of the populace. Introduction of foreign machinery. Different opinions formed in different provinces. Climate, and what at ts responsible for. Recent Governor of Szech’wan’s tribute to Christianity. New China and the new student. Revolutionary element in Yiin-nan. Need of a new life, and how China ts to get tt. Luchow, and a little about tt. 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 Misstonaries. Exchange of yarns. Exaspevating Chinese life, and its effects on Europeans. Men vefuse to walk to Sui-fu. Experiences in arranging up-river wip. Unmeaning etiquette of Chinese officials towards 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 parinerships. 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 endeavouring 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. 63 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. Everything is labelled, from the earth to the in- habitants; and 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 un- gentle 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 minimised to the last degree by the humour one gets and the novel changes one meets everywhere. Onward again, my men singing, perhaps quarrel- ling, 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 moun- tains, high up from the mundane, in the cleft of cafions, 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 64 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. 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 descrip- tion. 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, of the artificialities of dress, and the unnumbered futile affectations of our own maybe not misnamed civilisation, 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 tealm of silence is, after all, vaster than the realm of noise, and the fact brought a consolation, as one watched Nature affecting 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 realising 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 tem- pest has cast on some lonely rock; and now they are having recourse to cries, volleys, all the signals imaginable, to iet it be known that they are still there. They have been on this lonely isolated rock 65 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 commerce, in politics, in literature, in science, in all that has spelt advance to the West. The modern spirit is spreading speedily into the domains of life everywhere—in places swiftly, in places slowly, but spreading inevitably, st sit pru- dentia. 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 centres in Eastern China, such as Han-yang and Shanghai, foreign mills, iron works, and so on, fur- nish 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 rail- ways 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)*—and a single train and steamer does the work of hundreds or 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. * I imspected 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 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 their money! aes In 66 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. Whilst in the end the Empire will profit greatly by the inventions of the Occident, the period of transi- tion in Szech’wan, especially if machines are intro- duced 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 conces- sions 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 appar- vent a distinct hatred to things and ideas foreign. ‘But industrially particularly the benefits of the. West are being recognised 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 centres of new industries—even in the more forward areas quoted —but when this process begins new elements will enter into the Chinese industrial problem. 67 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 to- wards progress and innovation who 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 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 Yiin-nan, again, conditions were completely reversed ; and one finding himself in Yiin-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 68 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. 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 explana- tion of all the 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 Yiin-nan frontier to the great Sungari in lusty Manchuria, and be able to understand and account for everything.” However that may be, travelling in China, through a wonderful province like Szech’wan, whose chief entrepét 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 Yiin-nan, for that matter, in a lesser degree—always find the new nationalism in the form of the “‘ New China” student. Despite the opposi- tion he gets from the old school, and although the old order of things, by being so strong as almost to over- whelm 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 follow- ing from a speech delivered by Tseh Ch’un Hsiian, 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 labouring night and day to readjust their methods, and to make known their aims in their propagation 69 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 widely 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 inthis 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 scholars in Tokyo*—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 know= ledge than Chinese knowledge. And mere striplings, * This is not true,to-day. There has been a great falling off in numbers,—E. J. D., February, 1911. 7O CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. 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 examina- tions. In Yiin-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 fer- mentation 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 en- deavours 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 only China, from the highest to the lowest, will 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 marvellous 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 transi- 7 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. tion 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 honourable history, and their activity and efficiency outside China make them more to be dreaded than any race or any dozen races of to-day. But New China must have this new life. Commerce, science, diplomacy, culture, civilisa- tion 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? From her religions or from other religions? Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism—these have given her nothing. She needs a Christian conscience, and can this come from any- thing but from Christianity ? My opinion is that Christianity is her key. With it she will become perhaps the foremost empire of the world. But without it she is lost. 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 misunder- standing between the fusong, sent to shadow the 72 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. 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 stay 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 con- ditions ? It is the custom of the mandarins to send what is called a fusong (escort) for you; the escort comes from the military, although the appearance of the people may lead you to doubt it. I have two of these soldier people with me to-day, and two bigger raggamufiins 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.* Another nuisance, of which I have already spoken, is the necessity of taking a chair to maintain respect- ability. These things make travel in China not so cheap as one would be led to imagine. Travelling 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 * This should not be taken to apply to the /usong every- where. I have found them to be most useful on other occasions, but the above was written at Luchow as my experience of that particular day.—E. J.D. 73 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. “cha tsien”’ (tea money) for the cook. But it is the *‘face” which makes away with the 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 blong 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 mis- sionaries 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 depreca- tions of T’ong and my coolies, and my vehement 74 SS ed Ornamental archway in the gardens of the Yiin-nan Guild, at Sut-fu, Szechwan. th Chinese method of torture. ‘The victim is generally strung up by the thumbs. The above shows the barbaric device, arranged for the convenience of the photographer. ‘azgsuy X 94g Furyoopsaao0 ‘nf-ins yw ajdiuay CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. rhetoric in explanation that his presence was dis- tasteful to me, and at the end of the episode I found it imperative for my own safety, and perhaps for his, to clear out. The Canadians I found in their Chinese-built premises, comfortable albeit. Five of them were Tesident 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 Chinese nature 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 travelling 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 civilisation, appears eccen- tric 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 75 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 tome. ‘Ino ’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 ina 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 apologised that indisposi- tion kept him from calling personally upon me— this, of course, was a lie—he said he would feel it an honour 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 magis- trate 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 76 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. to leave at 3.30 am. 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 tudely 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 77 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 labour, wasting their energies in doing the right things at the wrong time, and wrong things always, and long after sun- down Sui-fu’s pagoda loomed in the distance. At II.o 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. After leaving 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 ex route for Ta-chien-lu, where * Opium is not now grown to any extent in Szech’wan.—E. J. D. 78 CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU. he is now working, showed me round 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, travelling 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 dis- turbed 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 read of at school— so much alike and yet so different to 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 in- genuity 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 cen- turies ago, and so common now in the Straits Settlements, where bankrupts are allowed consider- ably more freedom than would be possible if fictitious. registration were not allowed. I refer to the Regis- tration of Partnerships. 79 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 tvavellers. Farewell to Sui-fu. The postal service and tribute to I.P.0. 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 vailways. The veal Opening of China. How the foreigner will win the confidence of the Chinese. Distances and thety variability. Calculations uprooted. Author ina 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 travelling alone. Coolie nearly cuts his toe off. Street scene at Puérh-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 Chinaman 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 of the West: 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. Not so in China. There is so much craft, so much diplomacy, so much subtle legerdemain that, if he chooses, the Chinaman 80 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. 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, and 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 conversa- tion. 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 81 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 Ytin- nan were rather disquieting. I hadtaken 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 traveller 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, 82 82 Minor idols in a wayside temple. ‘diay snoraypovon AjaworNxe ue yr ropuer spider Kuru ayy nq ALI at} UMOp atuvo TOYyNE ayy (19}V] SIVdh O44) NF-INS OF ny-Huoj-ouryywoay Soumnof ayy UC ‘oa JUD alojay HuwIyI-HUIFT AIIYZ IYP UI IIIS VY SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-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 stage. above sea. Ist day—Anpien -s «> GOL vs and day—Huan-chiang .. 551... —— 3rd day—Fan-ih-ts'uen .. 7oli.. — 4th day—T’an-t’eo .. .. Zoli... —— 5th day—Lao-wa-t’an .. 140 li .. 1,140 ft. 6th day—Teo-sha-kwan .. 60 li .. 4,000 ft. qth day—Chii-li-p’u .. .. 60 .. 1,900 ft. 8th day—Ta-wan-tsi — ol. —— oth day—Ta-kwan-ting .. 70 li .. 3,700 ft. roth day—Wuchai .. .. O60li .. 7,000 ft. t1th 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 traveller 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 every- where 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, 83 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 toute. One of the largest Customs stations in the province of Yiin-nan is here situated at the east end of a one-span suspension bridge, about one hundred and fifty feet inlength. 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 men- tally 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 toads. 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 Yiin-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, butsmaller. To Ta-kwan-hsien a few natural obstacles occur, although the road is always high up on the hillsides. I crossed a miserable suspension bridge of two spans. The southern span is about thirty feet, the northern 84 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. span eighty feet; the centre 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 wood- work 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 between 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 85 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 the 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 travellers 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. Ifa 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 civilised country possesses, he cannot but think, even looking at the question from the Chinaman’s standpoint so far as he is able, that, were free scope * We were still in Szech’wan. At that time there was no poppy in Yiin-nan, and, as will be seen in other parts of this book, Szech’wan has now almost stamped out the growth of the drug. Szech’wan early acquired the art of opium manufacture, bounded as it is to the north by Kansu, and to the south by Yiin-nan, both centres of Mohammedan influence from early times to the present day; and when the practice of smoking the drug was introduced it must have spread at once to the inhabitants of this mist-covered province. It has been confidently stated that the consumption of opium per capita was three times that of the coast provinces. No foreign opium has ever been imported, and the poppy, cultivated certainly as early as the ninth century, was grown everywhere at the time I passed through Szech’wan (April, 1909). The probable production at this time for the province was not less than 250,000 piculs.--E. J.D. 86 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. 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 Chinaman 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 favoured 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 got 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 Chinaman 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 conces- sions 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 through the narrow path~ 87 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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. Butat 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—t 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. 88 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. “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 ina 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 5.0 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 bymy 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, so the matting would drop and expose me to public view. But I had a 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, 89 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. and I had the pleasure of sleeping on a wet bed at T’an-t’eo. 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 traveller 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 dis- jointed character of this particular portion of my common phraseology, I would only say in apology that I am writing under the gaze of a mystified crowd, go SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. each of whom has a word to say about my type- writer—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 Chinaman sees for the first time things of this intricate 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 traveller 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 gi ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 like 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 enterin. 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 Puérh-tu, the first place of importance after having come into Yiin-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 Puérh-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 them- selves 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 round me with outrageous adulation and seeming words of welcome. Meanwhile, I 92° SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. thought the coolie was dying, and, fearful and unnatural as it seems, it is nevertheless true that in 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 worth many dead men yet! He slowly opened his eyes, smiled, rose up, and immediately recognised 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 cigar- ette tin with some cigarettes in it, and that one of 93 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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. 94 Off the main road to Cha)-t'ong-fu. “kyueus} sty pur pury sty rao AyUStaIaA0s oyNjosqe UrezULEtU O} o auo ‘piojpury Ay}VaM v_ Jo a]}SvI BY} 0} Spes] pue ‘19AO YTVM OF} o1 ureut oy} wees faq#Avus aru. oY) Ut aspu oy} Suojye Buruuny (DUD T- ODL » UT a1qe [Hs eoutaosd ueu-uNX Ul Moy oy} F asioy @ oJ YSsnous apr ATareq sty} “P? CHAPTER VIII. Szech’wan and Yiin-nan. Coolies and theiv loads. Exports and imports. Hints to English exporters. Food at famine rates. A wretched inn at Wuchat. Author prevents murder. Sleep- ing in thevain. The foreign cigarette tvade. Poverty of Chao- Yong. Simplicity of life. Possible advantages of Chinese in struggle of yellow and white vaces. Foreign goods in Yiin-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 Kwet-chow. Opium and tin of Yiin-nan. Remarkable bonfire at Yiin-nan-fu. Infanticide at Chao- Yong. 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. Yiin-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 buildthem. Onecould not walk with comfort; it was an impossible task. Far away over the earth, 95 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 humour 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 easy 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 encourag- ingly. 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 g6 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. every step. Looking down, sheer down as from some lofty palace window, I saw the green snake waiting, waiting forme. 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 traveller 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 ina 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 Yiin-nan, and with salt, English cotton, Chinese porcelain, fans and so on from 97 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 Yiin-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 it 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 98 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. noisily down the gorges, veiled by the curtain of great trees; sometimes, on a ridge, a field of buck- wheat, 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 traveller, having seen the conditions under which the pigs are reared, refrained from the luxury of Yiin-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 II 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 humour of the situation. One can get humour 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 return- ing 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 Yiin-nan * See Appendix B at end of book on Weights and Measures.” 99 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. small cash, and this was only interrupted when a poor man, deaf and dumb, and of hideous appear- ance, 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 others 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 Yiin-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 Yiin-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 I00 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. 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 (x910) a proclamation was issued from the Viceroy’s yamen at Yiin-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 the 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 hig 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 neighbourhood. 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 travelled. 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 * See Appendix C, Ior ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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 favour in the eye of the English traveller. 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 inci- dentally show up the real character of some of the weaknesses of our own civilisation, and when one is in China, living near the people, forces reflection upon one of the useless multiplicity of our daily wants. We must have our daily stock of bread and butter and meat, glass windows and fires, hats, white shirts and woollen underwear, boots and shoes, trunks, bags and boxes, bedsteads, mattresses, sheets and blankets—most of which a Chinaman can do without, and indeed is actually better off without.* This is not true in every class, however ; for whilst there is no denying the charm of the simpler civilisation, many of the Chinese of Szech’wan and Ytin-nan glory in goods of foreign manufacture, no * Anyone who contemplates a tramp across China must not get the idea that he can still continue the uses of civilisation. For the most part he will have to live pretty well as a Chinaman the whole time, and he will find, like I found, that it is easy to give up a thing when you know the impossibility of getting it—E. J. D. 102 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. 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 devas- tated 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 substance alleged to have been lime, the common belief being that the majority of those who perished died as the effect of poisoning thereby. 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 ex- changed 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 103 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. 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.* 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. My views on the question are con- densed into a single paragraph in the second part of this book. There is practically no opium in Yiin-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 Yiin-nan-fu and Tali-fu, I saw no poppy whatever in the province. This does not mean, however, that no opium is to be got. * This was written in April, 1909. I have altered my views since I have travelled from end to end in Yiin-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. 104. SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. During the past three weeks* 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 endeavours 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 (abcut nine- o f pence) the Chinese ounce of prepared opium. At the present time, in the same city, many men would be willing to doa 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 Yiin-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 Yiin-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 * May, 1910. Asa 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 Yiin-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 105 | t ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. ait for men to travel in armed bands from the province of Kwei-chow, travelling by night over the moun- tains 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 JzAinm 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, 1q09) she is at a loss to ‘know what to do with her supply, and that is the reason why people of Ytin-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 pro- perties have laid 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 106 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. been smoked since the middle of the seventeenth century.* A tew years ago Yiin-nan had-only two articles of importance with. which to pay. for.extra-provincial products consumed, namely fum)and_fid. The jJatter came from a spot twenty ane. from Mengtsz, and the value of the output now runs to approxi- mately 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 on three thousand piculs, and the quantity going by land into China being very much greater. Yiin-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 Yiin-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 demon- ; stration that the people had ever seen. * This was written at the end of 1909. Now, in July, rg1o, 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 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. 107 | ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. The missionary of whom I enquired 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 enquiries 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. “T 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 108 SUI-FU TO CHAO-T’ONG-FU. infanticide which exists in all poor districts of China menaces the lives of all well-wishers of the entire province of Yiin-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 play- mates 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. 109 CHAPTER IX, THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF toro. 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. Move Boxerism in China than we know of. Causes of the Chao-t’ong Rebellion. Halley's Comet brings things toa 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 tvavel to the city in the dead of night. A new ch’en-tai takes the matter in hand. Rumours and suspense. Stations of the rebels. A night attack. Sixteen rebels decapitated. Officials alter thety tactics. Fighting on mainvoad. Superstition regarding soldiers. One of the leaders captured by a headman. Chapel burnt down and caretaker vescued by military. Li the Invincible under arms. Huang taken prisoner. Two leaders killed. Rising among the Miao. Mission work at a stand- still. Child-stealing, and the Yiin-nan Railway rumour. Barbaric punishment. Tribute to Chinese officials. British Consul-General. Résumé of the position. An unfortunate incident. DesPiTE the fact that this chapter was the last written—written, as a matter of fact, as late as July of last year (z910), and posted from Chao- t’ong-fu—it has been thought wise to place it here. It deals with the Chao-t’ong Rebellion, of which the outside world, even when it was at its height, knew little, but which, so recently as a couple of months prior to the date of writing, threatened to spell extermination to the foreigners in North-East Yiin-nan. And the reader, too, may welcome a digression from travel. IIo THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF toro. In spite of all that has been written in previous. and subsequent chapters, and in face of the universal cry of the progress China is speedily realising, of the stoutest optimism characteristic of the statesman. and of the student of Chinese affairs, a feeling of deep gloom at intervals overcomes one in the interior—a fear of some impending trouble. There is a rumour, but one smiles at it—there are always. rumours! Then there are more rumours, and a. feeling of uneasiness pervades the atmosphere; a local bubble is formed, it bursts, the whole of one’s. trust in the sincerity of the reform of China and her people is brushed away to absolute unbelief in a few days, and it means either a sudden onrush and. brutal massacre of the foreigners, or the thing blows. over after a short or long time of great strain, and ultimately things assume a normality in which the detection of the slightest ruffle in the surface of social life is hardly traceable. Such was the Chao-t’ong Rebellion, luckily un- attended by loss of life among the foreigners. It is. not yet over,* but it is believed that the worst is past. At the end of 1909 probably no part of the Empire seemed more peaceful. Two months afterwards. the heads of the Europeans were demanded; mis- sionaries were guarded by armed soldiers in their homes inside the city walls, and forbidden to go outside ; native Christians were brutally maltreated and threatened with death if they refused to turn traitor to their beliefs ; thousands of generally law- abiding men, formed into armed bands, were defiantly setting at naught the law of the land, and the whole of the main road over which I had passed. * July, 1970. Iit ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. from Sui-fu to Tong-ch’uan-fu (a distance of over four hundred miles) was blocked by infuriated mobs, who were out to kill,—their motto the famous ill- omened Boxer motto of rg00: ‘‘ Exalt the dynasty ; destroy the foreigner.” “* Kill, kill, kill!’ ran the cry for miles around the countryside, and a fearful repetition of the bloody history of ten years ago was daily feared. Provi- dential, however, was it that no foreigner was travelling at the time in these districts, and that those who, ignorant of the troubles, desired to do so were stopped at Yiin-nan-fu by the Consuls and at Sui-fu by the missionaries. It is a matter for gratitude also that throughout the nots, specially safeguarded by the great Providence of God, no lives of Europeans were lost; and owing to the praiseworthy and obvious attitude of the mis- sionaries in this area in endeavouring to keep the. thing as quiet as possible, and the notoriously con- servative manner in which consular reports upon such matters are preserved in Government lockers, practically nothing has been heard of the uprising. At times during the four slow-moving months, however, the situation became, as I shall endeavour to show, complicated in every way. The escape of the foreigners was made absolutely impossible by the fact that the whole of the roads, even those over the rough mountains leading south, were blocked successfully by the rebelling forces, and, when the deep gloom settled finally over the city, the fate of the Westerners seemed sealed and their future hopeless. All round the foreigners’ houses the people, infected with that strange, unaccountable, national hysteria, so terrible in the Chinaman’s temperament, rose up to burn and kill. Mayhap it means little I12 u2 4 fair sample of the difficult country the vebels had to negotiate. Chavacteristic representatives of the Miao faction of rebelling party THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF toro. to the man who reads. Massacres have always been common enough in China, he will say; and there are thousands of people in Europe to-day who know no more about China than what the telegrams of massacres of European missionaries have told them. Years ago one almost expected this sort of thing; butat the present day, when China is popularly supposed to be working honestly to gain for herself an honourable place among the nations, it is surely not to be expected in the ordinary run of things in days of peace. But we know that such visions are common to every European in Inland China, and even at the coast men talk continually of and believe that riots are going to happen in the near future.* Merchant, missionary, traveller and official all agree that there is yet more trouble ahead before the West will be won into the confidence of China and vice versa. The people who are studying the Reform Movement of the Young China, however, and who stolidly refuse to study with it the general attitude of the common people, laugh and dismiss with contempt the subject of the possibility of further outbreaks of Boxerism in the outlying parts of the Empire. But they should not laugh. The European cannot afford to laugh, and, if he be a sensible fellow, knows that he cannot afford to treat with contempt the opinions of the people who know. The more we understand the vast interior of China and the conservatism and peculiarities of character of the people of that interior, the less disposed shall we be to jest, the less disposed to ridicule, what I would characterise as the strongest and most deadly of the hidden menaces of the Celestial Empire. * Evidence in support of ,this fear is supplied in the account of the Hankow riots given in Appendix D. 113 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. One does not wish to be pessimistic, but it is foolish to close one’s eyes to bare fact. At the moment I am writing, in the middle of China, I know that I am safe enough here, but I do not disguise from myself that the wildest reports are still current within a quarter of a mile from me about me and my own kind in this peaceful city of Tong-ch’uan-fu. And it takes very little to light the fuse and to cause a terrible explosion here, in common with other places in this province. A man might*be quite safe one day and lose his head the next if he did not, at times when the rebellious element is apparent, conform strictly to the general wishes and accepted customs of the people among. whom he is living. No, we cannot afford to laugh. We must seek the opinion of those people who were confined within the walls of Chao-t’ong city—the silence of their own homes broken up by the distant uproar of a frantic chorus of yells and angry disputations, sounding, as it were, their very death-knell, as if they were to form a manacled procession dragging their chains of martyrdom to their own slow doom—before we show contempt for the opinion of those who would tell the truth. There is more of Boxerism in the far-away interior parts of China than we know of. Even as late as the middle of January of the present year (1910) there was no rumour of any up- rising. About this time, however, to supply a serious deficiency in the revenue caused by the dropping of the opium tax, since that drug had ceased to be grown, a general poll-tax was levied, which the people refused to pay, and at the same time they demanded that they be allowed again to-grow the 14 THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF oto. poppy. Among the population of Chao-t’ong-fu, or more particularly among the people around the city, especially the tribes-people, this additional tax was supposed to have been caused by the Europeans, and other wild rumours concerning the Tonkin-Yiin-nan Railway (to be opened in the following April), which gained currency with remarkable rapidity, added to the unrest. It only required that brilliant phe- nomenon of the heavens, with its wonderful tail—none other than Halley’s Comet—to bring the whole to a climax. This was altogether too much for the super- stitious Chinaman, and he looked upon the comet as some evil omen organised and controlled by the foreigner especially for the working of his own selfish ends in the Celestial Empire ; and a number believed it to be a heavenly sign for the Chinese to strike. That the riot was being started was plain, but the first definite news the foreigners received was on February 5th, when an I-pien (one of the tribes), whose little girl attended the mission school, was captured and compelled to join the rebelling forces between T’o-ch’i (on the River of Golden Sand *) and Sa’i-ho, in a westerly direction from the town. A march would take place on the fifteenth of that month, the Europeans would be assassinated, their houses would be burned and looted—so ran the rumour. By this date, for two days’ march in all directions from Chao-t’ong, the rebels had camped, and a motley crowd they were—Mohammedans, Chinese, I-pien, Hua Miao, and other hooligans. Mobilisation was effected by spies taking round secret cases (the ch'uandan) containing two pieces of coal and a feather—a simile meaning that the rebels were to : burn like fire and fly like birds. Meanwhile, military | * The local name for the Yangtze. II5 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. forces had been dispatched from Yiin-nan-fu, the capital (twelve days away), and from Ch’u-tsing-fu (seven or eight days away), and these, to the strength of a thousand, now came to the city, and it was thought that the brigadier-general would be able to cope with the trouble now that he had so many armed troops. Soldiers patrolled the city walls (which, by the way, had to be built up so that the soldiers might be able to get decent patrol), more were stationed on the premises of the Europeans, and every defensive precaution was taken. The officials were in daily communication by telegraph with the Viceroy, and at first the riot was kept well in hand by Government authorities. But the rebels had by this time got together no less than three thousand men, and were holding three impregnable positions on the adjacent hills, and had effectually cut off communication by the main road. Despite their numbers, they were afraid to strike, however, and lucky it was for the city that the leaders were not sufficiently trusted by their followers, many of them pressed men—men who had joined the rebelling ranks merely to save their own necks and their houses. At this time the pen-fu (a sort of mayor of the city) demanded that the missionaries working among the Hua Miao, and two lady workers paying a visit to that place, should return from Shih-men-K’an (70 li away), as he could not protect them in the country. A special mes- senger was dispatched, demanding instant departure, and in’the dead of night—a bitter wintry night, icy, dark, slippery, and cold—these ladies came under cover to the city. They reached the mission premises without molestation. 116 THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF 1ror0. By this time a new ch’en-tai (brigadier-general) had arrived from the capital, having been sent as a man who could handle the situation successfully. He was a Liu Ta Ren, who had previously held office in the city, and whose reputation for strategical resource and official cunning a Scotland Yard detective might envy.* Rumours grew more and more serious; the man- darins went all round the countryside endeavouring to pacify the people, and the foreigners could do nothing but “ sit tight’ through these most trying days. The suspense of being shut up in one’s house during a time of trouble of this nature, hearing every rumour which lying tongues create, and unable to get at the facts, is far worse than being in the thick of things, although this would have at once been fatal. But one needs to have lived in China during such a time to understand the awful tension which riots occasion- The rioters were stationed as follows :— 1. Weining, in Kwei-chow, to the south-east... .. .. 1,000 men. 2. Kiang-ti Hill, in Yiin-nan, to the south .. «1,000 men. 3. Several places around the city, to the west as far as the River of Golden Sand 1,000 men. * This Liu was a remarkable man, quite unlike the average mandarin. He got the name of Liu Ma Pang, a disrespectful term, meaning that he was fond of using the stick. Ona journey towards Chao-t’ong, some years ago, he went on ahead of his retinue of men and horses, and arriving at an inn at Tong-ch’uan-fu, asked the ta st fu—the general factotum—for the best room, and proceeded to walk into it. ‘‘No you don’t,” yelledgthe ta st fu, ‘‘ that’s reserved for Liu Ma Pang, and you’re not to go in there.’’ After some time Liu’s men arrived, and calling one or two, he said, ‘“‘ Take this man ”’ (pointing to the surprised ta si fu) ‘‘and give him a sound thrashing.’’ He stood by and saw the 117 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. On March 13th a night attack was expected. Breathless, the foreigners waited in their suspense, but it passed off without serious damage being done. On the Sunday, the missionaries, almost at their wits’ end with mingled fear and excitement, occasioned by the strain which weeks of anxiety must bring to the strongest, feared whether their services would be got through in peace. Meetings were being held all around the city, and gradually the mandarins gained small successes. Prisoners—miserable specimens of men fighting for they hardly knew what—were captured and brought to the city, and, on March 16th, sixteen human heads, thrown in as a gruesome mass into a common basket, with upturned eyes gaping into the great unknown, hideous-looking and bearing still the brutish stare of hysterical craving and morbid rage, were carried by an armed squad of military to the yamen. They made a ghastly picture when hung over the gate of the city to put the fear of death into the hearts of their brutal compatriots. The officials, hard-worked and themselves feeling the strain of the whole business, and incidentally fearful for the safety of their own heads, were perturbed all this time by rumours coming from Weining, the mutineers of which were alleged to be the fiercest of the three bands. Up to now the officials had been playing a conciliating game. They had been trying vainly to pacify, but now they found that they had to prove their energies and their benevolence by acting the part whacking administered, after which he said, ‘‘ That’s for speak- ing disrespectfully of a mandarin.” Then, ‘‘ Give him a thou- sand cash,” adding, ‘‘ That ’s for knowing your business.” Some years ago Liu was the means of saving the life of the late Mr. Litton (mentioned later in this book), at the time he was British Consul at Tengyueh, when there was fighting down in the south of Yiin-nan with the Wa’s.—E. J. D. 118 THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF 1Iogto. of tyrants rather than of administrators of mercy, by warring rather than by peace-making, by fighting and forcing rather than by conciliating and persuading. On Easter Tuesday, fighting took place on the main road to thenorth, when the pen-fu and hismen achieved a creditable success. The rebels almost to a man were taken, and among the prisoners was a girl who had been distributing the beans, a lovely damsel of eighteen, said to have been the fiancée of the leader of that band. Both her legs were shot through and she was considerably mutilated ; but although the pen-fu thought this sufficient punishment, instructions came from the capital that she must die. She was accordingly taken outside the city and beheaded. This caused some consternation among the rebels, as the death of the girl was looked upon as an omen of direct misfortune. For a very long time she had been going around the country dropping beans into the ground outside any houses she came across, the superstition being that wherever a bean was dropped there in the very spot, perhaps at the very moment, for aught that we know, an invincible warrior would spring up. She had dropped some millions of beans, but the tanks were not swelled as a consequence. The ch’en-tat had also been out all night, and as men were captured so they were beheaded on the spot without mercy and their heads subsequently hung outside the city gates. The headman of a small village—some forty li from the city—succeeded in capturing one of the leaders, and great credit was due to him; but soon the leader was rescued again by his followers, who then brutally killed and mutilated the body of the headman, causing him to undergo the ignominy of having his tongue and his 11g ' ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. [ heart cut out. Fighting was going on everywhere, and ‘by the end of March things were at their height. The fact that rain was badly needed tended only to aggravate the situation, and that lustrous comet made things worse. Day by day miserable processions brought the wounded into the city, and on the last day of the month, taken by sudden fright and almost getting out of hand, the panic-stricken people raised the cry that the rebels were marching direct for the city gates. Through the capital tactics adopted by the mandarins, however, this was prevented ; but, on the following day, the chapel belonging to the United Methodist Mission at an out- station was burnt to the ground and the houses of the people razed and looted. The caretaker, a faithful Hua Miao convert, was taken, stripped of his clothing, and threatened with an awful death if he did not betray the foreigners. He refused manfully to divulge any information whatsoever, and was on the point of being sacrificed, when the ch’en-tai came unexpectedly upon the scene with his military. He released the Miao, captured thirty-six rebels, killed sixteen more where they stood, and carried away many of their horses and the dreaded Boxer flag around which the men rallied. And now comes the smartest thing I heard of throughout the rebellion. A man named Li was the most dreaded of the trio of rebel chiefs, a man of marvellous strength, and who seemed to be able to fascinate his men and get them to do anything he wished—and Liu, the ch’en-tai, set himself the task of capturing him. Disguising himself in the garb of a pedlar, Liu went out towards Li’s camp, and met three spies on the look-out for a possible clue to the foreigners; they 120 “nf-5u0 4-ovy avau ‘sqaqaa ayn fo aovqd Suagoam ayy ca ‘spueStiq YIM paysayur Suraq peor oy} ‘nj-Bu0,j-ovyd) Jo sve-yNos ayy} 0} sary STU, “oSMyer aretp} Sea Sututofpe jadeyo ey} pue ‘peusye “gu0z Aasuvp 947 UL auagsS ary} SBM SUBTISTITYD Jo dnois sty I, THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF oro. asked him where the ch’en-tai was and all about him, declaring that if he did not tell them all he knew they would take him to Li, and that he would then lose his head. Just behind were a few of Liu’s best soldiers. Strolling up quite casually as if they knew least in the world of what was going on, they made their arrest, and clapped the handcuffs on them before their captives knew it. Liu ordered that two be beheaded immediately, which was done, and the other man was kept to show where Li’s camp was and where Li himself was hiding. And in this way Li the Invincible was captured also. This was the master-stroke of the situation. Li was brought back to the city with many other prisoners and a few heads, guarded by a strong body of the military. Almost simultaneously, Huang, one of the other rebel chiefs, was captured ; and at dusk one evening Li was put to death by the slow process. Afraid that if he were taken outside the city his followers might possibly recapture him, he was murdered outside the chief yamen, about ten hacks being necessary by process adopted to sever the head from the body. Only two men have been put to death inside the walls since the city of Chao-t’ong was built, over two hundred years ago. After death had taken place, Li was served in the same way as he "had served the village headman, and his heart and : his tongue were taken from his body. Huang was “killed in the usual way, and his head placed in a frame on the city gate. And so there died two of the bravest men who have headed rebellions in this part of the country of late years. Both were handsome fellows, of magnificent physique and undaunted courage, 121 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. worthy of fighting for a better cause. It seemed so strange that two such men should have had to die in the very bloom of life, when every strong sinew and drop of blood must have rebelled at such premature dissolution, and by a death more hideous than imagi- nation can depict or speech describe, just at a time in China’s awakening when such fellows might have made for the uplifting of their country. And they died because they hated the foreigner. After further desultory fighting, the remaining leader, losing heart, fled into Kwei-chow province, and for a time was allowed to wander away ; but later, a sum of a thousand taels was offered for him, dead or alive, and I have no doubt of the reward proving too great a bait for his followers. He has probably been given up.* In the month of May the Miao people rose to prolong the rioting, but their efforts did not come to much, although guerilla warfare was prolonged for several weeks, and British subjects were not allowed to travel over the main road beyond Tong-ch’uan-fu for some time after; indeed, as I write (July rst, rgro), permission for the missionaries to move about is still withheld. Then, following the rebellion, rumours spread all : over the province to the effect that the foreigners . were on the look-out for children, and were buying - up as many as they could get at enormous prices to ch’i the railway to Yiin-nan-fu, which by this time had been opened to the public. Daily were little children brought to the missionaries and Offered forsale. Child-stealing became common ; the greatest unrest prevailed again. Members of the * He was captured some months afterwards, I believe, at Mengtsz.—E. J. D. 122 THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF oro. Christian churches suffered persecution, and ad- herents kept at a safe distance. Scholars forsook the mission schools. Foreigners cautiously kept within their own premises as much as they could. Mission work was at a standstill, and all looked once more grave enough. Two women, caught in the act of stealing children at Chao-t’ong, were taken to the yamen, hung in cages for a time as a warning to others, and then made to walk through the streets shouting, * Don’t steal children as I have; don’t steal children as I have.” If they stopped yelling, soldiers scourged them. A man was lynched in the public streets in that city for stealing a child, and only by the adoption of the most stringent measures, which in England would be considered barbaric, were the mandarins able successfully to deal with the rumours and the trouble thereby caused. Even far away down on the Capital road, children ran from me, and mothers, catching sight of me, would cover up their little ones and run away from me behind barred doors, so that the foreigner should not get them. This latter trouble was felt pretty well throughout the length and breadth of Yiin-nan, and it must have been very disappointing to Christian missionaries who had been working around the districts of Tong- ch’uan-fu and Chao-t’ong-fu for over twenty years, and had got into close contact with scores of men and women, to see these very people taking away their children so that they should not be bought up by the very missionaries whose ministrations they had listened to for years. In course of time, things settled down again, but at the time my manuscript leaves me for the publisher the danger zone has not been greatly reduced. 123 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. In concluding my few remarks on this serious out- break, the like of which it is to be hoped will not be seen again in this province, it is only fair to chronicle the excellent behaviour of the Chinese officials and of the Viceroy of Yiin-nan in dealing with the situation. Although he is not, I believe, generally liked by the people as their ruler, Li Chin Hsi did all he could to quell the riots speedily, and saw to it that all the officials in whose districts the rebellion was raging, and who made blunders during its progress, were degraded in rank. It is difficult for Europeans thoroughly to grasp the situation. From Chao-t’ong to Yiin-nan-fu, the viceregal seat, is twelve days’ hard going, and all communication was done by telegraph—seemingly easy enough ; but one must not discount the slow Chinese methods of doing things. Most of the troops were twelve days away, and in China—in backward Yiin-nan especially —to mobilise a thousand men and march them over mountains a fortnight from your base is not a thing to be done ata moment’s notice. By the time they would arrive, it might have been possible for all the foreigners to have been massacred and their premises demolished, especially as the exits were blocked on all sides. But no time was lost and no pains were saved; and although the Chao-t’ong foreign residents, who suffered in suspense more than most missionaries are called upon to suffer, may differ with me in this opinion, I believe that not one of the officials who took part in endeavours to keep the riots from assuming more actually dangerous proportions could have done more than was done. If a man neglected his duty he lost his button, and he deserved nothing else. In Mr. P. O’Brien Butler, the able British Consul- 124 THE CHAO-T’ONG REBELLION OF Ioto. General, the British subjects had the greatest confi- dence. He might have erred in having declined from harassing the Chinese Foreign Office to grant permission and protection to Britishers who wished to travel after the leaders of the rebellion had been captured, but he undoubtedly erred on the right side. An unfortunate incident for the United Methodist Missionaries was the fact that the Rev. Charles Stedeford, who was sent out by the Connexion to visit the whole of the mission fields, was able to come only so far as Tong-ch’uan-fu, and was forced to return to Europe without having seen any of the magnificent work among the Hua Miao. After my manuscript went forward to my pub- lishers, permission to travel and protection were granted to British subjects again on the main road leading up to the Yangtze Valley. The author was the first Britisher to go from Tong-ch’uan-fu to Chao-t’ong-fu, and as I write, as late as the middle of July, r9r0, I am of the opinion that it is unwise to travel over this road for a long time to come, unless it is absolutely imperative to do so. At Kiang-ti I had considerable trouble in getting a place to sleep at, and I was glad when I had passed Tao-tien. At the invitation of missionaries working among them, I then spent some months in residence and travel in Miao-land, and only regret that it is not possible for an extended account of my experiences— always as bad as anything one is called to face in ordinary travel along the main road in China—to appear here. J hope, however, subsequently to publish a work which shall furnish some additional facts about the ethnology of this part of the world. = 125 CHAPTER X. THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN, AND MISSION WORK AMONG THEM. MEN who came through Yiin-nan twenty years ago wrote of its doctors and its medicines, its poverty and its infanticide. There seemed little else to speak of. Although the tribes were here then—and in a rawer state even then than they are at the present time—little was known about them, and men had not yet developed the cult of putting their opinions upon this most absorbing topic into print. To-day, however, scores of men in Europe are eagerly de- vouring every line of copy they can get hold of bearing upon this fascinating ethnological study. Mission- aries are plagued by inquiries for information respect- ing the tribes of Western China, and it is a curious feature of the situation that, with each article or book coming before the public contradiction follows contradiction, and very few people—not even those resident in the areas and working among the tribes— can agree absolutely upon any given points in their data. The numerous non-Chinese tribes I met in China formed one of the most interesting, and at the same time most bewildering, features of my travel ; and I can quite agree with Major H. R. Davies,* who tackles the tribe question with considerable ability in his book on Yiin-nan, when he says that it is safe to assert that in hardly any part of the world is there * Yiin-nan, The Link between India and the Yangtze, by Major H. R. Davies. Cambridge University Press. 126 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. such a large variety of languages and dialects as are to be found in the country which lies between Assam and the eastern border of Yiin-nan, and in the Indo- Chinese countries to the north of that region. The reason for it is generally ascribed to the physical characteristics of the country, the high mountain ranges and deep, swift-flowing rivers, which have brought about the differences in customs and lan- guage and the innumerable tribal distinctions so perplexing to him who would put himself in the position of an inquirer into Indo-Chinese ethnology. I know more than one gentleman in Yiin-nan at the present moment having under preparation manu- script upon this subject intended for subsequent publication, and I feel sure that their efforts will add valuable information to the all too limited supply now obtainable. In the meantime, I print my own impressions. T should like it to be known here, however, that I do not in any way whatsoever put myself forward as an authority on the question. I had not, at the time this was written, laid myself out to make any study of the subject. But the fact that I have lived in North-East Yiin-nan for a year anda half, and have travelled from one end of the province to the other, in addition to having come across tribes of people in Szech’wan, may justify me in the eyes of the reader for placing on record my own impressions as a general contribution to this most exciting discussion. I also lived at Shih-men-K’an (mentioned in the last chapter), among the Hua Miao for several months, travelled fairly considerably in the unsurveyed hill country where they live, and am the only man, apart from two other missionaries, who has ever been over that wonderful country lying to the extreme north-east 127 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. of Yiin-nan. One trip I made, extending over three weeks, will ever remain with me as a memorable time, but I regret that I have no space in this volume for even the merest reference to my jourey. Some of my friends in China might say sarcastically that mankind is destined to arrive at years of dis- cretion, and that I should have known better than to include in my book anything, however well founded, of anature tending to continue the wordy strife touching this vexed question of Mission Work, and that no matter how strikingly set forth, this is an old and obsolete story, fit only to be finally done with. It is for such to bear with me in what I shall say. There are thousands of men in the West who are entirely ignorant of men in China other than the ordinary Han Ren, and if I enlighten them never so little, then this chapter will have served an admirable end. In North-East Yiin-nan the tribes I came most in contact with were :— (i) The Miao or Miao-tze, as the Chinese call them; or the Mhong or Hmao, as they call themselves. + (ii) The I-pien (or E-pien), as the Chinese call them ; or the Nou Su (or Ngo Su), as they call themselves. : Probably the Nou Su tribes are what Major Davies calls the Lolo Group in his third division of the great Tibeto-Burman Family; but I merely suggest it, as it strikes me that the other branches of that group, including the Li-su, the La-hu, and the Wo-ni, seem to be descendants of a larger group, of which the Nou Su predominate in numbers, language, and customs. However, this by the way. 128 ‘moys-1aa yy fo usauom ovipy us “Moy -1mMsy fo UIUL ODITAT 12.4 D ; HA UY, PL ssdip Avp-Ayaao UT ‘UeU-UN YL puv AKoYyd-loa\y ut puto f ‘9}@M JO OMLIP pure poom fo Temat{ off “MIMO OBTPAT ISif-iitl : TAIPEI: “UDU-UTN X PVAPUII fo UVLO. OVIJAT THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. It may not be common knowledge that in most parts of the Chinese Empire, even to-day, there are tribes of people, essentially non-Chinese, who still rigidly maintain their independence, governed by their own native rulers as they were probably forty centuries ago, long before their kingdoms were annexed to China Proper. There are white bones and black bones, noses long and flattened, eyes straight and oblique, swarthy faces, faces yellow and white, coal-black and brown hair, and many other physical peculiarities differentiating one tribe from another. In many instances, these tribes, conquered slowly by the encroaching Chinese during the long and tedious term of centuries marking the growth of the Chinese Empire to its present immensity, are allowed to- maintain their social independence under their own chiefs, who are subject to the control of the Government of China—which means _ that excessive taxation is paid to the yamen functionary, who extorts money from anybody and everybody he can get into his clutches, and then gives a free hand. Others, in a further state of civilisation, have been gradually absorbed by the Chinese and are now barely distinguishable from the Han Ren (the Chinaman). And others, again, adopting Chinese dress, customs and language, would give the traveller a rough time of it were he to suggest that they are any but pure Chinese. To the ethnological student, it is obvious that so soon as the Chinese have tyrannised sufficiently and in their own inimit- able way preyed upon these feudal landlords enough to warrant their lands being confiscated, reducing a tribe to a condition in which, far removed from districts where co-tribesmen live, they have no status, 129 10 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. the aboriginals throw in their lot gradually with the Chinese, and to all intents and purposes become Chinese in language, customs, trade and life. This absorption by the Chinese of many tribes, stretching from the Burmese border to the eastern parts of Szech’wan, whilst an interesting study, shows that the onward march of civilisation in China will sweep all racial relicts from the face of this great awakening Empire. But at the same time there are many branches of a tribal family, some found as far west as British Burma and all more or less scattered and disor- ganised as the result of this silent oppression going on through the years, who still are ambitious of preserving their independent isolation, particularly in sparsely-populated spheres far removed from political activity. So remote are the districts in which these principalities are found, that the Chinese themselves are entirely ignorant of the characteristics of these tribes. They say of one tribe which is scattered all over China Far West that they all have tails; and of another tribe that the men and women have two faces! And into the official re- cords published by the Imperial Government the grossest inaccuracies creep concerning the origin of these peoples. Yiin-nan and Szech’wan—and a great part of Kwei-chow—in the main still untouched by the increased taxation necessary to provide revenue to uphold the reforms brought about by the forward movement in various parts of the Empire, are where the aboriginal population is most evident. This part of the Empire might be called the ethnological garden of tribes and various races in various stages of uncivilsation. These secluded mountain areas, 130 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. their unaltered conditions still telling forth the story of the world’s youth, have been the cradle and the death-bed of nations, of vigorous and ambitious tribes bent on conquest and a career of glory.” THE MIao. Of the Miao, with its various sections, we know a good deal. Their real home has been pretty finally decided to be in Kwei-chow province, and they pro- bably in former times extended far into Hu-nan, the Chinese of these provinces at the present time having undoubtedly a good deal of Miao blood in their veins. They are comparatively recent arrivals in Yiin-nan, but are gradually extending farther and farther to the west, maintaining their language and their dress and customs. I personally found them as far west as thirty miles beyond Tali-fu, a little off the main road, but Major Davies found them far up on the Tibetan border. He says: “‘ The most westerly point that I have come across them is the neighbourhood of Tawnio (lat. 23° 40’, long. 98° 45’). Through Central and Northern Yiin-nan they do not seem to exist, but they reappear again to the north of this in Western Szech’wan, where there are a few villages in the basin of the Yalung River (lat. 28° 15’, long. or? 40).” The Major was evidently ignorant of this Miao district of Chao-t’ong, to the north-east of the pro- vince. Stretching three days from Tong-ch’uan-fu right away on to Chao-t’ong, in a north line, Miao villages are met with fairly well the whole way ; then, three days from Tong-ch’uan-fu, in a north- westerly direction, we come to the Miao village of Loh-in-shan ; and then, striking south-west, through country absolutely unsurveyed part of the way, 131 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. Sa-pu-shan is met. This last place is the head- quarters of the China Inland Mission, where, at the present rate of progress, one might modestly esti- mate that in twenty years there will be no less than a million people receiving Christian teaching. These are not all Miao, however ; there are besides La-ka, Li-su, and many other tribes with which we have no concern at the present moment. So that it may be seen that from Yiin-nan-fu, the capital, in areas on either side of the main road leading up to the bifurcation of the Yangtze below Sui-fu, in a long, narrow neck running between the River of Golden Sand and the Kwei-chow border, Miao are met with constantly. And then, of course, over the river, in Szech’wan, they are met with again, and in Kwei-chow, further west, we have their real home. It is a far cry from Miao-land to Malaysia, but as I get into closer contact with the Miao people, the more do I find in them many common ways of every- day customs and points of character akin to the Malays and the Sakai (the jungle hill people of the Malay Peninsula), among whom I have travelled. Their modes of living contain many points in common. Ethnologists probably may smile at this assertion, the same as I, who have lived among the Miao, have smiled at a good deal which has come from the pens of men who have not. In this area there are two great branches of the Miao race :-— (i) The Hua Miao—The Flowery (or White) Miao. (ii) The Heh Miao—The Black Miao. The latter are considered as the superior of the two sections, speak a different tongue, and differ more or less widely in their methods, dress and customs, a 132 Hua Miao at dinner. These people live chiefly on maize, and are extremely poor. ‘The author has often eaten maize, ground by the old-fashioned mill, and boiled like rice. It is the nearest thing to saw-dust that can be imagined, 132 al Chinese family. The third from the left is a Minchia girl. Typical Miao village of North-East Yqin-nan, THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. study of which would lead one into a lifetime of interminable disquisitions, at the end of which one would be little more enlightened. Those who wish to study the question of inter-racial differences of the Miao are referred to Mr. Clarke’s Kwei-chow and Yiin-nan Provinces, Prince Henri d’Orleans’ Du Tonkin aux Indes, and Mr. Baber’s works. Major Davies also gives some new information con- cerning this hill people, and is generally correct in what he says; but in his, as in all the books which touch upon the subject, the language tests vary con- siderably. In Chao-t’ong and the surrounding dis- tricts, for instance, the traveller would be unable to make any progress with the vocabulary which the Major has compiled. I was unable to make it tally with the spoken language of the people, and append a table showing the differences in the phonetic—and I do it with all respect to Major Davies. I ought to add that this is the north-east corner of Yiin-nan language; that of Major Davies is taken from page 339 of his book. He says that the words given by him will not be found to correspond in every case with those in the Miao vocabulary in the pocket of the cover of his book, and some have been taken from other Miao dialects. However, the comparison will be interesting :— N-E. Yian- English Word. Major Davies’s Miao. nan Miao. Man (human being) Tan-neng, Tam-ming Teh-neh. Son .. «. «. To, Tam-t’ong- .. Tu. Eye .. «- .. K’a-mwa, Mai... .. A-ma. Hand .. .. .. Api .. .. «.. .. Tee. Cow .. .. .. Nyaw, Nga .. .. Niu. Pig «sae os Teng... .. .. «. Npa. Dog .» «+ «. Klie,Ko .. .. .. Klee. 133 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. English Word, Chicken Silver River Paddy Cooked Rice. . Tree Fire Wind Earth Sun Moon Big Come Go .. Drink One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten . Ka, Kei .. Nya . .. Tiang. .. Mblei . Mao .. .. Ndong eeThOs ee) ee As .. Chwa, Chiang .. oh EE) eee Gia Sex . Hno, Nai . .. Hla .. Hlo eo DAR: ass .. Mong . Ho .. .. A, Yi . Ao .. .. Pie, Po .. .. Pei, Plou.. ia Pay. cds . Chou... .. .. Shiang, I. .. Yi, Yik .. Chio .. . Chit .. Major Davies’s Miao. N.-E?Xiin- nan Miag. % . Nieh. .. Glee. .. Nglee. de Ve . Ntao. .. Teh. . Chia. we: Lig .. Hnu. . Hlee. .. Hlo. . Ta. .. Mao. . Hao. .. Ih. .. Ah. .. Tsz. .. Glao. vi Pe. .. Glao. .. Shiang. .. Yih, .. Chia. . Kao. The Miao language was until a year or two ago only spoken ; it was never written, and no one ever dreamed that it could be written. At the time of the great Miao revival, when thousands of Miao made a raid on the mission premises at Chao-t’ong, and implored the missionaries to come and teach them, it was found absolutely necessary that the language 134 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. should be reduced to writing, and the whole of this extremely creditable work fell to the Rev. Samuel Pollard, who may be characterised as the pioneer of this Christianising movement in North-East Yiin-nan. In reducing the language to writing, however, con- siderable difficulty was complicated by the presence of “ tones,” so well known to all students of Chinese, itself said to be an invention of the Devil. Tones introduce another element or dimension into speech. The number of sounds, not being sufficient for the reproduction of all the spoken ideas, has been multiplied by giving these various sounds in different tones. It is as if the element of music were intro- duced according to rule into speech, and as if one had not only to remember the words in everything he wished to say, but the tune also. The Miao people being so low down in the intellec- tual scale, and having never been accustomed to study, it was felt by the promoters of the written language that they should be as simple as possible, and hence they looked about for some system which could be readily grasped by these ignorant people. It was necessary that the system be absolutely phonetic and understood easily. By adapting the system used in shorthand, of putting the vowel marks in different positions by the side of the consonant signs, Mr. Pollard and his assistant found that they could solve their problem. The signs for the consonants are larger than the vowel signs, and the position of the latter by the side of the former gives the tone or musical note required. At the present time there are thousands of Miao now able to read and write, and the work of this 135 —, S, oF \ ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. enterprising missionary has conferred an inestimable boon upon this people. When I went among the Miao I was able, after ten minutes’ instruction, to stand up and sing their hymns and read their gospels with them. Miao women, who heretofore had never hoped to read, are now put in possession of the Word of God, and the simplicity of the written language enables them almost at once to read the Story of the Cross. Surely this is one of the outstanding features of mission work in the whole of China. I hope at some future date to publish a work devoted exclu- sively to my travels among the Hua Miao, for I feel that their story, no matter how simply written, is one of the great untold romances of the world. As a people, they are extremely fascinating in life and customs, emotional, large-hearted, and absolutely distinct from, with hardly a manner of daily life in common with, the Chinese. MISSION WORK AMONG THE MIAO. Whilst referring to mission work, it is a great privilege for the writer to add a word of most de- served eulogy of the United Methodist Mission at Chao-t’ong and Tong-ch’uan-fu, and to the kindness shown by the missionaries towards me when I came, an absolute stranger, among them in May, 1909. It is to two members of this Mission that I owe a life- long debt of gratitude, for it was Mr. and Mrs. Evans, of Tong-ch’uan-fu, who saved my life, a week or two after I left Chao-t’ong, as is recorded in a subse- quent chapter. It was in the old days of the Bible Christian Mission—than which the individual members of no mission in the whole of China worked with more 136 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. zeal and lower stipends—that a most interesting development in the mission took place. The mass of the Miao are the serfs of the descen- dants of their ancient kings, who are large land- owners, and the Miao are tenants. In 1905 the Miao heard of the Gospel, and came to listen to the preaching, and thousands came in batches at one time and another to the mission house. Their movements thus aroused suspicion among the Chinese, there was a good deal of persecution and personal violence, and at one time it looked as if there might be serious trouble. But the danger -quieted down. The chieftain gave land, the Miao contributed one hundred pounds sterling, and them- selves put up a chapel large enough to accommodate six hundred people. A year later, a thousand at a time crowded their simple sanctuary, and in 1907 nearly six thousand were members or probationers, and the work has steadily progressed ever since. I am indebted to the Rev. H. Parsons, who had. charge of the work at the time I passed through this. district, and whose guest I was for several months, for the following interesting details regarding the methods adopted in the running of this enormous mission field. Mr. Parsons is assisted in his work by his genial wife, who is a most ardent worker, and a capable Miao linguist. Mrs. Parsons regularly addresses congregations of several hundreds of Miao, and has travelled on journeys often with her husband ; and such work as hers, with several others in this mission, is a testimony to the wisdom of a system advocating the increase of the number of lady workers on the mission field in China. 137 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. “The present system of teaching has been gradually evolved—new conditions and developments have called for fresh methods. Various plans to teach the people have been tried, and only those which have ‘by experience been proved successful have been adopted. Considerable thought has been given to ‘securing systematic teaching of Bible truths in every village. The number of Miao more or less under Christian instruction in the districts supervised from Stone Gateway (the residence of the missionary-in- charge) may be from eight thousand to ten thousand. Between three and four thousand have received baptism, of whom a number are failing to show by consistent living the reality of their profession. Large numbers, however, are satisfactory. Over a ‘score of chapels and preaching places have been opened to meet the néeds of the Christians in the various districts, which cover an area of ten thousand square miles. The buildings are of mud, covered in most cases with a thatch. Nothing could be more Tough or inexpensive, yet to these children of the hills they are of much worth, not for their intrinsic value, but for what they represent. The Miao re- gard them as the centres of light and liberty, the ‘birthplaces of a new hope and eternal life. “ The ideal kept in view is to make the movement self-supporting. The people were encouraged to build their own chapels, and, therefore, they are no charge practically upon the mission funds. To keep their pulpits supplied regularly, a band of preachers has been selected and given some training, and now sixteen men give their whole time to this work, for which they receive the sum of £3 per annum for food, clothing and all personal expenses. An addi- tional allowance of about two shillings a man per 138 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. annum is made for the purchase of straw sandals. To supplement the “ regular’? preachers, a small band of the most trusted laymen has been chosen, and these men, styled local preachers, preach on Sundays, and return to their farming on the following day. They are not paid, but receive a few pence a year for sandals. Preaching of both ‘ regulars’ and “locals’ is on the whole satisfactory, and their efforts are appreciated by their fellow-tribesmen. “Efforts are constantly made to reach the many thousands of Miao whohave not accepted Christianity ; therefore, a band of thirty men, supported largely by generous grants from the British and Foreign Bible Society and the West China Religious Tract Society, itinerate in pairs among the villagers as colporteurs and Bible readers. To enable the missionary to keep in touch with every section of the field, deacons have been appointed in every village, their duties being to conduct services in their villages every night, generally to look after the spiritual welfare of their people, to keep the Christians of the field in touch with their fellow-believers and the missionary by attending conferences of workers and deacons, which are held periodically. These men also supply the names of persons who have removed to other villages or who have died, and collect the levies made for the carrying on of the work. Changes are made in the deacons every two years, and the appointment made by vote of the people. “ Day schools form an important part of the work among the Miao. Under normal circumstances, ten schools are conducted. Both boys and girls (only a few of the latter as yet) are taught to read and to write the Chinese and the Miao characters, and are given elementary training in a few Western subjects. 139 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. Strenuous efforts are also being made to purify,the home life by setting up a high standard of morals. Lax observance of the marriage bond is strongly discountenanced ; the people are taught to break with all the old evil practices, and to live pure and sober lives. Old customs die hard, however, and the battle is not yet finished. “Wizards have proved a source of great trouble. Very superstitious are the Miao, and hold in awe any person who professes to be able to peer into the future and to influence the destiny of their fellows. These wizards exert every power to oppose the missionaries, and the work is often hindered, some- times actually destroyed, by these men. The Miao are much afraid of sickness. To enable them to throw off some of the evil effects of previous vicious living, and to regain health, Dr. Lewis Savin and Dr. Lilian M. Grandin, who are at the hospital at Chao-t’ong, come out regularly, and have been the means of bringing a blessing to thousands. “Generally speaking, the work of the United Methodist Mission among the Hua Miao has many signs of a vigorous healthy growth.” “ Those who know it best,’ concludes Mr. Parsons, “‘ love it most, and entertain the strongest hopes of a successful future.” Tue Nov-su (oR I-PIEN). There is a class of people around Chao-t’ong who are called Nou-su, a people who, although occupying the Chao-t’ong Plain at the time the Chinese arrived, are believed not to be the aboriginals of the district. What I actually know about this people is not much. I have heard a good deal, but it must not be under- stood that I publish this as absolutely the final word. 140 ; awed ay} JO poreos Aros Alperoues ore sarpey oy} sv ‘ydvi8ojoyd onbiun y “999nF Sunaavd aya Surv: qsand Swyand ay. Surpaads unuom ovipy u1y “UDULOR ODLIAT Hua Miao at Chao-t'ong-fu. Five men and two women. A group of colporteurs, THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. People who have lived in the district for many years do not agree, so that for a mere traveller the task of getting infallible data would be quite formidable. No tribe is more widely known than the Nou-su, with their innumerable tribal distinctions and hereditary peculiarities so perplexing to the inquirer into Far Western China ethnology. The Nou-su area very fine, tall race, with com- paratively fair complexions, suggesting a mixture of Mongolian with some other straight-featured people. Of their origin, however, little can be vouched for, and with it we will have nothing to do here. But at the present time the Nou-su provide a good deal of interest from the fact that their power as tyrannic landlords and feudal chiefs is fast dying, and it may be that in a couple of decades, or a still shorter time, a people who, by obstinate self-reliance and great dislike to the Chinese, have remained un- affected by the absorbing spirit of the arbitrary Chinaman, will have passed beyond the vale of personality. Even now, however, they own and Tule enormous tracts of country (notably that part lying on the right bank of the River of Golden Sand) in north-east Yiin-nan. Some are very wealthy. One man may own vast tracts bigger than Yorkshire. In this tract there may be one hundred villages, all paying tribute to him and subject to the vagaries of his vilest despotism. From his tyranny his struggling tenantry have no redress. So long as the I-pien {the local name of the Nou-su) greases the palm of the squeezing Chinese mandarin in whose nominal control the district extends, he may run riot as he pleases. Social law and order is unknown, justice is a complete contradiction in terms, and whilst one 141 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. is in the midst of it, it is difficult to realise that in China to-day—the China which all the world believes to be awakening—there exists a condition of things which will allow a man to torture, to plunder, to murder, and to indulge to the utmost degree the whims of a Neronic and devilish temperament. Slave trading is common. If a tenant cannot pay his tribute, he sells himself for a few taels and becomes the slave of his former landlord, and if he would save his head treads carefully. In the early days, when one clan was driven further into the hills, they each clinched as much land as they could. In course of time, by petty quarrels, civil wars, and common feuds, the Nou-su were gradually thinned out. The Miao-tsi—the men of the hills and the serfs of the landlords, who four thousand years ago were a powerful race in their own kingdom—became the tenants of the Nou-su, whose rule is still marked by the grossest infamy possible to be practised on the human race. All the methods of torture which in the old days were associated with the Chinese are still in vogue, in many cases‘in an aggravated form. I have personally seen the tortures, and have listened to the stories of the victims, but it would not bear descrip- tion in print. It must not, however, be understood that to be a Nou-su is to be a landlord. By no means. For in the gradual process of the survival of the fittest, when the weaker landlords were murdered by their stronger compatriots and their lands seized, only a small per- centage of the tribe in this area have been able to hold sway. However, wherever there are landlords in this part of the country, they are always Nou-su or Chinamen. The Miao—or, at least, the Hua 142 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN., Miao own no lands, and are body and soul in the tyrannic clutch of the tyrannic I-pien. Then, again, in the Nou-su tribe there are various hereditary distinctions enabling a man to claim caste advantage. There are the Black Bones, as they style themselves, the aristocrats of the race, and the White Bones, the lower breeds, who obey to the letter their wealthier brethren—or anybody who has authority over them. The Nou-su, who are a totally different race anda much better class than the Miao, are believed to have been driven from the Chao-t’ong Plain, preferring migration to fighting, and many trekked across the Yangtze (locally called the Kin-sha) river into country now marked on good maps as the Man-tze country. It appears that the following are the two important branches :— (i) The Black (Na-su) .. Farmers and land- owners. (ii) The White (Tu-su) .. Generally slaves. Other minor classes are :— (i) The Lakes (or Red Nou-su) Mostly black- smiths. (ii) The A-u-tsi .. «. «. Mostly felt- makers, who rightly or wrongly claim. relationship with the Chinese. (iii) Another class, who are mostly basket-makers. The two great divisions, however, are the White and the Black. The latter class, themselves the owners of land, claim that all the White were originally slaves, and that those who are now free have escaped at some previous period from servitude. Men, as usual among such tribes, are scarcely distinguishable from the ordinary Han Ren. It 143 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. is the women, with their peculiar head-dress and picturesque skirts, who maintain the distinguishing features of the race. For the most part, the Nou-su are not idolaters ; no idols are in their houses. That portion of the tribe which migrated across the Yangtze, secure among the mountains, have never ceased to harass the Chinese, who now dwell on land which they themselves once tilled, or at least inhabited ; but they have been driven into remoter districts, and are only found away from the highways of Chinese travel. The race, too, is dying out—in this area at all events—and the Nou-su themselves reckon that their numbers have decreased by one- half during the last thirty years. This is one of the ‘saddest facts. The insanitation of their dwellings, their rough diet, and frequent riotings in wine, opium and other evils, are quickly playing havoc in their ranks, giving the strong the opportunity of enriching themselves at the expense of the weak, with frequent fighting about the division of land. Europeans who can speak the language of the Nou-su are numbered on the fingers of one hand. To one who has travelled in this neighbourhood for any length of time, it must be apparent that the unique method generally adopted by the Nou-su, that is, the landlord class, to get rich quickly is to kill off their next-door neighbour. The lives these men live, with nothing but scandal and licentiousness to pass their time, are grossly and horribly wicked when viewed by the broadest-minded Westerner. They all live in fear of their lives, and are each afraid of the others, all entertaining a secret hatred, and all ever on the alert to devise some safe scheme to murder the owner of some land they are anxious of annexing to their own—and in the doing of the deed 144 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. to save their own necks. If they succeed, they are accounted clever men. As I write, I hear of a man, quite a youngster, himself an exceedingly wealthy man, who killed his brother and confiscated his property with no compunction whatever. When tackled on the subject, he said he could do nothing else, for if he had not killed his brother his brother would have killed him. Yet there is no sense of crime as we of the West understand it all, and nothing is feared from the Chinese law. A man kills a slave, tortures him to death, and when the Chinese mandarin is appealed to, if he is at all, he looks wise and says, ‘I quite understand the position, I see your point, but I can do nothing. The murdered man was the landlord’s slave,’ and, with a gentle wave of his three-inch finger-nail, he explains how a man may kill his slave, his wife, or his son—and the law can do nothing. That is, if he compensates the mandarin. A Non-su looked upon a girl one day, when he was out collecting tribute. She was handsome, and he instructed his men to take her. She refused. A sum of one hundred ounces of silver was offered to anyone who would kidnap her and carry her off to his harem. Eventually he got the girl, and had her father tortured and then put to death because he would not deliver his daughter over to him. Yet there is no redress. Nou-su women, their feet unbound, with high foreheads and well-cut features, with fiery eyes set in not unkindly faces, tall and healthy, would be considered handsome women in any country in Europe. They rarely intermarry with other tribes. A good deal of affection certainly exists sometimes between husband and wife and between parents and 145 11 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. children, but the looseness of the marriage relation leads to unending strife. Many Europeans, travellers and missionaries, have been murdered in the country inhabited by the independent Lolo people. Although I have not personally been through any of that country, I have been on the very outskirts and have lived for a long time among the people there. I found them a pleasant hospitable race, fairly easy to get on with. And it must not be averred that, because they consider their natural enemy, the Chinaman, the man to be robbed and murdered, and because they kill off their fellow-landlords in order the more quickly to get rich, that they treat all strangers alike. Among the Europeans who have suffered death at their hands, it is probable that in some way the cause was traceable to their own bearing towards the people—either a total lack of knowledge of their language or an attitude which caused suspicion. Among the Nou-su, strong as this feudal life still is, the Chinese are fast gaining permanent influence. Their dissolute and drunken and inhuman daily practices are tending to work out among this people their own destruction, and in years to come in this neighbourhood the traveller will be perplexed at finding here and there a fine specimen of an up- standing Chinaman, with clean-cut face, straight of feature and straight of limb, with a peculiar Mongol look about him. He will be one of the surviving specimens of a race of people, the Nou-su, whose forgotten historical records would do much to clear up the doubt attaching to Indo-China and Tibet- Burma ethnology. The first Nou-su chieftain to come to Chao-t’ong, a man who was renowned as a tyrannical brute, 146 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. was one Jen Tsang-fu, who frequently gouged out the eyes of those who disobeyed his commands; and his descendants are said to have inherited a good many of this tyrant’s vices. The landlords prey upon their weaker brethren, and at last, with infinite sagacity, the Chinese Government steps in to stop the quarrels, confiscates the whole of the property, and thus reduces Nou-su land to immediate control of Chinese authorities. “The Nou-su are, of course, entirely dependent upon the land for their living. They till the soil and rear cattle, and the greatest calamity “that can come upon any family is that their land shall be taken from them. Tobe landless involves degrada- tion as well as poverty, and very severe hardship is the lot of men who have been deprived of this means of subsistence. For those who own no land, but who are merely tenants of the Tu-muh,* there seems to be no security of tenure ; but still, if the wishes and demands of the landlords are complied with, one family may till the same farm for many successive generations. The terms on which land is held are peculiar. The rental agreed upon is nominal. Large tracts of country are rented for a pig or a sheep or a fowl, with a little corn per year. Beside this nominal rent, the landlord has the right to make levies on his tenants on all special occasions, such as funerals, weddings, or for any other extraordinary expenses. He can also require his tenants with their cattle to render services. This system necessarily leads to much oppression and injustice. It is also said that if a family is hard pressed by a Tu-muh and reduced to extreme poverty, they will make themselves over to him on condition that a portion * ‘Literally “Eyes of the Earth ’’—the landlords. 147 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. of his land be given them to cultivate. Such people are called caught slaves, as distinguished from hereditary, and the eldest children become . the absolute property of the landlord and are generally given as attendants upon his wife and daughters. “Every farmer owns a large number of slaves, who live in the same compound as himself. These people do all the work of the farm, while the master employs himself as his fancy leads him. Over these unfortunate people the owner has absolute control. All their affairs are managed by him. His girl slaves he marries off to other men’s slave boys, and similarly obtains wives for his male slaves. The lot of these unfortunate people is hard beyond description. Being considered but little more valuable than the cattle they tend, the food given to them is often inferior to the corn upon which the master’s horse is fed. The cruel beatings and torturings they have been subject to have completely broken their spirit, and now they seem unable to exist apart from their masters. Very seldom do any of them try to escape, for no one will give them shelter, and the punishment awarded a recaptured slave is so severe as to intimidate the most daring. These poor folk are born in slavery, married in slavery, and they diein slavery. It is not uncommon to meet with Chinese slaves, both boys and girls, in Nou-su families. These have either been kidnapped and sold, or their parents, unable to nourish them, have bartered them in exchange for food. Their purchasers marry them to Tu-su, and their lot is thrown in{with the slave class. One’s heart is wrung with anguish sometimes as he thinks of what cruelty and wretchedness exist among the hills of this be- nighted , district. Even here, however, light is 148 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. beginning to shine, for some adherents of the Chris- tian religion have changed their slaves into tenants, thus showing the way to the ultimate solution of this difficult problem. “The life in a Nou-su household is not very complex. The cattle are driven out early in the morning, as soon as the sun has risen. They remain out until the breakfast hour, and then return to the stables and rest during the heat of the day, going out again in the cool hours. The food of the house- hold is prepared by the slaves, under the direction of the lady of the house. There is no refined cooking, for the Nou-su despises well-cooked food, and com- plains that it never satisfies him. He has a couplet which runs: ‘If you eat raw food, you become a warrior; if you eat it cooked, you suffer hunger.’ No chairs or tables are found in a genuine Nou-su house. The food is served up in a large bowl placed on the floor. The family sit around, and each one helps himself with a large wooden spoon. At the present time the refinements of Chinese civilisation have been adopted by a large number of Nou-su, and the homes of the wealthier people are as well furnished as those of the middle-class Chinese of the district. The women of the households also spend much time making their own and their children’s clothes. The men have adopted Chinese dress, but the women, in most cases, retain their tribal costume with its large turban-like head-dress, its plaited skirt and intricately embroidered coat. All this is made by hand, and the choicest years of maidenhood are occupied in preparing the clothes for the wedding- day. “The Nou-su, it would seem, used not to beg a wife, but rather obtained her by main force. At the 149 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. ! present day, while the milder method generally pre- vails, there are still survivals of the ancient custom. The betrothal truly takes place very early, even in infancy, and at the ceremony a fowl is killed, and each contracting party takes a rib; but as the young folk grow to marriageable age, the final negotiations have to be made. These are purposely prolonged until the bridegroom, growing angry, gathers his friends and makes an attack on the maiden’s home. Arming themselves with cudgels, they approach secretly, and protecting their heads and shoulders with their felt cloaks, they rush towards the house. Strenuous efforts are made by the occupants to pre- vent their entering, and severe blows are exchanged. When the attacking party has succeeded in gaining an entrance, peace is proclaimed, and wine and huge chunks of flesh are provided for their entertainment. “Occasionally during these fights the maiden’s home is quite dismantled. The negotiations being ended, preparations are made to escort the bride to her future home. Heavily veiled, she is supported on horseback by her brothers, while her near relatives, all fully armed, attend her. On arriving at the house, a scuffle ensues. The veil is snatched from the bride’s face by her relatives, who do their utmost to throw it on to the roof, thus signifying that she will rule over the occupants when she enters. The bride- groom’s people on the contrary try to trample it upon the doorstep, as an indication of the rigour with which the newcomer will be subjected to the ruling of the head of the house. Much blood is shed, and people are often seriously injured in these skirmishes. The new bride remains for three days in a temporary shelter before she is admitted to the home. A girl having once left her parent’s home to become a wife, 150 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. waits many years before she pays a return visit. Anciently the minimum time was three years, but some allow ten or more years to elapse before the first visit home is paid. Two or three years are then often spent with the parents. Many friends and re- latives attend any visitor, for with the Nou-su a large following is considered a sign of dignity and importance. When a child is born a tree is planted, with the hope that as the tree grows so also will the child develop. “ The fear of disease lies heavily upon the Nou-su people, and their disregard of the most elementary sanitary laws makes them very liable to attacks of sickness. They understand almost nothing about medicine, and consequently resort to superstitious practices in order to ward off the evil influences. When it is known that disease has visited a neigh- bour’s house, a pole, seven feet long, is erected in a conspicuous place in a thicket some distance from the house to be guarded. On the pole an old plough- share is fixed, and it is supposed that when the spirit who controls the disease sees the ploughshare he will retire to a distance of three homesteads. “A fever called No-ma-dzi works great havoc among the Nou-su every year, and the people are very much afraid of it. No person will stay by the sick-bed to nurse the unfortunate victim. ‘Instead, food and water are placed by his bedside and, covered with his quilt, he is left at the mercy of the disease. Since as the fever progresses the patient will perspire, heavy stones are placed on the quilt, that it may not be thrown off, and the sick person take cold. Many an unfortunate sufferer has through this strange practice died from suffocation. After a time the relatives will return to see what course the disease 151 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. has taken. This fever seems to yield to quinine, for Mr. John Li has seen several persons recover to whom he had administered this drug. When a man dies, his relatives, as soon as they receive the news, hold in their several homes a feast of mourning called by them the Za. A pig or sheep is sacrificed at the doorway, and it is supposed that intercourse is thus maintained between the living persons and the late departed spirit. The near kindred, on hearing of the death of a relative, take a fowl and strangle it; the shedding of its blood is not permissible. This fowl is cleaned and skewered, and the mourner then proceeds to the house where the deceased person is lying, and sticks this fowl at the head of the corpse as an offering. The more distant relatives do not perform this rite, but each leads a sheep to the house of mourning, and the son of the deceased man strikes each animal three times with a white wand, while the Peh-mo (priest or magician) stands by, and announcing the sacrifice by calling ‘so and so,’ giving of course the name, presents the soft woolly offering. “ Formerly the Nou-su burned their dead. Said a Nou-su youth to me years ago, ‘ The thought of our friends’ bodies either turning to corruption or being eaten by wild beasts is distasteful to us, and there- fore we burn our dead.’ The corpse is burnt with wood, and during the cremation the mourners arrange themselves around the fire and chant and dance. The ashes are buried, and the ground levelled. This custom is still adhered to among the Nou-su of the independent Lolo territory or more correctly Papu country of Western Szech’wan. The tribesmen who dwell in the neighbourhood of Wei- ning and Chao-t’ong have adopted burial as the 152 a =}. E » 2 0 Sz iy : Lb ee $ ae 5 % cb & E me ie Group of Hua Miao Christians at Shik-men-K’an. - ce pee ae” S-e S | ee, ie . ~ $ eld 2° Hua Miao boys on holiday in United Methodist Mission House in North-East Yiin-nan, “saSpyea dy ut Fuagvaautgy THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. means of disposing of their dead, but adding some customs peculiar to themselves. “On the day of the funeral the horse which the deceased man was in the habit of riding is brought to the door and saddled by the Pehmo. The com- mand is then given to lead the horse to the grave. All the mourners follow, and marching or dancing in intertwining circles, cross and recross the path of the led horse until the poor creature, grown frantic with fear, rushes and kicks in wild endeavour to escape from the confusion. The whole company then raise a great shout and call, ‘ The soul has come to ride the horse, the soul has come to ride the horse.” A contest then follows among the women of the deceased man’s household for the possession of this horse, which is henceforth regarded as of extreme value. It is difficult to discover much about the religion of the Nou-su, because so many of their ancient customs have fallen into disuse during the intercourse of the people with the Chinese. At the ingathering of the buckwheat, when the crop is stacked on the threshing floor, and the work of thresh- ing is about to begin, the simple formula, ‘ Thank you, Ilsomo,’ is used. Ilsomo seems to be a spirit who has control over the crops; whether good or evil, it is not easy to determine. [Ilsomo is not God, for at present, when the Nou-su wish to speak of God, they use the word Sce, which means Master. “‘In the independent territory of the Nou-su, to the west of Szech’wan, the term used for God is Eh-nia, and a Nou-su who has much intercourse with the independent people contends that there are three names indicative of God, and each representing different functions if not persons of the Godhead. These names are: Eh-nia, Keh-neh, Um-p‘a-ma. 153 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. The Nou-su believe in ancestor worship, and perhaps the most interesting feature of their religion is the peculiar form this worship takes. Instead of an ancestral tablet such as the Chinese use, the Nou- su worship a small basket (lolo) about as large as a duck’s egg and made of split bamboo. This ‘lolo’ contains small bamboo tubes an inch or two long, and as thick as an ordinary Chinese pen handle. In these tubes are fastened a piece of grass and a piece of sheep’s wool. A man and his wife would be re- presented by two tubes, and if he had two wives, an extra tube would be placed in the ‘lolo.’ At the ceremony of consecration the Pehmo attends, and a slave is set apart for the purpose of attending to all the rites connected with the worship of the deceased person. The ‘lolo’ is sometimes placed in the house,'but more often on a tree in the neighbour- hood or it may be hidden in a rock. For persons who are short-lived, the ancestral ‘lolo’ is placed in a crevice in the wall of some forsaken and ruined building. Every three years the ‘lolo’ is changed, and the old one burnt. The term ‘lolo,’ by which the Nou-su are generally known, is a contemptuous nickname given them by the Chinese in reference to this peculiar method of venerating their ancestors. “ Hill worship is another important feature of Nou- su religious life. Most important houses are built at the foot of a hill and sacrifice is regularly offered on the hill-side in the fourth month of each year. The Pehmo determines which is the most propitious day, and the Tumuh and his people proceed to the appointed spot. A limestone rock with an old tree trunk near is chosen as an altar, and a sheep and pig are brought forward by the Tumuh. The Pehmo, having adjusted his clothes, sits cross-legged before 154 THE TRIBES OF NORTH-EAST YUN-NAN. the altar, and begins intoning his incantations in a low muttering voice. The sacrifice is then slain, and the blood poured beneath the altar, and a hand- ful of rice and a lump of salt are placed beneath the stone. Some person then gathers a bundle of green grass, and the Pehmo, having finished intoning, the altar is covered, and all return to the house. The Pehmo then twists the grass into a length of rope, which he hangs over the doorway of the house. Out of a piece of willow a small arrow is made, and a bow similar in size is cut out of a peach tree. These are placed on the doorposts. On a piece of soft white wood a figure of a man is roughly carved, and this, with two sticks of any soft wood placed cross-wise, is fastened to the rope hanging over the doorway, on each side of which two small.sticks are placed. The Pehmo then proceeds with his incan- tation, muttering: ‘From now, henceforth and for ever will the evil spirits keep away from this house.’ “Most Nou-su at the present time observe the New Year festival on the same date and with the same customs as the Chinese. Formerly this was not so, and even now in the remoter district New Year’s day is observed on the first day of the tenth month of the Chinese year. A pig and sheep are killed and cleaned, and hung in the house for three days. They are then taken down, cut up and cooked. The family sit on buckwheat straw in the middle of the chief room of the house. The head of the house invites the others to drink wine, and the feasting begins. Presently one will start singing, and all join in this song: ‘ How firm is this house of mine. Throughout the year its hearth fire has not ceased to burn, My food corn is abundant, I have silver and also cash, My cattle have increased 155 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. to herds, My horses and mules have all white fore- heads K‘o K‘o Ha Ha Ha Ha K‘o K‘o, My sons are filial, My wife is virtuous, In the midst of flesh and wine we sleep, Our happiness reaches unto heaven, Truly glorious is this glad New Year.’ A scene of wild indulgence then frequently follows. “The Nou-su possess a written language. Their books were originally made of sheepskin, but paper is now used. The art of printing was unknown, and many books are said to have been lost. The books are illustrated, but the drawings are extremely crude,’’* * A good deal of information in this chapter was obtained from an article by the Rev. C. E. Hicks, published in the Chinese Recorder for March, 1910. The portion quoted is taken bodily from this excellent article. at 156 FIFTH JOURNEY. CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. CHAPTER XI. Revolting sights compensated for by scenery. Most eventful day in the trip. Buying a pony, and the reason for tts purchase. Author's pony kicks him and breaks his arm. Chastising the animal, and narrow escape from death. Rider and pony a sorry sight. An uneasy night. Reappearance of malaria. Author nearly forced to give in. Heavy vain on a adtfficult voad. At Ta-shut-tsing. Chasing frightened pony in the dead of night. Bad accommodation. Lepers and leprosy. Mining. At Kiang-ti. Two mandarins, and an amusing episode. Laying foundation of a long tliness. The Kiang-ti Suspension Bridge. Hard climbing. Tiffin in the mountains. Sudden ascents and descents. Description of the country. Tame birds and what they do. A non-enterprising community. Pleasant travelling without perils. Majesty of the mountains of Yiin-nan. WHILST in this district, as will have been seen, one has to steel himself to face some of the most revolting sights it is possible to imagine, he is rewarded by the grandeur of the scenic pictures which mark the downward journey to Tong-ch’uan-fu. The stages to Tong-ch’uan-fu were as follows :— Length of Heightabove stage. sea level. Ist day .. T’ao-iien .. .. Zoli... andday .. Ta-shui-tsing .. 30,, .. 9,300ft. 3rd day .. Kiang-ti .. .. 40,, .. 4,400,, 4th day .. Yi-che-shin -» 70,, .. 6300,, 5th day .. Hong-shih-ai .. 90,, .. 6,800,, 6th day .. Tong-ch’uan-fu.. 60,, .. 7,250,, The Chao-t’ong plateau, magnificently level, runs out past the picturesquely-situated tower of 157 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. Wang-hai-leo, from which one overlooks a stretch of water. A memorial arch, erected by the Li family of Chao-t’ong-fu, graces the main road farther on, and is probably one of the best of its kind in Yiin-nan, comparing favourably with the best to be found in Szech’wan, where monumental architecture abounds. Perhaps the only building of interest in Chao-t’ong is the ancestral hall of the wealthy family mentioned above, the carving of which is magnificent. At the end of the first day we camped at the Mohammedan village of T’ao-iien, literally ‘“‘ Peach Garden,” but the peach trees once might have been, though now certainly they are not. It was cold when we left, 38° F., hard frost. All the world seemed buttoned up and great-coated ; the trees seemed wiry and cheerless ; the legs of the pack-horses seemed brittle, and I felt so. Breath issued visibly from the mouth as I trudged along. My boy and I nearly came to blows in the early morning. I wanted to lie on; he did not. If he could not entertain himself for half an hour with his own thoughts, I, who could, thought it no fault of mine. I was a reasoning being, a rational creature, and thought it a fine way of spending a sensible, impartial half-hour. But I had to get up, and then came the benumbed fingers, a quivering body, a frozen towel, and a floor upon which the mud was frozen stiff. Little did he know that he was pulling me out to the most eventful and unfortunate day of my trip. At Chao-t’ong I had bought a pony in case of emergency—one of those sturdy little brutes that never grow tired, cost little to keep, and are unex- celled for the amount of work they can get through every-day in the week. Its colour was black, a 158 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. smooth, glossy black—the proverbial dark horse— and when dressed in its English saddle and bridle looked even smart enough for the use of the dis- tinguished traveller, who smiled the smile of pleasant ownership as it was led on in front all day long, seeming to return a satanic grin for my foolishness at not riding it.* The first I saw of it was when it was standing full on its hind legs pinning a man between the railings and a wall in a corner of the mission premises. It looked well. Truly, it was a blood beast ! On the second day out, whilst walking merrily along in the early morning, the little brute lifted its heels, lodged them most precisely on to my right forearm with considerable force—more forceful than affectionate—sending the stick which I carried thirty feet from me up the cliffs. The limb ached, and I felt sick. My boy—he had been a doctor’s. boy on one of the gunboats at Chung-king—thought it was bruised. I acquiesced, and sank fainting to a stone. On the strength of my boy’s diagnosis we rubbed it, and found that it hurt still more. Then diving into a cottage, I brought out a piece of wood, three inches wide and twenty inches long, placed my arm on it, bade my boy take off one of my puttees from one of my legs, used it as. a bandage, and trudged on again. Not realising that my arm was broken, in the evening I determined to chastise the animal in a * The incredulous of my readers may question, and rightly so, “* Then where did he get his saddle?” So I must explain that I met just out of Sui-fu a Danish gentleman (also a traveller) who wished to sell a pony and its trappings. As I had the arrange- ment with my boy that I would provide him with a conveyance, and did not like the idea of seeing him continually in a chair and his wealthy master trotting along on foot, I bought it for my boy’s use. He used the saddle until we reached Chao-t’ong. 159 , ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. manner becoming to my disgust. Mounting at the foot of a long hill, I laid on the stick as hard as I could, and found that my pony had a remarkable turn of speed. At the brow of the hill was a twenty- yard dip, at the base of which was a pond. Down, down, down we went, and, despite my full strength (with the left arm) at his mouth, the pony plunged in with a dull splash, only to find that his feet gave way under him in a clay bottom. He could not free himself to swim. Farther and farther we sank together, every second deeper into the mire, when just at the moment I felt the mud- clinging about my waist, and I had visions of a horrible death away from all who knew me, I plunged madly to reach the side. With one arm useless, it is still to me the one great wonder of my life how I escaped. Nothing short of miraculous; one of the times when one feels a special protection of Providence surrounding him. Pulling the beast’s head, after I had given myself @ momentary shake, I succeeded in making him give a mighty lurch—then another—then another, and in a few seconds, after terrible struggling, he reached the bank. We made a sorry spectacle as we walked shamefacedly back to the inn, under the gaze of half a dozen grinning rustics, where my man ‘was preparing the evening meal. In the evening, on the advice of my general confi- dential companion, I submitted to a poultice being applied tomy arm. It was bruised, so we put on the old-fashioned, hard-to-be-beaten poultice of bread. Whilst it was hot it was comfortable ; when it was cold, I unrolled the bandage, threw the poultice to the floor, and in two minutes saw glistening in the moonlight the eyes of the rats which ate it. 160 Coal Mine. Coal is found plentifully in many parts of Yiin-nan province. Often one can scrape it from the surface; in other places it is dug from underground. The picture is a photograph of an underground working. Kiangti Suspension Bridge. The drop leading down to the bridge is over 5,000 feet. Mountain scenery in North-East Yiin-nan. This spot lies to the south-east of Chao-t’ong-fu, and is eminently typical of the nature of the country. ‘The photo was taken from 10,000 feet about sea level, CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. Then I bade sweet Morpheus take me; but, although the pain prevented me from sleeping, I remember fainting. How long I lay I know not. Shuddering in every limb with pain and chilly fear, I at length awoke from a long swoon. Something had happened, but what? There was still the paper window, the same greasy saucer of thick oil and light being given by the same rush, the same rickety table, the same chair on which we had made the poultice—but what had happened? I rubbed my aching eyes and lifted myself in a half-sitting posture—-a dream had dazzled me and scared my senses. And then I knew that it was malaria coming on again, and that I was once more her luckless victim. Malignant malaria, mistress of men who court thee under tropic skies, and who, like me, are turned from thee bodily shattered and whimpering like a child, how much, how very much hast thou laid up for thyself in Hades ! Thank Heaven, I had superabundant energy and vitality, and despite contorted and distorted things dancing haphazard through my fevered brain, I determined not to go under, not to give in. My mind was a terrible tangle of combinations never- theless—intricate, incongruous, inconsequent, mon- strous; but still I plodded on. For the next four days, with my arm lying limp and lifeless at my side, and with recurring attacks of malaria, I walked on against the greatest odds, and it was not till I had reached Tong-ch’uan-fu that I learnt that the limb was fractured. Men may have seen more in four days and done more and risked more, but I think few travellers have been called upon to suffer more agony than befell the lot of the man who was crossing China on foot. 161 12 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. From T’ao-iien there is a stiff ascent, followed by a climb up steep stone steps and muddy mountain banks through black and barren country. The morning had been cold and frosty, but rain came on later, a thick, heavy deluge, which swished and swashed everything from its path as one toiled painfully up those slippery paths, made almost unnegotiable. But my imagination and my hope helped me to make my own sunshine. There is something, I think, not disagreeable in issuing forth during a good honest summer rain at home with a Burberry well buttoned and an umbrella over one’s head; here in Yiin-nan a coat made it too uncomfortable to walk, and the terrific wind would have blown an umbrella from one’s grasp in a twinkling. If we are in the home humour, in the summer, we do not mind how drench- ing the rain is, and we may even take delight in getting our own legs splashed as we glance at the “very touching stockings”’ and the “very gentle and sensitive legs ’’ of other weaker ones in the same plight. But here was I in a gale on the bleakest tableland one can find in this part of Yiin-nan, and a sorry sight truly did I make as I trudged “ two steps forward, one step back’’ in my bare feet, covered only with rough straw sandals, with trousers upturned above the knee, with teeth chattering in malarial shivers, endeavouring between-times to think of the pouring deluge as a benignant enemy fertilising fields, purifying the streets ofthe horrid little villages in which we spent our nights from contagion, refreshing the air! Shall I ever forget the day ? Just before sundown, drenched to the skin and suffering horribly from the blues, we reached one single hut, which I could justly look upon as a sort 162 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. of evening companion ; for here was a fire—albeit, a green wood fire—which looked gladly in my face,talked to me, and put life and comfort and warmth into me for the ten li yet remaining of the day’s hard journey. And at night, about 8.30 p.m., we at last reached the top of the hill, actually the summit of a mountain pass, at the dirty little village of Ta-shui-tsing. Not for long, however, could I rest; for I heard yells and screams and laughs. That ponyagain! Every one of my men were afraid of it, for at the slightest invitation it pawed with its front feet and landed man after man into the gutter, and if that failed it stood upright and cuddled them around the neck. Now I found it had run—saddle, bridle and all—and none volunteered to chase. So at 9.30, weary and bearing the burden of a terrible day, which laid the foundation of a long illness to be recorded later, I found it my unpleasant duty to patrol the hill from top to bottom, lighting my slippery way with a Chinese lantern, chasing the pony silhouetted on the skyline. Ta-shui-tsing is a dreary spot with no inn accommodation at all,*a place depopulated and laid waste, gloomy and melancholy. I managed, how- ever, after promising a big fee, to get into a small mud-house, where the people were not unkindly disposed. I ate my food, slept as much as I could in the few hours before the appearing of the earliest dawn on the bench allotted to me, feeling thankful that to me had been allowed even this scanty lodging. But I could not conscientiously recommend the place to future travellers—a dirty little village with its dirty people and its dirty atmosphere. At the top of the pass the wind nearly removed my ears as I took a final glance at the * A new inn has been built since.—E. J. D. 163 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. mountain refuge. Mountains here run south-west and north-east, and are grand to look upon. The poorest people were lepers, the beggars were all dead long ago. In Yiin-nan province there are thousands of lepers, a disease which the Chinese, not without reason, dread terribly, for no known remedy exists. Burning the patient alive, which used often to be resorted to, is even now looked upon as the only true remedy. Cases have been known where the patient, having been stupefied with opium, has been locked in a house, which has then been set on fire, and its inmate cremated on the spot. Mining used to be carried on here, so they told me; but I was not long in concluding that, what- ever was the product, it has not materially affected the world’s output, nor had it greatly enriched the labourers in the field. When I got into civilisation I found that coal of a sulphurous nature was the booty of ancient days. There may be coal yet, as is most probable, but the natives seemed far too apathetic and weary of life to care whether it is there or not. Passing Ta-shui-tsing, the descent narrows to a splendid view of dark mountain and green and beautiful valley. We were now travelling away from several ranges of lofty mountains, whose peaks appeared vividly above the drooping rain-filled clouds, onwards to a range immediately opposite, up whose slopes we toiled all day, passing en route only one uninhabited hamlet, to which the people flee in time of trouble. After a weary tramp of another twenty-five li—the Yiin-nan li, mind you, the most unreliable quantity in all matters geo- graphical in the province—I asked irritatedly, as all travellers must have asked before me, “‘ Then, 164 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. in the name of Heaven, where is Kiang-ti?’”’* It should come into view behind the terrible steep decline when one is within only about a hundred yards. It is roughly four thousand feet below Ta-shui-tsing. Kiang-ti is an important stopping place, with but one forlorn street, with two or three forlorn inns, the best of which has its best room immediately over the filthiest stables, emitting a stench which was almost unbearable, that I have seen in China. It literally suffocates one as it comes up in wafts through the wide gaps in the wood floor of the room. There are no mosquitoes here, but of a certain winged insect of various species, whose distinguishing characteristics are that the wings are transparent and have no cases or covers, there was a formidable army. I refer to the common little fly. There was the house fly, the horse fly, the dangerous blue-bottle, the impecunious blow fly, the indefatigable buzzer, and others. One’s delicate skin got beset with flies: they got in one’s ears, in one’s eyes, up one’s nose, down one’s throat, in one’s coffee, in one’s bed; they bade fair to devour one within an hour or two, and brought forth inward curses and many swishes of the *kerchief. The village seemed a death-trap. Glancing comprehensively at one another as I entered the higher end of the town, a party of revelling tea-drinkers hastily pulled some cash from their satchels to settle accounts, and made a general rush into the street, where they awaited noisily the approach of a strangely wondrous and imposing spectacle, one that had not been seen * Pronounced Djang-di. Famous throughout Western China for its terrible hill, one of the most difficult pieces of country in the whole of the west. ( 165 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. in those parts for many days. The tramper, tired as he could be, at length approached, but the crowd had increased so enormously that the road was completely blocked. Tradesmen with their portable workshops, pedlars with their cumbersome gear and pack-horses could not pass, but had to wait for their turn; there were not even any tortuous by-streets in this place whereby they might reach their destination. Children lost them- selves in the crush, and went about crying for their mothers. A party of travellers, newly arrived from the south by caravan ere er wedged with their worn-out horses and mules in the thick of the mob, and could not move an inch. As far as the eye could reach the blue-clad throng heaved restlessly to and fro under the blaze of the brilliant sun which harassed everyone in the valley, and, moving slowly and majestically in the midst of them all, came the foreigner. As they caught sight of me, my sandalled feet, and the retinue following on wearily in the wake, the populace set up an ecstatic yell of ferocious applause and turned their faces towards the inn, in the doorway of which one of my soldier-men was holding forth on points of more or less delicacy respecting my good or bad nature and my British connection. At that moment, the huge human mass began to move in one predetermined direction, and then a couple of mandarins in their chairs joined the swarming rabble. I had to sit down on the step for five minutes whilst my boy, with commendable energy, cleared these two mandarins, who had come from Chen-tu and were on their way to the capital, out of the best room, because his master wanted it. As he finished speaking, there came a loud crashing 166 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. noise and a shout—my pony had landed out just once again, and banged in one side of a chair belong- ing to these travelling officials. They met me with noisy and derisive greetings, which were returned with a straight and penetrating look. No less than fifty degrees was the thermometrical difference in Ta-shui-tsing and Kiang-ti. Hereit was stifling. Cattle stood in stagnant water, ducks were envied, my room with the sun on it became in- tolerable, and I sought refuge by the river; my butter was too liquid to spread; coolies were tired as they rested outside the tea-houses, having not a cash to spend ; my pony stood wincing, giving sharp shivers of his skin, and moving his tail to clear off the flies and his hind legs to clear off men. As for myself, I could have done with an iced soda or a claret cup. Very early in the morning, despite malaria shivers, I made my way over the beautiful suspension bridge which here graces the Niu Lan,* a tributary of the Yangtze, up to the high hills beyond. This bridge at Kiang-ti is one hundred and fifty feet by twelve, protected at one end by a couple of monkeys carved in stone, whilst the opposite end is guarded by what are supposed to be, I believe, a couple of lions—and not a bad representation of them either, seeing that the workmen had no original near at hand to go by. From here the ascent over a second range of moun- tains is made by tortuous paths that wind along the sides of the hills high above the stream below, and at * This river, the Niu Lan, comes from near Yanglin, one day’s march from Yiin-nan-fu. It is being followed down by two American engineers as the probable route for a new railway, which it is proposed should come out to the Yangtze some days north of Kiang-ti. (See Appendix E). 167 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. other times along the river-bed. The river is followed in a steep ascent, a sort of climbing terrace, from which the water leaps in delightful cascades and waterfalls. A four-hour climb brings one, after terrific labour, to the mouth of the picturesque pass of Ya-ko-t’ang at 7,500 feet. In the quiet of the mountains I took my midday meal ; there was about the place an awe-inspiring stillness. It was grand but lonely, weird rather than peaceful, so that one was glad to descend again suddenly to the river, tracing it through long stretches of plain and barren valley, after which narrow paths lead up again to the small village of Yi-che-shin, considerably below Ya-ko-t’ang. It is the sudden descents and ascents which astonish one in travelling in this region, and whether climbing or dropping, one always reaches a plain or upland which would delude one into believing that he is almost at sea-level, were it not for the towering mountains that all around keep one hemmed in in a silent stillness, and the rarefied air. Yi-che- shin, for instance, standing at this altitude of con- siderably over 6,000 feet, is in the centre of a table- land, on which are numerous villages, around which the fragrance of the broad bean in flower and the splendid fertility now and again met with make it extremely pleasant to walk—it is almost a series of English cottage gardens. Here the weather was like July in England—or what one likes to imagine July should be in England—dumb, dreaming, hot, lazy, luxurious weather, in which oneshould doashe pleases, and be pleased with what he does. As I toiled along, my useless limb causing me each day more trouble, I felt I should like to lie down on the grass, with stones ’twixt head and shoulders for my pillow, and repose, as Nature was reposing, in sovereign strength. 168 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. But I was getting weaker! I saw, as I passed, gardens of purple and gold and white splendour ; the sky was at its bluest, the clouds were full, snowy, mountainous. Then on again to varying scenes. Inns were not frequent, and were poor and wretched. The country was all red sandstone, and devoid of all timber, till, descending into a lovely valley, the path crossed an obstructing ridge, and then led out into a beautiful park all green and sweet. The country was full of colour. It put a good taste in one’s mouth, it impressed one as a heaven-sent means of keeping one cheerful in sad dilemma. The gardens, the fields, the skies, the mountains, the sunset, the light itself—all were full of colour, and earth and heaven seemed of one opinion in the harmony of the reds, the purples, the drabs, the blacks, the browns, the bright blues, and the yellows. Birds were as tame as they were in the Great Beginning ; they came under the table as I ate, and picked up the crumbs without fear. Peasant people sat under great cedars, planted to give shade to the travellers, and bade one feel at home in his lonely pilgrimage. Then one felt a peculiar feeling —this feeling will arise in any traveller—when, sur- mounting some hill range in the desert road, one descries, lying far below, embosomed in its natural bulwarks, the fair village, the resting-place, the little dwelling-place of men, where one was to sleep. But when towards nightfall, as the good red sun went down, I was led, weary and done-up, into one of the worst inns it had been my misfortune to encounter, a thousand other thoughts and feelings united in common anathema to the wnenterprising com- munity. 169 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. Tea was bad, rice we could not get, and all night Jong the detestable smells from the wood fires choked our throats and blinded our eyes; glad, therefore, was I, despite the heavy rain, to take a hurried and early departure the next morning, descending a thousand feet to a river, rising quite as suddenly toa height of 8,500 feet. Now the road went over a mountain broad and flat, where travelling in the sun was extremely pleasant—or, rather, would have been had I been fit. Pack-horses, laden clumsily with their heavy loads of Puerh tea, Manchester goods, oil and native exports from the Yiin-nan province, passed us on the moun- tain-side, and sometimes numbers of these willing but ill-treated animals were seen grazing in the hollows, by the wayside, their backs in almost every instance cruelly lacerated by the continuous rubbing of the wooden frames on which their loads were strapped. For cruelty to animals China stands an easy first ; love of animals does not enter into their sympathies at all. I found this not to be the case among the Miao and the I-pien, however; and the tribes across the Yangtze below Chao-t’ong, locally called the Pa-pu, are, as a matter of fact, fond of horses, and some of them capable horsemen. The journey across these mountains has no perils. One may step aside a few feet with no fear of falling a few thousand, a danger so common in most of the country from Sui-fu downwards. The scenery is magnificent—range after range of mountains in whatever direction you look, nothing but mountains of varying altitudes. And the patches of wooded slopes, alternating with the red earth and more fertile green plots through which streams flow, with rolling waterfalls, picturesque nooks and winding 170 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. pathways, make pictures to which only the gifted artist’s brush could do justice. Often, gazing over the sunlit landscape, in this land ‘“‘ South of the Clouds,”’ one is held spellbound by the intense beauty of this little-known province, and one wonders what all this grand scenery, untouched and un- marred by the hand of man, would become were it in the centre of a continent covered by the ubiquitous globe-trotter. No country in the world more than West China possesses mountains of combined majesty and grace. Rocks, everywhere arranged in masses of a Tude and gigantic character, have a ruggedness tempered by a singular airiness of form and softness of environment, in a climate favourable in some parts to the densest vegetation, and in others wild and barren. One is always in sight of mountains rising to fourteen thousand feet or more, and constantly scaling difficult pathways seven or eight or nine thousand feet above the sea. And in the loneliness of a country where nothing has altered very much the handiwork of God, an awe-inspiring silence per- ‘ vades everything. Bold, grey cliffs shoot up here through a mass of verdure and of foliage, and there white cottages, perched in seemingly inaccessible positions, glisten in the sun on the coloured mountain- sides. You saunter through stony hollows, along straight passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls of rocks, now winding through broken, shaggy chasms and huge, wandering fragments, now suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where Peace, long established, seems to repose sweetly in the bosom of Strength. Everywhere beauty alter- nates wonderfully with grandeur. Valleys close in abruptly, intersected by huge mountain masses, I7I ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. the stony water-worn ascent of which is hardly passable. Yes, Yiin-nan is imperatively a country first of mountains, then of lakes. The scenery, embodying truly Alpine magnificence with the minute sylvan beauty of Killarney or of Devonshire, is nowhere excelled in the length and breadth of the Empire. XN 172 CHAPTER XII. Yiin-nan’s chequered caveer. Switzerland of China. At Hong-shih-ai. China’s Golden Age in the past. The conservative instinct of the Chinese. How to quiet coolies. Roads. Dangers of ordinary travel in wet season. K’ung- shan and tis mines. Tong-ch'uan-fu, an important mining centre. English and German machinery. Methods of smelting. Protestants and Romanists in Yiin-nan. Arrival at Tong-ch’uan-fu. Missionaries set author's broken avm. Trio of Europeans. Author starts for the provincial capital. Abandoning purpose of crossing China on foot. Arm in splints. Curious incident. At Lat-t’eo- po. Malaria returns. Serious illness of author. Delirium. Devotion of the missionaries. Death expected. Innkeeper’s curious attitude. Recovery. After-effects of malaria. Patient stays in Tong-ch’uan-fu for several months. Then completes his walking tour. YUN-NAN has had a chequered career ever since it became a part of the empire. In the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, the invincible warrior, annexed this Switzerland to China; and how great his exploits must have been at the time of this addi- tion to the land of the Manchus might be gathered from the fact that all the tribes of the Siberian ice-fields, the deserts of Asia, together with the country between China and the Caspian Sea, acknowledged his potent sway—or at least so tradition says. She is sometimes right. My journey continuing across more undulating country brought me at length to Hong-shih-ai (Red Stone Cliff), a tiny hamlet hidden away completely in a deep recess in the mountain-side, settled in a narrow gorge, the first house of which cannot be seen until within a few yards of entry. Inn accom- modation, as was usual, was by no means good. 173 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. It is characteristic of these small places that the greater the traffic the worse, invariably, is the accommodation offered. Travellers are continually staying here, but not one Chinaman in the popula- tion is enterprising enough to open a decent inn. They have no money to start it, I suppose. But it is true of the Chinese, to a greater degree than of any other nation, that their Golden Age is in the past. Sages of antiquity spoke with deep reverence of the more ancient ancients of the ages, and revered all that they said and did. And the rural Chinaman to-day says that what did for the sages of olden times must do for him to-day. The conservative instinct leads the Chinese to attach undue importance to precedent, and therefore the people at Hong-shih-ai, knowing that the village has been in the same pitiable condition for genera- tions, live by conservatism, and make no effort whatever to improve matters. Fire in the inn was kindled in the hollow of the ground. There was no ventilation ; the wood they burned was, as usual, green ; smoke was suffocating. My men talked well on into the night, and kept me from sleeping, even if pain would have allowed me to. I spoke strongly, and they, thinking I was swearing at them, desisted for fear that I should heap upon their ancestors a few of the reviling thoughts I entertained for them. I should like to say a word here about the roads in this province, or perhaps the absence of roads. They had been execrable, the worst I had met, ageravated by heavy rains. With all the reforms to which the province of Yiin-nan is endeavouring to direct its energies, it has not yet learned that one of the first assets of any district or country is good 174 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. roads. But this is true of the whole of the Middle Kingdom. The contracted quarters in which the Chinese live compel them to do most of their work in the street, and, even in a city provided with but the narrowest passages, these slender avenues are per- _ petually choked by the presence of peripatetic vendors. of every kind of article of common sale in China, and by itinerant craftsmen who have no other shop than the street. In the capital city of the province, even, it is a matter of some difficulty to the European to- walk down the rough-paved street after a shower of rain, so slippery do the slabs of stone become ; and he has to be alive always to the lumbering carts, whose wheels are more solid than circular, pulled by bullocks as in days long before the dawn of the Christian Era. The wider the Chinese street the more abuses can it be put to, so that travel in the broad streets of the towns is quite as difficult as in the narrow alleys; and as these streets are never repaired, or very rarely, they become worse than no roads at all—that is, in dry weather. This refers to the paved road, which, no matter what its faults, is certainly passable, and in wet weather is a boon. There is, however, another kind of road—a mud road, and with a vengeance muddy. An ordinary mud or earth road is usually only wide enough for a couple of coolies to pass, and in this. province, as it is often necessary (especially in the Yiin-nan-fu district) for one cart to pass another, the farmer, to prevent trespass on his crops, digs. around them deep ditches, resembling those which are dug for the reception of gas mains. In the rainy season the fields are drained into the roads,, which at times are constantly under water, and. 175 7 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. beyond Yiin-nan-fu, on my way to Tali-fu, I often found it easier and more speedy to tramp bang across a rice field, taking no notice of where the road ought to be. By the time the road has sunk a few feet below the level of the adjacent land, it is liable to be absolutely useless as a thoroughfare ; it is actually a canal, but can be neither navigated nor crossed. There are some roads removed a little from the main roads which are quite dangerous, and it is not by any means an uncommon thing to hear of men with their loads being washed away by rivers where in the dry season there had been the roads. The great lines of Chinese travel, so often im- passable, might be made permanently passable if the governor of a province chose to compel the several district magistrates along the line to see that these important arteries are kept free from standing water, with ditches in good order at all seasons. But for the village roads—during my travels over which I have come across very few that could from a Western standpoint be called roads—there is absolutely no hope until such time as the Chinese village may come dimly to the apprehension that what is for the advantage of the one is for the advan- tage of all, and that wise expenditure is the truest economy—an idea of which it has at the present moment as little conception as of the average thought of the Englishman. A hundred li to the east of Hong-shih-ai, over two impassable mountain ranges, are some considerable mines, with antiquated brass and copper smelting works, and this place, K’ung-shan by name, with Tong-ch’uan-fu, forms an important centre. As is well known, all the copper of Yiin-nan goes to 176 “a ae Chinese home life. Loh-in-shan, three days from Tong-ch’ uan-fu (see p. 131). ‘Bats Jo ayvIS B UL aia sIapUazap dq} ‘ap{sut sou ‘pur Bue}ypy yySnosq sear ured ayy IV ‘aSnyar jo saovyd se ‘pastuuerc} spro[pury] oy} wayM JO UOLTEqer Jo seu ur ‘ePdoad ey} Aq Posm aim puL ‘ny-INS wosy uaop Aaumol ayy to wayyo waes are sIaMo} asa], “ORT BNEY ore sinqord oy} Ut wads ajdoad ay cadnfaa fo samoy uvu-un X IVA-YION ¥ CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. Peking as the Government monopoly, excepting the enormous amount stolen and smuggled into every town in the province.* The smelting is of the roughest, though they are at the present moment laying in English machinery, and the Chinaman in charge is under the impression that he can speak English: he, however, makes a hopeless jargon of it. This mining locality is sunk in the deepest degradation. Men and women live more as wild beasts than as human beings, and should any be unfortunate enough to die, their corpses are allowed to lie in the mines. Who is there that could give his time and energy to the removal of a dead man? Tong-ch’uan-fu should become an important town if the rich mineral country of which it is the pivot were properly opened up. Several times I have visited the works in this city, which, under the charge of a small mandarin from Szech’wan, can boast only the most primitive and inadequate machinery, of German make. A huge engine was running as a kind of pump for the accumulation of air, which was passed through a long thin pipe to the three furnaces in the outer courtyard. The furnaces were mud-built, and were fed with charcoal (the most expensive fuel in the district), the maximum of pure metal being only 1,300 catties per day. The ore, which has been roughly smelted once, is brought from K’ung-shan, is finely smelted here, then conveyed most of the way to Peking by pack-mule, the expense in thus handling, from the time it leaves the mine to its destination at Peking, being several times its market * In the capital there is a street called ‘‘ Copper Kettle Lane,” where one is able to buy almost anything one wants in copper and brass. Hundreds of men are engaged in the trade, and yet it is ‘‘ prohibited.” These ‘‘Copper Kettle Lanes” are found in many large cities.—E. J. D. 177 13 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. value. Nothing but copper is sought from the ore, and a good deal of the gold and silver known to be contained is lost. I passed an old French priest as I was going to Tong-ch’uan-fu the next day. He was very pleased to see me, and at a small place we had a few minutes’ chat whilst we sipped our tea. In Yiin-nan, I found that the Protestants and the Romanists, although seeing very little of each other, were not engaged in actual warfare, and, communi consensu, went their own way, maintaining an attitude of more or less friendly indifference one towards the other. It is a pity that this could not be said of all the other provinces. I heard the other day in Szech’wan of the circulation of a pamphlet in the Chinese character, issued by a faction of the Roman Catholic body which may be termed a harmful polemic, calculated to bring no good result to the Romanist doctrine, and tending only to widen the breach between Roman Catholics and Protestants.* * Without wishing here to hold a brief for either party, I imagine that the gist of the general translation of this pamphlet will not be without interest. For a considerable time Protestant missionaries in the area of Liang-shan-hsien (in Szech’wan) have suffered aggression at the hands of the Romanists, the latest phase being the wide distribution of this booklet, entitled Simple Arguments of the Church. They are simple indeed! The first part deals with an attempt to prove that the ‘“‘ Heaven’s Lord Church ” (T’ien Chu Huei) is the only true church, on the four points of Unity, Sanctity, Catholicity and Continuity ; while the latter portion of the book proves to the mind of the ordinary reader that the ‘‘ Jesus Church ”’ is false on each and all of these four points. It were a pity to give further publicity to the details presented to the Chinese of this vast interior province, but I might say it is evident that the writer bore nothing but ill-will to that great body of self-sacrificing missionaries comprising the Protes~- tant bodies at work in the Empire. ‘‘In the ‘ Jesus Church,’”’ says the translation, ‘“‘ there are those who, following the teachings of Luther, do not recognise him as its founder. You need not fear if one day you murder 100,000 men, and defile the like number of women, only firmly believe in Jesus and it is all right; other matters are of little importance, and because of worship, merits, scripture, ceremonies, 178 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. The last day’s march to Tong-ch’uan-fu is perhaps the most interesting of this stage of my journey. Climbing over boulders and stony steps, I reached an altitude of 8,500 feet, whence thirty li of pleasant going awaited us all the way to Lang-wang-miao (Temple of the Dragon King). Here I sat down and strained my eyes to catch the glimpse of the compact little walled city, where I hoped my broken arm would be set by the European missionaries. The traveller invariably hastens his pace here, expecting to run down the hill and across the plain in a very short space ; but as the time passed, and I slowly wended my way along the difficult paths through the rice fields, I began to realise that I had been duped, and that it was farther than it seemed. Two blushing damsels, maids goodly to look upon, gave me the sweetest of smiles as I strode across the bodies of some fat pigs which roamed at large in the outskirts of the city, the only remembrance I have to mar the cleanliness of the place. At Tong-ch’uan-fu the Rev. A. Evans and his doctrines, commandments, all may be altered at will—nothing is settled.” Speaking of pastors and their authority for coming to lead others to heaven, the writer was of the opinion that no doubt need be entertained that they will go to hell with those they lead ; under the pretence of preaching they go everywhere, desiring only to make money so as to return to their own countries to live in pleasure and comfort. ‘“‘ And why publish it? Because every- one knows it.” The two churches spoken of were impartially and clearly separated. The ‘‘ Jesus Church’”’ lacked evidence, its doctrines had no proof. Split off from the ‘‘ Heaven’s Lord Church ” they gave rise to many sects, they were not obedient to the Pope, and were confused and without regulations. ‘‘ Pretending to propagate the Old and New Testaments, they go everywhere deceiving the ignorant and making mischief, escaping on the suspicion of danger. Adulterers and drunkards, there is no evil thing they do not practice,” and the writer concludes by asking what virtue can these men preach, being of such disorderly conduct, and asserting blandly that “‘ everyone of this religion drops into the pit of fire,’ The reader may add his own comment.—E. J. D. 179 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. extremely hospitable wife set my arm and did every- thing they could—as much as a brother and sister could have done—to help me, and to make my short stay with them a most happy remembrance. It was, however, destined that I should be their guest for many months, as shall hereinafter be explained. * * * * A trio of Europeans might have been seen on the morming of Monday, May 10, 1909, leaving Tong- ch’uan-fu on the road to Yiin-nan-fu, whither the author was bound. Mr. and Mrs. Evans, who, as chance would have it, were going to Ch’u-tsing-fu, were to accompany me for two days before tuming off in a southerly direction when leaving the prefecture. It was a fine spring moming, balmy and bonny. It was decided that I should ride a pony, and this I did, abandoning my purpose of crossing China on foot with some regret. I was not yet fit, had my broken arm in splints, but rejoiced that at Yiin-nan- fu I should be able to consult a European medical man. Comparatively an unproductive task—and perhaps a false and impossible one—would it be for me to detail the happenings of the few days next ensuing. I should be able not to look at things themselves, but merely at the shadow of things— and it would serve no profitable end Suffice it to say that two days out, about midday, a special messenger from the capital stopped Mr. Evans and handed him a letter. It was to tell him that his going to Ch’u-tsing-fu would be of no use, as the gentleman he was on his way to meet would not arrive, owing to altered plans After consulting his wife, he hesitated whether they should go back 180 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. to Tong-ch’uan-fu, or come on to the capital with me. The latter course was decided upon, as I was so far from well—I only learned this some time afterwards. And now the story need not be lengthened. At Lai-t’eo-po (see first section of the second book of this volume), malaria came back, and an abnormal temperature made me delirious. The following day I could not move, and it was not until I had been there six days that I was again able to be moved. During this time, Mr. and Mrs. Evans nursed me day and night, relieving each other for rest, in a terrible Chinese inn—not a single moment did they leave me. The third day they feared I was dying, and a message to that effect was sent to the capital, informing the consul. Meanwhile malaria played fast and loose, and promised a pitiable early disso- lution. My kind, devoted friends were fearful lest the innkeeper would have turned me out into the roadway to die—the foreigner’s spirit would haunt the place for ever and a day were I allowed to die inside. But I recovered. It was a graver, older, less exuberant walker across China that presently arose from his flea-ridden bed of sickness, and began to make a languid personal introspection. I had developed a new sensitiveness, the sensitiveness of an alien in an alien land, in the hands of new-made, faithful friends. Without them I should have been a waif of all the world, helpless in the midst of unconquerable surroundings, leading to an inevitable destiny of death. I seemed de- climatised, denationalised, a luckless victim of fate and morbid fancy. It was malaria and her workings, from which there was no escape. 181 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. Malaria is supposed by the natives of the tropic belt to be sent to Europeans by Providence as a chastening for otherwise insupportable energy of the white man. Malignant malaria is one of Nature’s watch-dogs, set to guard her shrine of peace and ease and to punish woeful intruders. And she had brought me to China to punish me. As is her wont, Nature milked the manhood out of me, racked me with aches and pains, shattered me with chills, scorched me with fever fires, pursued me with des- pairing visions, and hag-rode me without mercy. Accursed newspapers, with their accursed routine, came back to me; all the stories and legends that I had ever heard, all the facts that I had ever learnt, came to me in a fashion wonderfully contorted and distorted ; sensations welded together in ghastly, brain-stretching conglomerates, instinct with in- dividuality and personality, human but torturingly inhuman, crowded in upon me. The barriers divid- ing the world of ideas, sensations, and realities seemed to have been thrown down, and all rushed into my brain like a set of hungry foxhounds. The horror of effort and the futility of endeavour permeated my very soul. My weary, helpless brain was filled with hordes of unruly imaginings ; I was masterless, panic- driven, maddened, and had to abide for weeks—yea, months—with a fever-haunted soul occupying a fever-rent and weakened body. At Yiin-nan-fu, whither I arrived in due course after considerable struggling, dysentery laid me up again, and threatened to pull me nearer to the last great brink. For weeks, as the guest of my friend, Mr. C. A. Fleischmann, I stayed here re- cuperating, and subsequently, on the advice of my medical attendant, Dr. A. Feray, I went back to 182 CHAO-T’ONG-FU TO TONG-CH’UAN-FU. Tong-ch’uan-fu, among the mountains, and spent several happy months with Mr. and Mrs. Evans. Had it not been for their brotherly and sisterly zeal in nursing me, which never flagged throughout my illness, future travellers might have been able to point to a little grave-mound on the hilltops, and have given a chance thought to an adventurer whom the fates had handled roughly. But there was more in this than I could see; my destiny was then slowly shaping. Throughout the rains, and well on into the winter, I stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Evans, and then con- tinued my walking tour, as is hereafter recorded. Enp oF Book I. 183 BOOK II. THE second part of my trip was from almost the extreme east to the extreme west of Yiin-nan—from Tong-ch’uan-fu to Bhamo, in British Burma. The following was the route chosen, over the main road in some instances, and over untrodden roads in others, just as circumstances happened :— Tong-ch’uan-fu to Yiin-nan-fu (the capital city) .. .. .. .. 520 li. Yiin-nan-fu to Tali-fu.. .. .. 905 li. Tali-fu to Tengyueh (Momien) .. 855 li. Tengyueh to Bhamo (Singai) .. 280 English miles approx. I also made a rather extended tour among the Miao tribes, in country untrodden by Europeans, except by missionaries working among the people. Cloth dvers in Western China. This is a common sight in towns of Yiin-nan, especially at Tong- ch’uan-fu, which is noted for its indiga. Scores of men are engaged in the business, and the district stands unique as being still unaffected by foreign dyes. Many parts of China have discarded the native dye for the foreign product. The rows of cloth are seen drying in the sun, being brought out in the morning and taken into the city again at night. 188 Outside the city wall of Long-ch'uan-fu. The basket on the man’s back shows the method of carrying in moun- tainous districts, as opposed to the ‘tiao’’ method. The cape, a long white felt covering of excellent manufacture, worn by the other man, is largely worn by people engaged in work in hilly neighbourhoods in N.E. Yin-nan. *y99J 000'6 0} ASTI PuTYyaq ST]ty ey “nf-won yo-5uo 7 ‘ada, uvronfu0z FIRST JOURNEY. TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. CHAPTER XIII. Stages to the capital. Universality of reform in China. Political, moral, social and spiritual contvast of Yiin-nan with other parts of the Empive. Inconsistencies of celestial life. Author's start for Burma. The caravan. To Che-cht. Dogs fighting over human bones. Lat-t’eo-p’o : highest point traversed on overland journey. Snow and hail storms at ten thousand feet. Desolation and poverty. Brutal husband. Horse saves author from destruction. The one hundred li to Kong-shan. Wild, rugged moorland and mournful mountatns. Wreichedness of the people. Night travel in Western China. Author knocks a man down. Late arrival and tts vexations. Horrible inn accommodation. End of the Yiin-nan Plateau. Appreciable rise in temperature. Entertaining a band of inelegant infidels. European contention for superiority, and the Chinaman’s point of view. Insoluble conundrums of ‘“‘ John’s" national character. The Yiin-nan railway. Current ideas in Yiin-nan regarding foreigners. Discourteous fu-song and his escapades. Fright of ill-clad urchin. Scene at Yang-lin. Arrival at the capital. No exaggeration is it to say that the eyes of the world. are upon China. It is equally safe to say that, whilst all is open and may be seen, but little is under- stood. Inithe Far Eastern and European press so much istheard¥of the awakening of China that one is apt really to believe that the whole Empire, from its Dan to Beersheba, is boiling for reform. But it may be that the husk is taken for the kernel. The husk comprises the treaty ports and some of the capital cities of the provinces ; the kernel is that vast sleepy interior of China. Few people, even in 187 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. Shanghai, know what it means ; so that to the stay-at- home European pardon for ignorance of existing conditions so much out of his focus should readily be granted. From Shanghai, up past Hankow, on to Ichang, through the Gorges to Chung-king, is a trip likely to strike optimism in the breast of the most sceptical foreigner. But after he has lived for a couple of years in an interior city as I have done, with its antiquated legislation, its superstition and idolatry, its infanti- cide, its girl suicides, its public corruption and moral degradation, rubbing shoulders continually at close quarters with the inhabitants, and himself living in the main a Chinese life, our optimist may alter his opinions, and stand in wonder at the extraordinary differences in the most ordinary details of life at the ports on the China coast and the Interior, and of the gross inconsistencies in the Chinese mind and character. If in addition he has stayed a few days away from a city in which the foreigners were shut up inside the city walls because the roaring mob of rebels outside were asking for their heads, and he has had to abandon part of his overland trip because of the fear that his own head might have been chopped off en route, he may increase his wonder to doubt. The aspect here in Ytin-nan—politically, morally, socially, spiritually— is that of another kingdom, another world. Con- ditions seem, for the most part, the same yester- day, to-day, and for ever. And in his new environment, which may be a replica of twenty centuries ago, the dream he dreamed is now dispelled. “China,” he says, ‘‘is mot awaking; she barely moves, she is still under the torpor of the ages.” And yet again, in the capital and a few of the larger 188 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. cities, under your very eyes there goes on a reform which seems to be the most sweeping reform Asia has yet known. Such are the inconsistencies, seemingly unchange- able, irreconcilable in conception or in fact , a truthful portrayal of them tends to render the writer a most inconsistent being in the eyes of his reader. * * * * No one was ever sped on his way through China with more goodwill than was the writer when he left Tong-ch’uan-fu ; but the above thoughts were then in his mind. Long before January 3rd, 1910, the whole town knew that I was going to Mien Dien (Burma.) Confessedly with a sad heart—for I carried with me memories of kindnesses such as I had never known before— I led my nervous pony, Rusty, out through the Dung Men (the East Gate), with twenty enthusiastic scholars and a few grown-ups forming a turbulent rear. My Chinese, at the parting outside the Beggar’s Temple, was limited to ‘‘ Ching an,” but I knew that their unintelligible expressions were all of the kindliest intent. As I strode onwards the little group of excited younkers watched me disappear out of sight on my way to the capital by the following route—the second time of trying ;>- Length of Height stage. above sea. Ist day—Che-chi .. «. go li. .. 7,800 ft. 2nd day—Lai-t’eo-p’o .. 90 li. .. 8,500 ft. 3rd day—Kongshan .._ .. 100 li. .. 6,700 ft. 4th day—Yang-kai .. .. 85 li. .. 7,200 ft. 5th day—Ch’ang-p’o.. .. 95 li. .. 6,000 ft. 6th day—The Capital .. 70 li. .. 6,400 ft. 189 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. My caravan consisted of two coolies: one carried my bedding and a small basket of luxuries in case of emergency, the other a couple of boxes with absolute necessities (including the journal of the trip). In addition, there accompanied me a man who carried my camera, and whose primary business it was to guard my interests and my money—my general factotum and confidential agent—and by an inverse operation enrich himself as he could, and thereby maintain relations of warm mutual esteem. They received thirty-two tael cents per man per diem, and for the stopping days on the road one hundred cash. Neither of them, of course, could speak a word of English. The ninety li to Che-chi was mostly along narrow paths by the sides of river-beds, the intermediate plains having upturned acres waiting for the spring. At Ta-chiao (7,500 feet), where I stayed for my first alfresco meal at midday, the man—a tall, gaunt, ugly fellow, pock-marked and vile of face—told us he was a traveller, and that he had been to Shanghai. This I knew to be a bare-faced lie. He voluntarily explained to the visitors, gathered to see the barbarian feed, what condensed milk was for, but he went wide of the mark when he announced that my pony,* hog-maned and dock-tailed (but Chinese still), was an American, as he said I was. A young mother near by, suffering from acute eye inflamma- tion, was lying in a smellful gutter on a felt mat, two pigs on one side and a naked boy of eight or so on the other, whilst she heaped upon the head of the innocent babe she was suckling curses most * I took a pony because I had made up my mind to return into China after I had reached Burma. In Tong-ch’uan-fu a good pony can be bought for, say, £3—in Burma, the same pony would sell for £10.—E. J. D. 190 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. horribly blood-curdling. Dogs—the universal scavengers of the awakening interior, to which merest allusion is barred by one’s Western sense of decency—just outside Che-chi, where I stayed the night, had recently devoured the corpse of alittle child. Its clothing was strewn in my path, together with the piece of fibre matting in which it had been wrapped, and the dogs were then fighting over the bones. To Lai-t’eo-p’o was a day that men might call a “ killer.” It is a dirty little place with a dirty little street, lying at the foot of a mountain known throughout Western China as one of the wildest of Nature’s corners, nearly ten thousand feet high, a terrific climb under best conditions. A clear half-moon, and stars of a silvery twinkle, looked pityingly upon me as I started at 3.0 a.m., ignorant of the dangerously narrow defile leading along cliffs high up from the Yili Ho. In the dark cautiously I groped along. Not without a painful emotion of impending danger, as I watched the stellular reflections dancing in the rushing river, did I wander on in the wake of a group of pack-ponies, and took my turn in being assisted over the broken chasms by the muleteers. Two fellows got down below and practically lifted the tiny animals over the passes where they could not keep their footing. Gradually I saw the nightlike shadows flee away, and with the dawn came signs of heavy weather. Snow came cold and sudden. As we slowly and toilsomely ascended, the velocity of the wind fiercely increased ; down the mountain-side, at a hundred miles an hour, came clouds of blinding, flinty dust, making the blood run from one’s lips and cheeks as he plodded on against great odds. With the biting IgI ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. wind, howling and hissing in the winding ravines and snow-swept hollows, headway was difficult. Often was I raised from my feet : helplessly I clung. to the earth for safety, and pulled at withered grass to keep my footing. The ponies, patient little brutes, with one hundred and fifty pounds strapped to their backs, came near to giving up the ghost, being swayed hopelessly to and fro in the fury. For hours we thus toiled up pathways seemingly fitter for goats than men, where leafless trees were bending destitute of life and helpless towards the valley, as the keen wind went sighing, moaning, wailing through their bare boughs and budless twigs. Such a gale, wilder than the devil’s passion, I have not known even on the North Atlantic in February. At times during the day progression in the deepen- ing snow seemed quite impossible, and my two men, worn and weary, bearing the burden of an excessively fatiguing day, well-nigh threw up the sponge, vowing that they wished they had not taken on the job. But the scenery later in the day, though monoto- nouslyso, was grand. The earth was literally the colour of deep-red blood, the crimson paths intertwining the darker landscape bore to one’s imagination a vision of some bloody battle—veritable rivers of human blood. To cheer the traveller in his desdlation, the sun struggled vainly to pierce with its genial rays through the heavy, angry clouds rolling lazily upwards from the black valleys, and enveloping the earth in a deep infinity of severest gloom. The cold was damp. In the small hemmed-in hollows, whereto our path- way led, the icy dew clung to one’s hair and beard. From little brown cottages, with poor thatched roofs 192 The wayside lodging-house of Yiin-nan. 48 The author's cavavan on Lai-t’eo-p'0 Hill, 9,300 feet above the sea. Mountains opposite rise to about 14,000 feet. Two days from Tong-ch'uan-fu. TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. letting in the light, and with walls and woodwork long since uniformly rotten, men and women emerged, rubbing their eyes and buttoning up their garments, looking wistfully for the hidden sun. At Shao-p’ai (8,100 feet) a brute of a fellow was administering cruellest chastisement to his disobedient yoke-fellow, who took her scourging in good part. I passed along as fast as I could to the ascent over which a road led in and around the mountain with alarming steepness, a road which at home would never be negotiated on foot or on horseback, but which here forms part of the main trade route. From the extreme summit one dropped abruptly into a protecting gorge, where falling cascades, sparkling like crystal showers in the feeble sunlight occasionally breaking through, danced playfully over the smooth- worn, slippery rocks ; a stream foamed noisily over the loose stones, and leapt in rushing rapids where the earth had given way ; there was no grass, no scenery, no life, and in the sudden turnings the hurricane roared with heavenly anger through the long deep chasms, over the twelve-inch river-beds at the foot. At Lai-t’eo-p’o accommodation at night was fairly good. Men laughed hilariously at me when I raved at some carpenters to desist their clumsy hammering three feet above my head. Hundreds of dogs yelped unceasingly at the moon, and with the usual rows of the men in mutual invitation to “Come and wash your feet,” or “‘ Ching fan, ching fan,’ the draughts, the creaks and cracks, the un- intermitting din, and so much else, one was not sorry to rise again with the lark and push onwards in the cold. Down below this horrid town there is a plain ; in this plain there is a hole fifty feet deep, 193 14 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. and had my pony, which I was leading, not pulled me away from falling thereinto, my story would not now be telling. : To Kongshan (6,700 feet), past Yei-chu-t’ang (8,100 feet) and Hsiao-lang-t’ang (7,275 feet), one hundred li away, was a journey through country considerably more interesting, especially towards the end of the day, a peculiar combination of wooded slope and rough, rock-worn pathways. Hsiao-lang-t’ang, twenty-five li from the end of the stage, overlooks a wide expanse of barren, uninviting moorland. Deep, jagged gullies break the uneven rolling of the mountains; dark, weird caverns of terrible immensity yawn hungrily from the surface of weariest desolation, ever widening with each turn. Mist hid the ugliest spots high up among the peaks, whose white summits, peeping sullenly from out this blue sea of damp haze, told a wondrous story of winter’s withering all life to death, a spot than which in summer few places on earth would be more entrancing. But these mountains are breathing out a solitude which is eternal. Man here has never been. Far away beyond lies the country of the aborigines; but even the Lolo, wild and rugged as the country, fearless of man and beast, have never dared to ascend these heights. They are mournful, cheerless, devoid of a single smile from the common mother of us all, lacking every feature by which the earth draws man into a spirit of unity with his God. Horrid, frowning waste and aimless discontinuity of land, harbinger of loneliness and of evil! People, poor struggling beings of our kind, here seemed mocked of destiny, and a hot raging of misery waged within them, for all that the heart might desire and wish for had to them been 194 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. denied. If, indeed, the earth be the home of hope, and man’s greatest possession be hope, then would it seem that these poor creatures were entirely cut off, shut out from life, wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert. There were no exceptions, it was the common lot. Each day and every day did these men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued destitution, and temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding country, pregnant only with aggravation to their own dire wretched- ness. In such spots, unhappily in Ytin-nan not few, does the mystery of life grow ever more mysterious to one whom distress has never harassed. A great pity seized my heart, but these poor people would prob- ably have laughed had they known my thoughts. As I passed they came uninterestedly to look upon me. They watched in expressive silence; they were silent because of poverty. And I, too, kept a seal upon my lips as I ate the good things here provided under the eyes of those to whom hunger had given none but a jealous outlook. Pitiful enough were it, thought I, merely to watch without allowing to escape speech furthei to taunt them. So I ate, and they looked at me. I came and went, but never a word was uttered by these men and women, or even by the children, whose most painful feeljzig seemed that of their own feebleness. They.were indeed feeble units standing in a threatening infini- tude of life, and their-thoughts probably dwelt upon my luxury and wealth as mine could not help dwelling upon their hungry town of hungry men and famished children. Words cannot paint their poverty—men 195 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. void of hope, of life, of purpose, of idea. Happy for them that they had known no other. We ascended over a road of unspeakable torture to one’s feet. Gazing down, far away into a seem- ingly bottomless abyss, we could faintly hear in the lulling of the wind the rush of a torrent, fed by a hundred mountain streams, which washed our path and in horrible disfigurement tore open the surface of the hillsides. The long day was drawing wearily to a close. As the sun was sinking beyond the uneven hills over which I was to climb before the descent to the town begins, the effect of the green and gold and red and brown produced a striking picture of sweet poetic beauty. I stood in contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, non- chalantly picking out mouldy monkey-nuts from some coarse sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female. Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone -breaking the hollow’s gloom. Uncanny is night travel in China. ‘* Who knows but what ghosts, those fierce-faced denizens of the hills, may run against thee and bewitch thee,’’ murmured one man to the others. They stopped, and I stopped with them. And in the darkness, pegging on alone at the mercy of these coolies, my own thoughts were not unsynchronistic. At last, with no slight misgiving, we came down into the city’s smoke. Dogs barked at me, and ran away like the curs they are. Midway down the stone footway my yamen runner too cautiously crept up to me in the dark, muttering something, and I 196 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. floored him with my fist. Afterwards I learnt that he came to relieve me of the pony I was leading. Every room in every wretched inn was occupied ; opium fumes already issued from the doorways, and it was now pitch dark, so that I could scarce see the sallow faces of the hungry, uncouth crowd, to whom with no little irritation I tried to speak as I peered carefully into the caravanserai. Evident it certainly was that the duty lying nearest to me at that par- ticular moment, to myself and all concerned therein, was to accept what I was offered, and not wear outmy temper in grumbling. My boy, Lao Chang (an I-pien), the brick, expressed to me his regrets, and something like real sympathy shone out from his eyes in the dimness. “ Puh p’a teh, puh p’a teh ” ( “Have no fear, have no fear’’), said he; and as I stood the while piling up cruellest torture upon my uncourtly host, he made off to prepare a downstair room (to lapse into modern boarding-house phraseology). First through an outer apartment, dark as darkest night; on past the caterwauling cook and a few disreputable culinary hangers-on; asked to look out for a pony, which I could not see, but which I was told might kick me; then onward to my boy, who stood on a stool and dropped the grease of a huge red Chinese candle among his plaited hair, as he wobbled it above his head to light the way. He gripped me tenderly, took me to his bosom as it were, gave me one push, and I was there. He tarried not. What right had he to listen to what I in secret would say of the horrid keeper and his twice horrid shakedown inn? He passed out swiftly into outer darkness, uttering a groan I rudely inter- preted as, “‘ That or nothing, that or nothing.” 197 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. It was a room, that is in so far as four sides, a floor and a ceiling comprise one. Of that I had no doubt. A sort of uncomely offshoot from the main inn building, built on piles in the earth after the fashion of the seashore houses of the Malay—but much dirtier and incomparably more shaky. For many a long year, longer than mine horrid host would care to recollect, this now unoccupied space had served admirably as the common cooking-room—the ruined fireplace was still there; later, it had been the stable—the ruined horse trough was still there. At one extreme corner only could I stand upright ; long sooty cobwebs graced the black wood beams over- head, hanging as thick as icicles in a mountain valley ; each step I took in fear and trembling (the slightest move threatened to collapse the whole dilapidation). Four planks, four inches wide at the widest part and of varying lengths and thicknesses, placed on a pile of loose firewood at the head and foot, comprised the bedstead on which I tremulously sat down. Upon this improvised apology for a bed, under my mosquito curtains (no traveller should be without them in Western China), I washed my blistered feet on an ancient Daily Telegraph, whilst my cook saw to my evening meal. His bringing in the rice tallied with my laying the tablecloth in the same place where I had washed my feet—the one available spot. As I ate, rats came brazenly and picked up the grains of rice I dropped in my inefficient handling of chopsticks, and in scaring off these hardened, hungry vermin I accidentally upset tea over my bed, whilst at the same moment a clod-hopping coolie came in with an elephant tread, with the result that my European reading-lamp lost its balance from 198 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. the top of a tin of native sugar and started a con- flagration, threatening to make short work of me and my belongings—not to mention that horrid fellow and his inn. During the night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch—moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting common- place of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity—gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking from my-dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the previous day was due. There were the rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks and cracks—no quiet about the place from night to morning. Then came the barking of dogs, the noises of the cocks and kine, of horses and foals, of pigs and geese—the general wail of the zoological kingdom—cows bellow- ing, duck diplomacy, and much else. So that it were not surprising to learn that this distinguished traveller in these contemptible regions was sitting on a broken- down bridge, looking wearily on to the broken-down tower on the summit of a pretty little knoll outside Kongshan, thinking that it were well a score of such were added did their design embrace a warning to evade the place. Having done some twenty li by moonlight, I managed with little difficulty to reach Yang-kai (6,350 feet) by 3.0 p.m. This road, which is not the main road to the capital, was purposely chosen ; 199 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. most travellers go through Yang-lin. The journey is comprised of pleasant ascents and descents over the latter portion of the great Yiin-nan Plateau, and a very appreciable difference in the temperature was here noticed. While the people at the north-east of the province, from which I had come, were shivering in their rags and complaining about the price of charcoal, the population here basked under Italian skies in a warm sun. From Lui-shu-ho (7,200 feet) the country was beautifully wooded with groves of firs and chestnuts. At the inn to which I was led the phlegmatic proprietor, after wishing me peace, assumed un- ostentatiously the becoming attitude of a Customs official, and scrutinised with vigour the whole of my gear, from an empty Calvert’s tooth-powder tin to my Kodak camera, showering particularly con- descending felicitations upon my English Barnsby saddle and field-glasses thereto attached. His excitement rose at once. He called loudly for his confederates—a band of inelegant infidels—and bidding them stand one by one at given distances, he gaped at them through the glasses with the hilarity of a schoolboy and the stupidity of an owl. He jumped, he shouted, he waved his arms about me, and handing them back to me with both hands, shouted deafeningly in my ear that they were quite beyond his ken; and then he sucked his teeth disgustingly and spat at my feet. His associates were speechless, asses that they were, and could only stare, in horror or impudence I know not. Meantime Lao Chang brought tea, and sallied forth immediately to fraternise among old friends. As I drank my tea, after having invited them one by 200 Man and beast of Yrin-nan. The ponies are probably the sturdiest animals in the world, and certainly rank among the hardest workers. One cannot truthfully write this of the men! 200 Charcoal carriers on the way to Ytin-nan-fu. The fellow on the left is carrying rice. ‘(upysSuoyy ava) uv, [ suoT ovisEy spavmoy SuryooT Sy TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty stare, destitute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese gentry, sucking at tobacco- pipes as long as their own overfed bodies, forced upon me a sense of my unfitness to the unknown conditions of the life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in the sterile waste of their fashionable life. They spoke to me subse- quently, and I bravely threw at them a Chinese phrase or two ; but when the conversation got above my head, and I told them, quietly but determinedly, that I could not understand, my English speech seemed vaguely to indicate a sudden collapse of the acquaintance, the opening of a gulf between us, destined to widen to the whole length and breadth of Yang-kai, swallowing up their erstwhile confidences. One of them facetiously remarked that the gentleman wished to eat his rice; and as they cleared out, falling over each other and the high step at the entrance to the room, I thought that no matter how old they are, Chinese are but little children weak. But had I treated them as little children I should have found that they were old men. There was in me withal a sense of better rank in the eyes of this super-excellent few who worshipped, in ‘‘ heathen’ China, the Satan of Fashion. As a matter of fact, their rank had emerged from such long centuries ago that it seemed to me to be so identified with them that they were hardly capable of analysis of people such as myself. As I looked pitifully upon them and the involved simplicity of their immutable natures, I realised an unconquerable feeling of inborn rank and natural elevation in respect to nationality. This is, however, against my personal general con ception of Eastern peoples, but I must admit I felt 201 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. it this afternoon. And so perhaps it is with the majority of Europeans in the Far East, who, because they have no knowledge of the language or a familiarity with national customs and ideas, remain always aliens with the Easterner. They cannot sympathise with him in his joys and sorrows, his likes and dislikes, his prejudice and bias, or under- stand anything of his point of view. This is one of the hardest lessons for the European traveller in ‘China who has none of the language. Because we do not understand him, we call the Chinaman a heathen—it is easier. Now, to the Chinaman his country is the~best in the world, his province better than any other of the eighteen, and the village in which he lives the most enviable spot in the province—the centre of his universe. Speak disparagingly about that little circle, critically or sympathetically, and he is at once up against you. It may develop narrowness of mind and smallness of soul. We Westerners think we know that it does; and the fact that he allows his mental horizon to be bounded by such Narrow confines appears to us to render him any- thing but a desirable citizen and a full-sized man. But no matter. The Chinaman, on the other hand, regards all those men who have never tasted the bliss of a true home in the Empire which is celestial as barbarians—part of this feeling is patriotism and love of country, part is rank conceit. But Englishmen are saying that England is the most ‘Christian country in the world for the very same reason. Rationally speaking, John is the “‘ old brother ”’ of the world, oldest of any race by very many centuries. In common with all other travellers and those who 202 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. have lived with this man, and who have made his nature a serious study, apart from racial bias, I am perplexed with conundrums which cannot be solved. Some of the conundrums are perhaps superficial, and disappear with a deeper insight into his life ; others are wrought into his being. Yet he has a fixedness of character, reaching in some directions to absolute crystallisation ; he possesses the virility of young manhood and many of the mutually inconsistent traits of late manhood and early youth. I wonder at his ignorance of merest rudimentary political economy—but why? This man explored centuries ago the cardinal theories of some of our present-day ‘Western classics. However, I have to teach him the form of the earth and the natural causes of eclipses. He is frightened by ghosts, burns mock money to maintain his ancestors in the future state, worships a bit of rusty old iron as an infallible remedy for droughts; I have seen him shoot at clouds from the city wall to frighten away the rain— and I despise him for it all. As I revise this copy, a rumour is current in the town in which I am resting to the effect that foreigners are buying children and using their heads to oil the wheels of the new Yiin-nan railway, and I despise him for believing it. The Chinaman will not fight, and I sneer at him; he abhors me because I do. I ridicule his manner of dress ; he thinks mine grossly indecent. I consider his flat nose and the plaited hair and shaven skull as heathenish ; but the Chinaman, eating away with his to me ridiculous chopsticks, looks out from his quick, almond-shaped eyes and considers me still a foreign devil, although he is too cunning to tell me. His opinions of me are founded upon the narrow grounds of vanity and egotism ; mine, although I do 203 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. not admit it even to myself, from something very much akin thereto.* I have been looked upon in far-away outposts of the Chinese Empire where foreigners are still un- known, as an example of those human monstrosities which come from the West, a creature of a very low order of the human species, with a form and face uncouth, with language a hopeless jargon, and with manners unbearably rude and obnoxious. Not that I personally answer accurately to this descrip- tion, reader, any more than you would, but because I happen to be among a people who, as far back as Chinese opinion of foreigners can be traced, have considered themselves of a morality and intellec- tuality superior to yours and mine. I write the foregoing because it sums up what may be termed the current ideas regarding Europeans, ideas the reverse of complimentary, which are the more unfortunate on account of the fact that they are held by the vast majority of a people forming a quarter of the whole human race. This is true, despite all the reform. These ideas may be, and I trust they are, erroneous, but I know that I must keep in mind the extremely important desideratum in dealing with the Chinese that they look at me—my person, my manners, my customs, my theories, my things—through Chinese eyes, and although mistaken, misled, reach their own conclusions from their own point of view. This is what they have been doing for centuries, but we know that it all now is being subjected to slow change. The original stock, however, takes on no * For further excellent descriptions of the Chinese nature Irefer the reader to Chester Holcombe’s China: Past and Present.—E. J. D. 204 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. change whatever, and several generations must pass before this transfer of mental vision can be effected, when the Chinaman will view all things and all peoples in their true light. Next morning my three men were heavy. The lean fellow—I have christened him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones—moved about painfully in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary amount of reboiled cabbage, however, bucked him up a bit, and holding up a crooked, bony finger, he indicated intelligently that we had one hundred li to cover. Whilst engaged in conversation thus, sounds of early morning revelry reached me from below. My boy, his accustomed serenity now quite dis- turbed, held threateningly above the head of the yamen runner (who had given me a profound kotow the evening previous prior to taking on his duties) a length of three-inch sugar cane; he evidently meant to flatten him out. This I learned was because this shadower of the august presence wished to take Yang-lin (about 60 li away) instead of going to Ch’ang-p’o (100 li) as I intended. I got him in, looked him as squarely in the face as it is possible when a Chinaman wants to evade your scrutiny, told him I wished to go to Ch’ang-p’o, and that I hoped I should have the pleasure of his company thus far. He replied with a grinning smile, which one could easily have taken for a smiling grin— “Oh, yes, foreign mandarin, Ch’ang-p’o—100 li— foreign mandarin, foreign mandarin.” And I thought the incident closed. Such is the appalling gullibility of the Englishman in China. 205 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. We stopped for tea at a small hamlet ten li out. The place was deserted save for a small starving boy, whose chief attention was given to laborious endeavours to make his clothing meet in certain necessary areas. He evidently had never seen a foreigner. As he directed his optics towards me he winced visibly. He walked round me several times, fell over a grimy pail of soap-suds, stopped, gazed in enraptured enchantment with parted lips and outstretched arms as if he had begun to suspect what it was before him. To the eye of the beholder, however, he gazed as yet only on vacancy, but just as I was about to attempt self-explanation he was gone, tearing away down the hill as fast as his legs could carry him, and the ragged remains of his father’s trousers flapping gently in the breeze. As I rose to leave crackers frightened my pony, followed in a few moments by a howling, hooting, unreasonable rabble from a temple near by. I found it was the result of a village squabble. I could scarce keep the order of my march as I left the tea-shop, so roughly was I handled by the irritated and impatient crowd, and had much ado to refrain from responding wrathfully to the repeated jeers of impudent, half-grown beggars of both sexes who helped to swell the riotous cortége. But through it all none of the insults were meant for me, so Lao Chang told me, and they did not mean to treat me with discourtesy. Trees hollowed out and spanned from field to field served for gutters for irrigation; shepherds clad in white felt blankets sat huddled upon the ground behind huge boulders, oblivious of time and of the boisterous wind, while their sheep and goats grubbed away on the scanty grass the moorland provided ; 206 TONG-CH’UAN-FU TO THE CAPITAL. high up we saw forest fires, making the earth black and desolate; ruins almost everywhere recalled to one’s mind the image of a past prosperity, which now was replaced by traces of misery, exterior influences. which seemed to breed upon the traveller a deep discouragement. I came across some women mock- weeping for the dead: at their elbow two girls were washing clothes, and when little children, catching sight of me, ran to their mothers, the women stopped. their hulla-baloo, had a good stare at me, exchanged. a few words of mutual inquiry, and then resumed. their bellowing. Soon it became quite warm, and walking was. pleasant. I was startled by the fu-song,* who invited me to go to a neighbouring town for tea. My men were far behind. I was at his mercy, so I went. Soon I found myself passing through the city gates. of Yang-lin, the very town I was trying to keep away from. The yamen fellow turned back at me and chuckled rudely to himself. I insisted that I did not wish to take tea; he insisted that I should—I must. He led me to an inn in the main street, arrangements were made to house me, old men and young lads gathered to welcome me like a lost. brother, and the fu-song told me graciously that he was going to the magistrate. In cruel English, with. many wildly threatening gestures, did I protest, and the people laughed acquiescingly. “Puh tong, puh tong, you gaping idiots!” I repeated, and it caused more glee. Swinging myself past them all, I dragged my stubborn pony through the mob to the gate by which. I had entered. My men were not to be found. I did not know the road or the language. I sat down. * ge. Yamen escort. (See p. 73]. 207 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. on a granite pillar to undergo an embarrassing half- hour. Presently my men hailed me, and approach- ing, swore with imposing loftiness at the discomfited guide. My bulldog coolie dropped his loads, the fu-song somehow lost his footing, I yelled ‘‘ Ts’eo”’ {{Go”’), and with a cheer the caravan proceeded. The following day we were at the capital. 208 ‘gray Usaq IaA9 sey OYA uvadomyY ATUO 9y} St JOYINY sy} Sse ‘oyoyd onbiun vy “nf-upn yo-Su0, fo qsan-ygaon ayy 07 haqunos pakaaansun ut 9295 ‘ A native Christian and his wife at Deh-tsao-shan, on the opposite side of the Tong-ch'uan-fu plain. The photo was taken after his idols had been burnt. A city in Western China. Showing the graves in the foreground. CHAPTER XIV. YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. Access to Yiin-nan-fu. Concenivated veform. Tribute to Hst Liang. Conservatism and progress. The Tonkin- Yiin-nan Railway. The Ytn-nan army. Author's views in 1909 and 1910 contrasted. Phenomenal forward march, and what it means. Danger of too much drill. International aspect on the frontier. The police. Street improvements. Visit to the gaol, and a description. The Young Pretender to the Chinese throne. How the prison is conducted. The schools. Vistt to the university, and a description. Riot among the students. Visit to the Agricultural School, and a description. Silk industry of Yiin-nan. YUN-NAN-FU to-day is as accessible as Peking. After many weary years the Tonkin-Yiin-nan railway is now an accomplished fact, and links this capital city with Haiphong in three days. Reform concentrates at the capital The man who visited Yiin-nan-fu twenty, or even ten years ago, would be astounded, were he to go there now, at the improvements visible on every hand A building on foreign lines was then a thing unknown, and the conservative Viceroy, Tseng Kong Pao, the decapitator in his time of thousands upon thousands of human beings, would turn in his grave if he could behold the utter annihilation of his pet “* feng shui,” which has followed in the wake of the good works done by the late loved Viceroy, Hsi Liang. The name of Hsi Liang is revered in the province of Yiin-nan as the most able man who has ever ruled 209 15 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. the two provinces of Yiin-nan and Kwei-chow, a man of keen intellectuality and courtly manner, and notorious as being the only Mongolian in the service of China’s Government. I lived in Yiin-nan-fu for several weeks at a stretch, and since then have made frequent visits, and knowing the enormous strides being made towards acquiring Occidental methods, I now find it difficult to write with absolute accuracy uponthings in general. But I have found this to be the case in all my travels. What is, or seems to be, accurate to-day of any given thing in a given place is wrong to-morrow under seemingly the same conditions; and although no theme could be more tempting, and no subject offer wider scope for inge- nious hypothesis and profound generalisation, one has to forego much temptation to “ colour” if he would be accurate of anything he writes of the Chinese. Eminent sinologues agree as to the impossibility of the conception of the Chinese mind and character as a whole, so glaring are the inconsistencies of the Chinese nature. And as one sees for himself in this great city, particularly in official life, the business- like practicability on the one hand and the utter absurdity of administration on the other, in all modes and methods, one is almost inclined to drop his pen in disgust at being unable to come to any concrete conclusions. Of no province in China more than of Yiin-nan is this true. Reform and immovable conservatism go hand in hand. Men of the most dissimilar ambitions compose the corps diplomatique, and are willing to join hands to propagate their main beliefs ; and when one writes of progress—in railways, in the army, in gaols, in schools, in public works, in no matter 210 YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. what—one is ever confronted by that dogged im- mutability which characterises the older school. So that in writing of things Yiin-nanese in this great city it is imperative for me to state bare facts as they stand now, and make little comment. THE RAILWAY. The Tonkin-Yiin-nan Railway, linking the interior with the coast, is one of the world’s most interesting engineering romances. This artery of steel is probably the most expensive railway of its kind, from the constructional standpoint. In some districts seven thousand pounds per mile was the cost, and it is probable that six thousand pounds sterling per mile would not be a bad estimate of the total amount appropriated for the construction of the line from a loan of 200,000,000 francs asked for in 1898 by the Colonial Council in connection with the programme for a network of railways in and about French Indo-China. To Lao-kay there are no less than one hundred _and seventy-five bridges. The completion of this line realises in part the ambition of a celebrated Frenchman, who—once a printer, ’tis said, in Paris—dropped into the political flower-bed, and blossomed forth in due course as Governor-General of Indo-China. When Paul Doumer, for it was he, went east in 1897, he felt it his mission to put France, politically and commer- cially, on as good a footing as any of her rivals, notably Great Britain. It did not take him long to see that the best missionaries in his cause would be the railways. At the time of writing (June, 1910) I cannot but think that profit on this railway will be a long time coming, and there are some in the capital aii ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. who doubt whether the commercial possibilities of Yiin-nan justified this huge expenditure on railway construction. Whilst authorities differ, I per- sonally believe that the ultimate financial success of the venture is assured. There are markets crying out to be quickly fed with foreign goods, and it is My opinion that the French will be the suppliers of those goods. British enterprise is so weak that we cannot capture the greater portion of the growing foreign trade, and must feel thankful if we can but retain what trade we have, and supply those exports with which the French have no possibility of competing.* THE MILITARY. The foreigner in Yiin-nan-fu can never rest unless he is used to the sounds of the bugle and the hustling spirit of the men of war. In standard works on Chinese armaments no men- tion is ever made of the Yiin-nan army, and statistics are hard to get. But it is evident that the cult of the military stands paramount, and it has to be conceded, even by the most pessimistic critics of this backward province, that the new troops are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-organised to crush any rebellion. This must be counted a very fair result, since it has been attained in about two years. A couple of years ago Yiin-nan had practically no army—none more than the military ragtags of the old school, whose chief weapon of war was the opium pipe. But now there are ten thousand troops—not units on paper, but men in uniform— well-drilled for the most part and of excellent * For a general description of the line and other data see Appendix E. YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. physique, who could take the field at once. The question of the Yiin-nan army is one of international interest : the French are on the south, Great Britain on the west. On June 2nd, 1909, I rode out to the magnificent training ground, then being completed, and on that date wrote the following in my diary :— “YT watched for an hour or two some thousand or so men undergoing their daily drill—typical tin soldiery and a military sham. “Only with the merest notion of matters military were most of the men conversant, and alike in ordinary marching—when it was most difficult for them even to maintain regularity of step—or in more complicated drilling, there was a lack of the right spirit, no go, no gusto—scores and scores of them running round doing something, going through a routine, with the knowledge that when it was finished they would get their rice and be happy. Everyone who possesses but a rudimentary know- ledge of the Chinese knows that he troubles most about the two meals every day should bring him, and this seems to be the pervading line of thought of seven-eighths of the men I saw on the padang at drill. Officers strutting about in peacock fashion, with a sword dangling at their side, showed no inclination to enforce order, and the rank and file knew their methods, so that the disorder and haphazardness of the whole thing was absolutely mutual. ‘“‘ Whilst I was on the field gazing in anything but admiration on the scene, I was ordered out by one of the khaki-clad officers in a most unceremonious manner. Seeing me, he shouted at the top of his thick voice, * Ch’u-k’ti, ch’u-k’i’ (an expression 213 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. meaning ‘ Go out !’—-commonly used to drive away dogs), and simultaneously waved his sword in the air as if to say, ‘Another step, and I ’ll have your head.’ And, of course, there being nothing else to do, I ‘ch’u-k’iid,’ but in a fashion befitting the dignity of an English traveller. “ The reorganisation of the army, with the accelera- tion of warlike preparations, has the advantage that it appeals to the embryonic feeling of national patriotism, and affords a tangible expression of the desire to be on terms of equality with the foreigner. That officer never had a prouder moment in his life than when he ordered a distinguished foreigner from the drilling ground, of which he was for the time the lordly comptroller. And it may be added that the foreigner can remember no occasion when he felt ‘ smaller,’ or more completely shrivelled. “Whilst it is safe to infer that the motives that underlie the significant access of activity in military matters in Yiin-nan differ in no way from those which have led to the feverish increase in armaments in other parts of the world, such ideas that have yet been formed on actual preparations for possible war are most crude. On paper the appointments in the army and the accuracy of the figures of the complement of rank and file admit of no question, but the practical utility of their labours is quite another matter, and a matter which does not appear to produce among the army officials any great mental disturbance in their delusion that they are pro- gressing. Yiin-nan is in need of military reform, reform which will embrace a start from the very beginning, and one of the first steps that should be taken is that those who are to be in the position of administering training Should find out something 214 YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. about western military affairs, and so be in a position of knowing what they are doing.” The above was my conscientious opinion in the middle of last year. Now—in June of rg910o—I have to write of enormous improvements and revolutions in the drilling, in the armaments, in the equipment, in the general organisation of the troops and the conduct of them. Yiin-nan is still peculiarly in her transition stage, which, while it has many elements of strength and many menacing possi- bilities, contains, more or less, many of the old weaknesses. All matters, such as her financial question, her tariff question, her railway question, her mining question, are still “in the air” —the unknown »% in the equation, as it were— but her army question is settled. There is a definite line to be followed here, and it is being followed most rigidly. Come what will, her army must be safe and sound. China is determined to work out the destiny of Ytin-nan herself, and she is working hard—the West has no conception how hard—so as to be able to be in the position of safe- guarding—vigorously, if necessary—her own borders. One question arises in my mind, however. Should there be a rebellion, would the soldiers remain true? This is vital to Yiin-nan. Skirmishings on the French border more or less recently have shown us that soldiers are wobblers in that area. The rank and file are chosen from the common people, and one would not be surprised to find, should trouble take place fairly soon, while they are still raw to their business, the soldiers turn to those who could give them most. It has been humorously remarked that in case of disturbances the first thing the Chinese Tommy would do would be to shoot the 215 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. officers for treating him so badly and for drilling him so hard and long. ‘What is true of the capital in respect to military progress I found to be true also of Tali-fu. A couple of years ago a company of drilled soldiers arrived there as a nucleus for recruiting units for the new army. Soon 1,500 men were enlisted. They were to serve a three years’ term, were to receive four dollars per month, and were promised good treatment. The officers drilled them from dawn to dusk ; deserters were therefore many, necessitating the detail of a few heads coming off to avert the trouble of losing all the men. It cost the men about a dollar or so for their rice, so that it will be readily seen that, with a clear profit of three dollars as a monthly allowance, they were better off than they would have been working on their land. Officers received from forty to sixty taels a month. Temples here were converted into barracks—a sign in itself of the altered conditions of the times—and I visited some extensive buildings which’ were being erected at a cost of eighty thousand gold dollars. ;. Military progress in this ‘backward province” is as great as it has been anywhere at any time in any part of the Chinese Empire.* THE POLICE. Until a few years ago, as China was kept in law and order without the necessary evil of a standing army, so did Yiin-nan-fu slumber on in the Chinese equivalent for peace and plenty. As they now are, and taking into consideration that they were all picked from the rawest material, the police force of this capital is as able a body of men as are to be * For further observations on this question see Appendix F. 216 Entrance to Military Traimng Ground at Yin-nan-fu. a6 General view of Yiin-nan-fu. “3 4 s__.... New Police Force of Ytin-nan-fu. YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. found in all Western China. Probably the Metro- politan police of dear old London could not be re-forced from their ranks, but disciplined and well- ordered they certainly are withal. Swords seem to take the place of the English bludgeon, and a peaked cap, beribboned with gold, is substituted for the old- fashioned helmet of blue; and if the time should ever come, with international rights, when English- men will be “run in” in the Empire, the sallow physiognomy and the dangling pigtail alone will be unmistakable proofs to the victim, even in heaviest intoxication, that he is not being handled by. police- men of his own kind—that is, if the Yiin-nan police shall ever have made strides towards the attainment of home police principles. However, in their place these men have done good work. Thieving in the city is now much less common, and gambling, although still rife under cover—when will the Chinese eradicate that inherent spirit ?—is certainly being put down. One of the features of their work also has been the improvement they have effected in the appearance of the streets. Old customs are dying, and at the present time if a man in his untutored little ways throws his domestic refuse into the place where the gutter should have been, as in olden days, he is immediately pounced upon, reprimanded by the policeman on duty, and fined somewhat stiffly. THE GAOL. A great fuss was made about me when I went to visit the governor of the prison one wet morning. He met me with great ostentation at the entrance, escorting me through a clean courtyard, on either side of which were pretty flower-beds and plots of green turf, to a reception-room. There was nothing 217 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. “‘quadlike”” about the place. This reception-room, furnished on a semi-Occidental plan, overlooked the main prison buildings, contained foreign glass windows draped with white curtains, was scrupulously clean for China, and had magnificent hanging scrolls on the whitewashed walls. Tea was soon brewed, and the governor, wishing to be polite and sociable, told me that he had been in Yiin-nan-fu for a few months only, and that he considered himself an extremely fortunate fellow to be in charge of such an excellent prison—one of the finest in the kingdom, he assured me. After we had drunk each other’s health—I sincerely trust that the cute, courteous old chap will live a long and happy life, although to my way of thinking the knowledge of the evil deeds of all the criminals around me would considerably minimise the measure of bliss among such intensely mundane things—I was led away to the prison proper. This gaol, which had been opened only a few months, is a remarkably fine building, and with the various workshops and outhouses and offices covers from seven to eight acres of ground inside the city. The outside, and indeed the whole place, bears every mark of Western architecture, with a trace here and there of the Chinese artistry, and for carved stone and grey-washed brick might easily be mistaken for a foreign building. It cost some ninety thousand taels to build, and has accommoda- tion for more than the two hundred and fifty prisoners at present confined within its walls. After an hour’s inspection, I came to the conclusion that the lot of the prisoners was cast in pleasant places. The food was being prepared at the time— three kinds of vegetables, with a liberal quantity of 218 YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. rice, much better than nine-tenths of the poor brutes lived on before they came to gaol. Besworded warders guarded the entrances to the various outbuildings. From twenty to thirty poor human beings were manacled in their cells, condemned to die, knowing not how soon the pleasure of the emperor may permit of them shuffling off this mortal coil : one grey-haired old man was among the number, and to see him stolidly waiting for his doom brought sad thoughts. The long-termed prisoners work, of course, as they do in all prisons. Weaving cloth, mostly for the use of the military, seemed to be the most important industry, there being over a score of Chinese-made weaving machines busily at work. The task set each man is_ twelve English yards per day; if he does not complete this quantity he is thrashed, if he does more he is remunerated in money. One was amused to see the English-made machine lying covered with dust in a corner, now discarded, but from its pattern all the others had been made in the prison. Tailors rose as one man when we entered their shop, where Singer machines were rattling away in the hands of competent men; and opposite were a body of pewter workers, some of their products—turned out with most primitive tools—being extremely clever. The authorities had bought a foreign chair, made of iron— a sort of miniature garden seat—and from this pattern a squad of blacksmiths were turning out facsimilés, which were selling at two dollars apiece. They were well made, but a skilled mechanic, not himself a prisoner, was teaching the men. Bamboo blinds were being made in the same room, whilst at the extreme end of another shed were paper dyers 219 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. and finishers, carrying on a primitive work in the same primitive way that the Chinese did thousands of years ago. It was, however, exceedingly interesting to watch. As we passed along I smelt a strong smell of opium. Yes, it was opium. I sniffed significantly, and looked suspiciously around. The governor saw and heard and smelt, but he said nothing. Opium, then, is not, as is claimed, abolished in Yiin-nan. Worse than this: whilst I was the other day calling upon the French doctor at the hospital, the vilest fumes exuded from the room of one of the dressers. It appeared that the doctor could not break his men of the habit. But we remember that the physician of older days was exhorted to heal himself. Just as I was beginning to think I had seen all there was to be seen, I heard a scuffle, and saw a half- score of men surrounding a poor frightened little fellow, to whom I was introduced. He was the little bogus Emperor of China, the Young Pretender, to whom thousands of Yiin-nan people, at the time of the dual decease in recent Chinese history, did homage, and kotowed, recognising him as the new emperor. The story, not generally known outside the province, makes good reading. At the time of the death of the emperor and empress-dowager, an aboriginal family at the village of Kuang-hsi- chou, in the south-east of Yiin-nan province, know- ing that a successor to the throne must be found, and having a son of about eight years of age, put this boy up as a pretender to the Chinese throne, and not without considerable success. The news spread that the new emperor was at the above- named village, and the people for miles around flocked in great numbers to do him homage, congratulating 220 YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. themselves that the emperor should have risen from the immediate neighbourhood in which they themselves had passed a monotonous existence. For weeks this pretence to the throne was main- tained, until a miniature rebellion broke out, to quell which the Viceroy of Yiin-nan dispatched with all speed a strong body of soldiers. Everybody thought that the loss of a few heads and other Chinese trivialities was to end this little flutter of the people. But not so. The whole of the family who had promoted this ficti- tious claim to the throne—father, mother, brothers, sisters—were all put to death, most of them in front of the eyes of the poor little fellow who was the victim of their idle pretext. The military re- turned, reporting that everything was now quiet, and a few days later, guarded by twenty soldiers, came this young pretender, encaged in one of the prison boxes, breaking his heart with grief. And it was he who was now conducted to meet the foreigner. He has been confined within the prison since he arrived at the capital, and the object seems to be to keep him there, training and teaching him until he shall have arrived at an age when he can be taught atrade. The tiny fellow is small for his eight years, and his little wizened face, sallow and delicate, has a plausible tale to tell. He is always fretting and grieving for those whose heads were shown to him after decapitation. However, he is being cared for, and it is doubtful whether the authorities—or even the emperor himself—will mete out punishment to him when he grows older. He did nothing; he knew nothing. At the present time he is going through a class-book which teaches him the language to be used in audience with the Son of Heaven— 221 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. he will probably be taken before the emperor when he is old enough. But now he is not living the life of a boy—no playmates, no toys, no romps and frolics. He, like Topsy, merely grows—in surround- ings which only a dark prison life can give him. This was the first time I had even been in prison in China. This remark rather tickled the governor, and on taking my departure he assured me that it was an honour to him, which the Chinese language was too poor to express, that I should have allowed my honourable and dignified person to visit his mean and contemptible abode. He commenced this com- pliment to me as he was showing me the well-equipped hospital in connection with the prison—containing eight separate wards in charge of a Chinese doctor. I smiled in return a smile of deepest gratitude, and waving a fond farewell, left him in a happy mood. THE SCHOOLS. One would scarce dream of a university for the province of Yiin-nan. Yet such is the case. In former days—and it is true, too, to a great extent to-day—the prominent place given to educa- tion in China rendered the village schools an object of more than common interest, where the educated men of the Empire received their first intellectual training. Probably in no other country was there such uniformity in the standards of instruction. Every educated man was then a potential school- master—this was certainly true of Yiin-nan. But all is now changing, as the infusion of the spirit of the phrase “China for the Chinese” gains forceful meaning among the people. The highest hill within the city precincts has been chosen as the site for a university, which is truly a a22 YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. remarkable building for Western China. One of the students of the late Dr. Mateer (Shantung) was the architect—a man who came originally to the school as a teacher of mathematics—and it cannot be said that the huge oblong building, with a long narrow wing on either side of a central dome, is the acme of beauty from a purely architectural standpoint. Of red-faced brick, this university, which cost over two hundred thousand taels to build, is most imposing, and possesses conveniences and improve- ments quite comparable to the ordinary college of the West. For instance, as I passed through the many admirably-equipped schoolrooms, well venti- lated and airy, I saw an Italian who was laying in the electric light,* the power for which was generated by an immense dynamo at the basement, and upon which alone twenty thousand taels were spent. Thirty professors have the control of thirty-two class- rooms, teaching among other subjects mathematics, * Soon afterwards a disturbance occurred among the students, and had it not been for the promptitude of the inspector, some of them might have lost their heads. The electric light had just been laid in, and was working so well that the authorities found it imperative to charge each of the 400 resident students one dollar per month for the upkeep. This simple edict was the cause of the riot. In a body the boys rolled up their pukais, and marched down to the main entrance, declaring that they were determined to resign if the order was not rescinded. The inspector, however, had had all the doors locked. The frenzied students broke these open, and incidentally thrashed some of the caretakers for interfering in matters which were not considered to be strictly their business. Subsequently the Chancellor of Education visited the college in person, but no heed was paid to his exhortations, and it was only when the dollar charge for lighting was reduced that peace was restored. The Chancellor, as a last word, told them that if they vacated their schoolrooms a fine of about a hundred taels would be im- posed upon each man. The occasion was marked by all the foolish ardour one finds among college boys at home, and it seems that, despite the enor- mous amount of money the college is costing to run, the students are somewhat out of hand.—E. J. D. 223 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. music, languages (chiefly English and Japanese), geography, chemistry, astronomy, geology, botany, and so on. The museum, situated in the centre of the building, does not contain as many specimens as one would imagine quite easily obtain- able, but there are certainly some capital selections of things natural to this part of the Empire. The authorities probably thought I was rather a queer foreigner, wanting to see everything there was to see inside the official barriers in the city. Day after day I was making visits to places where foreigners seldom have entered, and I do not doubt that the officials, whilst treating me with the utmost deference and extreme punctiliousness, thought I was a sort of British spy. When I went to the Agricultural School, probably the most interesting visit I made, I was met by the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a keen fellow, who spoke English well, and who, having been trained at Shanghai, and therefore understanding the idiosyn- cracies of the foreigner’s character, was invited to entertain. And this he did, but he was careful that he did not give away much information regarding the progress that the Yiin-nanese, essentially sons of the soil, are making in agriculture. For this School of Agriculture is an important adjunct. Scholars are taken on an agreement for three years, during which time they are fed and housed at the expense of the school; if they leave during the specified period they are fined heavily. No less than 180 boys, ranging from sixteen to twenty-three, are being trained here, with about 120 paid appren- tices. Three Japanese professors are employed— one at a salary of two hundred dollars a month, and two others at three hundred, the latter having charge 224 YUN-NAN-FU, THE CAPITAL. of the fruit and forest trees and the former of vegetables. In years to come the silk industry of Yiin-nan will rank among the chief, and the productions will rank among the best of all the eighteen provinces. There are no less than ten thousand mulberry trees in the school grounds for feeding the worms ; four thousand catties of leaves are used every day for their food ; five hundred immense trays of silkworms are con- stantly at work here. The worms are in the charge of scholars, whose names appear on the various racks under their charge, and the fact that feeding takes place every two hours, day and night, is sufficient testimony that the boys go into their work with commendable energy. As I was being escorted around the building, through shed after shed filled with these trays of silkworms, several of the scholars made up a sort of procession, and waited for the eulogy that I freely bestowed. In another building small boys were spinning the silk, and farther down the weavers were busy with their primitive machinery, with which, however, they were turning out silk that could be sold in London at a very big price. The colourings were specially beautiful, and the figuring quite good, although the head-master of the school told me that he hoped for improvements in that direction. And I, looking wise, although knowing little about silk and its manufacture, heartily agreed with the little fat man. There is a department for women also, and, cen- trary to custom, I had a look around here too. The girls were particularly smart at spinning. There were also experimental gardens.* * For further matter on the capital, and information on the international position of the British,and the French in Yin-nan, see Appendices G and H. 225 16 SECOND JOURNEY. YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU (VIA CH’U-HSIONG-FU). CHAPTER XV. Stages to Tali-fu. Worst roads yet experienced. Stampede among ponies. Hybrid crowd at Anning-cheo. Simplicity of life of common people. Does China want the foreigner ? Straits Settlements and China Proper compared. China’s aspect of her own position. Renaissance of Chinese military power. Europeans Not wanted in the Empive. Emptiness of the lives of the common people. Author erects a printing machine in Inland China. National conceit. Differences in make-up of the Hua Miao and the Han Ren. The Hua Miao and what they ave doing. Emancipation of their women. Tribute to Protestant missionaries. Betrothal and marriage in China. Miao women lead a life of shame and misery. Crude ideas among Chinese regarding age of foreigners. Musty man and dusty traveller at Lao-ya-kwan. Intense cold. Salt trade. Parkitke scenery, pleasant travel, solitude. From the figures of heights appearing below, one would imagine that between the capital and Tali-fu hard climbing is absent. But during each stage, with the exception of the journey from Sei-tze to Sha-chiao-kai, there is considerable fatiguing uphill and downhill work, each evening bringing one to approximately the same level as that from which he started his morning tramp. I went by the following route :— Length of Height stage. above sea. ist day—Anning-cheo .. .. 7o li .. 6,300 ft. and day—Lao-ya-kwan.. .. 70 li .. 6,800 ft. 226 YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU. Length of Height a stage. above sea. 3rd day—Lu-féng-hsien.. .. 75 li .. 5,500 ft. 4th day—Sei-tze .. .. .. 80li .. 6,100 ft. 5th day = -Kwane-tisie bsieit .< 60 li .. 6,300 ft. 7th day—Ch’u-hsiong-fu .. 70 li .. 6,150 ft. 8th day—Liiho-kai.. .. .. 60 li .. 6,000 ft. oth day—Sha-chiao-kai.. .. 65 li .. 6,400 ft. roth day—Pu-péng.. .. .. goli .. 7,200 ft. rith day—Yiin-nan-i .. .. 65 li .. 6,800ft. rzth day—Hungay .. .. .. 80li .. 6,oooft. 14th day—Chao-chow .. .. 60 li .. 6,750 ft. r5th day—Tali-fu .. .. .. 60 li .. 6,700 ft. A long, winding and physically-exhausting road took me from Sha-chiao-kai to Yin-wa-kwan, the most elevated pass between Yiin-nan-fu and Tali-fu, and continued over barren mountains, bereft of shelter, and void of vegetation and people, to Pu- péng. A rough climb of an hour and a half then took me to the top of the next mountain, where roads and ruts followed a high plateau for about thirty li, and with a precipitous descent I entered the plain of Yiin-nan-i. Then over and between barren hills, passing a small lake and plain with the considerable town of Yiin-nan-hsien ten li to the right, I continued in a narrow valley and over mountains in the same uncultivated condition to Hungay, situated in a swampy valley. Having crossed this valley, another rough climb brings the traveller to the top of the next pass, Ting-chi-ling, whence the road descends, and leads by a well-cultivated valley to Chao-chow. After an easy thirty li we reached Hsiakwan,* one of the * Hsiakwan would be supplied by a branch line of the main railway in the Kunlong scheme advocated by Major H. R. Davies, leaving at Mi-tu, to the south of Hungay.—E. J. D. 227 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. s largest commercial cities in the province, lying at the foot of the most magnificent mountain range in Yiin-nan, and by the side of the most famous lake. A paved road takes one in to his destination at Tali- fu, where I was welcomed by Dr. and Mrs. Clark, of the China Inland Mission, and hospitably enter- tained for a couple of days. The roads in general from Yiin-nan-fu to Tali-fu were worse than any I have met from Chung-king on- wards, partly owing to the mountainous condition of the country, and partly to neglect of maintenance. Where the road is paved, it is in most places worse than if it had not been paved at all, as neither skill nor common sense seems to have been exercised in the work. It is probably safe to say that there are no ancient roads in Ytin-nan, in the sense of the con- structed highways which have lasted through: the centuries, for the civilisation of the early Yiin-nanese ‘was not equal to such works. As a matter of fact, the condition of the roads is all but intolerable. Many were never made, and are seldom mended— one may say that with very few exceptions they are never repaired, except when utterly impassable, and then in the most make-shift manner. My highly-strung Rusty received a shock to his nervous system as I led him leisurely from the incline leading into Anning-cheo (6,300 feet), through the arched gateway in a pagoda-like entrance, which when new would have been a credit to any city. The stones of the main street were so slippery that I could hardly keep on my legs. Frightened by one of their number dragging its empty wooden carrying frame along the ground behind it, a drove of unruly pack-ponies dashed and bucked and tossed themselves out of order, and an instant afterwards came helter-skelter towards 228 ‘pposvg asouy. v fo uaurooeds ane it ‘uDu-uX ud Ypver yous oav svposvd asayy fo s4095 ogg A village gathering in Ytin-nan. The cabbage seen over the heads of the people is hung up to dry prior to pickling. Entrance to a Government school in Western China. YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU. my ‘ten-inch pathway by the side of the road. All of my men caught the panic, and in their mad rush several were knocked down and trampled upon by the torrent of frightened creatures. I thought I was being charged by cavalry, but beyond a good deal of bruising I escaped unhurt. Closer and closer came the hubbub and the din of the town—the market was not yet over. As I approached the big street, throngs of blue-cottoned yokels, quite out of hand, created a nerve-racking uproar, as they thriftily drove their bargains. I shrugged my shoulders, gazed long and earnestly at the motley mob, and putting on a bold front, pushed through in a care- less manner. Ponies with salt came in from the other end of the town, and in their waddling the little brutes gave me more knocks. It was an awful crowd—Chinese, Minchia, Lolo, and other specimens of hybridism unknown to me. Yet I suppose the majority of them may be called happy. Certainly the simplicity of the life of the common people, their freedom from fastidious tastes, which are only a fetter in our own Western social life, their absolute independence of furniture in their homes, their few wants and perhaps fewer necessities, when contrasted with the demands of the English- man, is to them a state of high civilisation. Here were farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers, and retired people living a simple, unsophisticated life. All the strength of the world and all its beauties, all true joy, everything that consoles, that feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark paths, every- thing that enables us to discern across our poor lives a. splendid goal and a boundless future, comes to us from true simplicity. I do not say that we get all this from the Chinese, but in many ways they can teach 229 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. us how to live in the spirit of simplicity. They were living from hand to mouth, with seemingly no anxieties at all—and yet, too, they were living without God, and with very little hope. And here the foreigner reappeared to disturb them. Even in Anning-cheo, only a day from the capital, I was regarded as a being of another species, and was treated with little respect. I was not wanted. No international question has become more hack- neyed than “Does China want the foreigner?” Columns of utter nonsense have from time to time been printed in the English press, purporting to have come from men supposed to know, to the effect that this Empire is crying out, waiting with open arms to welcome the European and the American with all his advanced methods of Christendom and civilisation. It has by general assent come to be understood that China does want the foreigner. But those who know the Chinese, and who have lived with them, and know their inherent insincerity in all that they do, still wonder on, and still ask, ‘“‘ Does she? ” To the European in Hong-Kong, or any of the China ports, having trustworthy Chinese on his commercial staff—without whom few businesses in the Far East can make progress—my argument may seem to have no rvatson d@’éive. He will be inclined to blurt out vehemently the absurdity of the idea that the Chinese do not want the foreigner. First, they cannot do without him if China is to come into line as a great nation among Eastern and Western powers. And then, again, could anyone doubt the sincerity of the desire on the part of the Celestial for closer and downright friendly intercourse if he has had nothing more than mere superficial dealings with them ? Thus thought the writer at one time in his life, 230 YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU. He has had in a large commercial firm some of the best Chinese assistants living, in China or out of it, and has nothing but praise for their assiduous perse- verance and remarkable business acumen and integrity. As a business man, I admire them far and away above any other race of people in the East and Far East. Is there any business man in the Straits Settlements who has not the same opinion of the Straits-born Chinese ? But as one who has travelled in China, living among the Chinese and with them, seeing them under all natural conditions, at home in their own country, I say unhesitatingly that at the present time only an infinitesimal percentage of the population of the vast Interior entertain genuine respect for the white man, and, in centres where Western influence has done so much to break down the old-time hatred towards us, the real, unveneered attitude of the ordinary Chinese is one not calculated to foster between the Occident and the Orient the brotherhood of man. Difficult is it for the foreigner in civilised parts of China—and impossible for the great preponderance of the European peoples at home—to grasp the fact that in huge tracts of Interior China the populace have never seen a foreigner, save for the ubiquitous missionary, who takes on more often than not the dress of the native. Although the Chinese Government recognises the dangerous situation of the nation vis-a-vis with nations of Europe, and has ratified one treaty after another with us, the nation itself does not, so far as the traveller can see, appreciate the fact that she cannot possibly resist the white man, and hold her- self in seclusion as formerly from the Western world. China is discovering—has discovered officially, 231 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. although that does not necessarily mean nationally —as Japan did so admirably when her progress was most marked, that steam and machinery have made the world too small for any part thereof to separate ltself entirely from the broadening current of the world’s life. Whilst not for a moment failing to admire the aggressive character of Occidentals, and the resultant necessity of thwarting them—we see this especially in official circles in Yiin-nan—Chinese leaders of thought and activity are recognising that in inter- national relations the final appeal can only be to a superior power, and that power, to be superior, must be thorough, and thorough throughout. So different to what has held good in China for countless ages. That is why China is making sure of her army, and why she will have ready in 1g12—ten years before the period originally intended—no less than thirty- six divisions, each division formed of ten thousand units.* China is now endeavouring to walk the ground which led Japan to greatness among the nations—she takes Japan as her pattern, and thinks that what Japan has done she can do—and, officially abandoning her long course of self-sufficient isolation, * A most important factor in the altering circumstances is the renaissance of the Chinese military power. Japanese in- structors swarm in China, and are swiftly building up a mighty military engine as their ally. The original plan of the Chinese Government was to form thirty-six divisions, each of ten thousand men, and to have this entire force ready to take the field before the year 1922, but it is perfectly evident from the reports which have filtered through to Europe, that this huge army will be ready by 1912, or ten years earlier than was originally intended. The Review of Reviews for January, 1910, in referring to an article written by General von der Boeck, one of Germany’s most brilliant infantry commanders, says: ‘‘ The General is inclined to believe that in 1912 China will possess a well-equipped army of half a million men, the greater part armed with modern weapons, and with a discipline and organisation infinitely superior to anything which China has yet produced.”—E. J. D. 232 YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU. is plunging into the flood of international progress, determined to acquire all the knowledge she can, and thus win for herself a place among the Powers. But I am in Yiin-nan, and things move slowly here. All this does not mean that my presence is desired, or that fear of me, the foreigner, has ceased. On the contrary, it signifies that I am more greatly to be feared. The European is not wanted in China, no- matter how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who sits and devours all the newspaper copy—good, bad and indifferent— which filters through regarding China ‘becoming’ the El Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of teaching the Chinese to foreignise as much as he can, teaching the leaders of the people to strive to modify national life, and to raise public conduct and administration to the best standards of the West. When China is capable of looking after herself, and able to maintain the position she is securing by the aid of the foreigner in her provinces, following her present mode of thought and action, the foreigner may go back again. But it is to be hoped that the evolution of the country will be different. Another feature impressed upon me was the emptiness of the lives of the people. Education was. rare, and any education they had was confined to. the Chinese classics. Neither of the three men I had with me could read. or write. The thoughts of these people are circum- scribed by the narrow world in which they live, and. only a chance traveller such as myself allows them a glimpse Of other places. Each man, with rare exception, lives and labours and dies where he is. born—that is his ambition; and in the midst of a * 233 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. people whose whole outlook of life is so contracted, I find difficulty in believing that progress such as Japan made in her memorable fifty-year forward movement will be made by the Chinese of Yiin-nan in two hundred years. Everything one can see around him here, at this town of Anning-cheo, seems to make against it. In my dealings with Chinese in their own country—I speak broadly— I have found that he “ knows everything.” I erected a printing-press in Tong-ch’uan-fu some months ago—a type of the old flat handpress not unlike that first used by Caxton. It was a part of the equipment of the Ai Kueh Hsieh Tang (Love of Country School), and I was invited by the gentry to erect it. Now the thing had not been up an hour before all the old fossils in the place knew all about it. Printing to them was easy—a child could do it. It is always, ‘“‘O ren teh, o ren teh” (‘‘I know, I know”). These men, dressed in their best, stood with their arms behind them, and smiled stupidly as I laboured with my coat off fixing their primitive machinery. Yet they did ot know, and now, within a few months, not a sheet has been printed, and the whole plant is going to rack and ruin. This is the difference between the Chinese and the tribespeople of Yiin-nan. Here we see the good of the missionary again, quite apart from any religious basis. The tribesman comes and lays himself at the feet of the missionary, and says at once, “ I do not know. Tell me, and I will follow you. I want to learn.” That is why it is that the Chinese stand open-eyed and open-mouthed when they see the Miao making strides altogether impossible to themselves, in proportion to their standard of civilisation, and this position of things will not be altered, unless 234 YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU. they cease to deceive themselves. I have seen a Miao boy of nine who never in his life had seen a Chinese character, who did not know that school existed, and whose only tutoring depended on the week’s visit of the missionary twice a year. I have seen this youngster read off a sheet of Chinese characters no Chinese boy of his age in the whole city would succeed in. I have not been brought into contact with any other tribe as I have with the Hua Miao.* But if the progress this once-despised people are making is maintained, the Yiin-nanese will very soon be left behind in the matter of practical scholar- ship. These Miao live the simplest of simple lives, but they wish to become better—to live purer lives, to become civilised, to be uplifted; and therefore they are most humble, most approachable, and are slowly evolving into a happy position of proud independence. Education among the Hua Miao is not lost: among the Chinese much of the labour put forward in endeavours to educate them is lost, or seems to bear no immediate fruit. The Miao are living by confidence and hope that tums towards the future; the Yiin-nanese are content with their confidence in the past. The Miao, however, were not like this always—but a few years ago they were not heard of outside China. The coming emancipation of their women, demands some attention. The few Europeans who have lived among the multitudes in Central China would not associate beds of roses with the lives of the women anywhere. * In many parts of China at the present day many Chinese imagine that the Miao tribes are monkeys, and that they have tails in the natural order of things. (For other information see Chapters IX and X.) 235 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. The daughter is seldom happy, and unless the wife present her husband with sons, who will perpetuate the father’s name and burn incense at his tablet after his death, het life is more often than not made absolutely unbearable—a fact responsible for the numerous suicides more than any other one thing. She is the drudge, the slave of the man. And the popular belief is that all the women of the Middle Kingdom are essentially Chinese; but little is heard of the tribespeople—more numerous probably than in any other given area in all the world—whose womankind are as far removed from the Chinese in language, habits and customs as English ladies of to-day are removed from Grecians. A decade or so ago no one heard of the Miao women: they were the lowest of the low, having no status. They were far worse off than their Chinese sisters, who, no matter what they had to endure after marriage, were certainly safeguarded by law and etiquette allowing them to enter the married state with respectability; but no social laws, no social ties protect the Miao women. Until a few years ago their “club” was a common brothel, too horrible to describe in the English language. As soon as a girl gave birth to her first child she came down on the father to keep her. In many cases, it is only fair to say, they lived together faithfully as man and wife, although such cases were not by any means in the majority. The poor creatures herded together in their unspeakable vice and infamy, with no shame or common modesty, fighting for the wherewithal to live, and only by chance living regularly with one man, and then only just so long as he wished. Little girls of ten and over regularly attended these awful hovels, and children grew out of their childhood with no 236 Funeral scene in Western China. Stobbine-blace. for horse caravans. ‘haamunu 7D ysarag ysryppng rgisnpy fo pox) asauryD nn rreerr rroeorer Trecererr Tere YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU. other vision than that of entering into the disgraceful life as early as Nature would allow them. It meant little less than that practically the whole of the population was illegitimate, viewed from a Western standpoint. No such thing as marriage existed. Men and women cohabited in this horrible orgy of existence, with the result that murder, disease and pestilence were rife among them. It was only a battle of the survival of the fittest to pursue so terrible a life. Nearly all the people were diseased by the transgression of Nature’s laws. After a time, however, through the instrumentality of Protestant missionaries, these wretched people began to see the light of civilisation. Gradually, and of their own free will, the girls gave up their accursed dens of misery and shame, and the men lived more in accord with social law and order. The Miao, too, had hitherto been dependent for their literature upon the Chinese character, which only a few could understand. Soon they had literature in their own language,* and a great social reform set in. They showed a desire for Western learning such as has seldom been seen among any people in China—these were people lowest down in the social scale; and now the latest phase is the establishment of betrothal and marriage laws, calculated to revolutionise the community and to introduce what in China is the equivalent for home life. Betrothal among the Chinese is a matter with which the parties most deeply concerned have little to do. Their parents engage a go-between or match-maker, and another point is that there is no * The written language was framed and instituted by the Rev. Sam. Pollard, of the Bible Christian Mission (now merged into the United Methodist Mission).—E. J.D. 237 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. age limit. Not so now with the Christian Miao. No paid go-between is engaged, and brides are to be at a minimum age of eighteen years, and bridegrooms twenty. The establishment of these laws will, it is hoped, make for the emancipation from a life of the most dreadful misery of thousands of women in one of the darkest countries of the earth.* But now the Miao is pressing forward under his burdens, to guide himself in the struggle, to retrieve his falls and his failures; and in the future lies his hope—the indomitable hope upon which the interest of humanity is based—and he has in addition the grand expectation of escaping despair even in death. It is all the praiseworthy work of our fellow-country- men, living isolated lives among the people, building up a worthy Christian structure upon Miao simplicit and humble fidelity to the foreigner. - But I digress from my travel. Little out of the ordinary marked my travels to Lao-ya-kwan (6,800 feet), an easy stage. My meagre tiffin at an insignificant mountain village was, as usual, an educational lesson to the natives. Each tin that came from my food basket—one’s servant delighted to lay out the whole business—underwent the severest criticism tempered with unmeaning eulogy, picked up and put down by perhaps a score of people, who did not mean to be rude. When I used their chopsticks—dirty little pieces of bamboo— in a manner very far removed from their natural method, they were proud of me. Outrageously . panegyric references were made when an old man, scratching at his disagreeable itch-sores under my * The marriage laws were instituted by the China Inland ‘Mission at Sa-pu-shan, where a great work is being done among the Hua Miao. A good many more stipulations are embodied in the excellent rules, but I have no room here to detail. —E. J. D. 238 YUN-NAN-FU TO TALLFU. nose, clipped a youngster’s ear for hazarding my age to be less than that of any of the bystanders, the length of my moustache and a three-day growth on my chin giving them the opinion that I was certainly over sixty.* I entered Lao-ya-kwan under an inauspicious star. No accommodaticn was to be had, all the inns were literally overrun with sedan chairs and filled with well-dressed officials, already busy with the “‘hsi-lien”’ (wash basin). In my dirty khaki clothes, out at knee and elbow, looking musty and mean and dusty, with my topee botched and battered, I presented a most unhappy contrast as I led my pony down the street under the sarcastic stare of bystanding scrutineers. The nights were cold, and in the private nouse where I stayed, mercifully overlooked by a trio of protesting effigies with visages grotesque and gruesome, rats ran fearlessly over the room’s mud floor, and at night I buried my head in my rugs to prevent total disappearance of my ears by nibbling. Not so my men. They slept a few feet from me, three on one bench, two on another. Bedding was not to be had, and so among the dirty straw they huddled together as closely as possible to preserve what bodily heat they had. Snow fell heavily. In the early morning sunlight on January 13th the undulating valley, with its grand untrodden carpet of white, looked magnificently beautiful as I picked * The Chinese have the crudest ideas of the age of foreigners. Among themselves the general custom is for a man to shave his upper lip so long as his father is alive, so that in the ordinary course a man wearing a moustache is looked upon as an old man. In Tong-ch’uan-fu the rumour got abroad that three “ uei kueh ren”’ (‘‘ foreign men ’’) went riding horses—two young ones and one old one. The ‘old one” was myself, because I had hair on my top lip, despite the fact that I was considerably the junior. And the fact that one was a lady was not deemed worthy of the slightest consideration.—E. J.D. 239 ACROSS CHINA ON FOOT. ‘out the road shown me by a poor fellow whose ears had got frost-nipped. No easy work was it climbing tediously up the narrow footway in a sharp spur rising some 1,000 feet in a ribbed ascent, overlooking a fearful drop. Over to the left I saw an unhappy little urchin, hardly a rag covering his shivering, bleeding body, grovelling piteously in the snow, while his blind and goitrous mother did her best at gathering firewood with a hatchet. The pass leading over this range, through which the white crystalline flakes were ‘driven wildly in one’s face, was a half-moon of smooth rock actually worn away by the endless tramping of myriads of pack-ponies, who then were plodding through ruts of steps almost as high as their haunches. | A man with a diseased hip joined me thirty li farther on, dismounting from his pile of earthly belongings which these men fix on the backs of their ponies. It is a creditable trapeze act to effect a mount after the pony is ready for the journey. He had, he said, met me before. He knew that I was a missionary, and had heard me preach. He remem- bered my wife and myself and children passing the night in the same inn in which he stayed on one of his pilgrimages from his native town somewhere to the east of the province. I had never seen him ‘before; I had no wife; I have never preached a ‘sermon in my life. I should be pained ever again to have to suffer his unmannerly presence anywhere. Ponies were being loaded near my table. The tapscallion in question explained that the black blocks were salt, taking a pinch from my salt-cellar with his grimy fingers to add point to his remarks. I kicked at a couple of mongrels under the rude form on 240 YUN-NAN-FU TO TALI-FU. which I sat, fighting for the skin of one of those potato-like pears which grow here so prolifically. The person announced that they were dogs, and that an idiosyncrasy of Chinese dogs was to fight. Several wags joined in, and all appeared, through the travelling nincompoop, to know all about my past and present, lapsing into a desultory harangue upon all men and things foreign. The street re- minded me of Clovelly—rugged and ragged—and the people were wrinkled and wretched; and, indeed, being a Devonian myself by birth, I should be excused of wantonly intending to hurt the delicate feelings of the lusty sons of Devon were I to declare that I thought the life not of a very terrible dis- similarity from that port of antiquity in the West. Salt was everywhere, much more like coal than salt, certainly as black. The blocks were stacked up by the sides of inns ready for transport, carried on the backs of a multitude of poor wretches who work like oxen from dawn to dusk for the merest pittance, on the backs of droves and droves of ponies, scrambling and spluttering along over the slippery once-paved streets. All day long, with the exception of two or three easy ascents, we were travelling in pleasantly un- dulating country of park-like magnificence. My men dallied. I tramped on alone; and sitting down to rest on the rocks, I realised that I was in one of the strangest, loneliest, wildest corners of the world. Great mountain-peaks towered around me, white and sparkling diadems of wondrous beauty, and at my feet, black and stirless, lay a silent pool, reflecting the weird shadows of my coolies flitting like spectres among the jagged rocks of these most solitary hills. 241 17 CHAPTER XVI. Lu-féng-hsien and tis bridge. Magnificence of mountains towards the capital. Opportunity for Dublin Fusiliers. Characteristic climbing. Crockery crash and tts sequel. Mountain forest. Changeableness of climate. Wayside scene and some reflections. Is your master drunk ? Babies of the poor. Loess roads. Travellers, and how they should travel. Wvrangling about payment at the teashop. The lying art among the Chinese. Difference of West and East. The Chinaman a liar by nature. Eastern and Western civilisation, and how it ts working. Remarks on the written character and Romanisation. Will China lose hey national characteristics ? ‘‘ Ih dien mien, th dien mien.”