Across China on Foot THE PEOPLE OF SZECH'WAN

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-shïh-ch'ang and Luchow, I am endeavoring to take in the scene around me. The people are so numerous in this province that they must struggle in order to live. Vain is it for the most energetic among them to escape from the shadow of necessity and hunger; all are similarly begirt, so they settle down to devote all their energies to trade. And trade they do, in very earnest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However that may be, traveling in China, through a wonderful province like Szech'wan, whose chief entrepôt 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 Yün-nan, for that matter, in a lesser degree--always find the new nationalism in the form of the "New China" student. Despite the opposition he gets from the old school, and although the old order of things, by being so strong as almost to overwhelm him, allows him to make less progress than he would, this new student, the hope of the Empire, is there. I do not wish to enter into a controversy on this subject, but I should like to quote the following from a speech delivered by Tseh Ch'un Hsüan, when he was leaving his post as Governor of Szech'wan:--

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

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

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

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

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

But New China must have this new life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What does she say, T'ong?"

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

I duly arrived at Lan-chï-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-chï-hsien, and that if I attempted to do such a thing I should have to go alone, and that I should never reach there. I remonstrated, but my boy was firm. He took me to him and fathered me. He almost cried over me, to think that I, that I, his master, of all people in the world, should doubt his allegiance to me. "I no 'fraid," he declared. "P'laps master no savee. Sui-fu b'long velly big place, have got plenty European. You wantchee makee go fast, catchee plenty good 'chow.' I think you catchee one piecee boat, makee go up the river. P'laps I think you have got velly tired--no wantchee makee more walkee--that no b'long ploper. That b'long all same fool pidgin."

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

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

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

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

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

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

But my reckonings were bad.

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

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

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

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