Treaties Affecting China
1899. Britain-Russia—Britain not to interfere with Russia north of great wall, and Russia not to interfere in Yangtze valley.
1899. America to Powers (John Hay’s Note)—“Open door” for all in China, and preservation of territorial integrity.
1905. Portsmouth Treaty (Russia-Japan)—Japan takes Korea and part of Manchuria.
1905. Britain-Japan—Alliance and assuring integrity of China.
1907. Russia-Japan—Recognize territorial integrity of China.
1907. Britain-Russia—Britain to support China in Tibet.
1908. America-Japan—Open door in China; integrity of China.
1910. America to Powers—Internationalize Manchurian railways; rejected by Russia and Japan.
1910. Russia-Japan—Secret convention to reject America’s financial and commercial plans in Manchuria; Russia and Japan to divide Manchuria in spheres of influence and trade.
These treaties sound very well, but mean very little, excepting this, that if Japan or Russia persistently breaks them and invades China, Britain and America have a cause before the world, to thrash, if it is necessary, the offender’s navy, and cut Japan off from Korea and Manchuria. The treaties are a confusion. They all specify that the “open-door” theory is acknowledged, but Russia and Japan have forced China to assent to their visé on any proposed railway schemes in Manchuria and Pechili. Despite the Britain-Japan Treaty of 1905, wherein the “integrity of China” is specified as a promise to the nations, the London Times confesses as follows: “The grim facts of the economic gravitation of Manchuria toward Russian and Japanese control are beyond remedy, treaties and agreements notwithstanding.” Yet at one time the thunderer would bring on a war for the sake of a straw! If Russia continues to offend there is no way to stop her except that America and Britain shall send their navies to pound her Baltic gates until she behaves in Manchuria, Mongolia, etc., which she soon would do in fear of her Duma on the inside of the Baltic gates. Britain never again can use Japan to pound Russia, for Japan and Russia have agreed to take the Manchurian spoil, as Japan did in the case of Korea, whenever the opportunity offers through dissension among the powers. Japan and Russia are high-tariff countries, and wherever they establish themselves, Britain, America, Germany and France will knock in vain for trade entry. China, like Britain, is a low-tariff country (at present five per cent., and even the proposed twelve per cent. would be low), and the manufacturing nations therefore desire the “open door” maintained, which can only be done on America’s and Britain’s reiterated treaty stipulations of the “integrity of China”. America must always keep a Pacific fleet stronger than Japan’s. A fight is unnecessary, for Japan is checkmated at once by this policy. Britain and America, and, if possible, Germany, must work together in the Far East to watch both Russia and Japan, and see that China gets the “square deal” in having reserved for her expansion her immemorial preserves of Manchuria, Mongolia and Turkestan. In Premier Yuan’s difficulties, the irreconcilable former Manchu major general, Yin Tchang, fled to Dalny, where he ran a bureau which plotted for the overthrow of the republic.
China made a beginning in 1911 in the agitation for the retrocession of some of the foreign colonies. Prince Ching then suggested that commissioners should be appointed by the Cabinet to discuss with Britain the retrocession of Wei-Hai-Wei. There are other nations which hold vastly more territory than do America and Britain, whether in concessions, settlements or colonies. The other nations have done comparatively little for China as compared with America and Britain, and Prince Ching might have approached this worthy subject in proportionate order. Until China is on her feet, foreign concessions at all her ports are the best object lesson she could have in municipal government and improvements, but foreign colonies, as large as Germany’s Kiaochou and Japan’s and Russia’s spheres of occupation in Manchuria, are unjust to her.
The New China party bears as a thorn in its flesh the awful burden of 1900, the old Russian and the Japanese indemnities. America alone, under President Roosevelt’s administration, remitted her share of the 1900 (Boxer) indemnity. These punitive indemnity payments prevented China from offering relief in the terrible pneumonic plague epidemic in Manchuria in 1911, and in the famines which followed the floods in 1911 and 1912 in the central and eastern provinces. Half a million people starved to death, and China has not forgotten that the funds which the starving people needed were taken by the rich European nations as indemnity payments. Britain, however, did return part of her indemnity on condition that it should be applied to the Shansi University at Taiyuan, of which Doctor Timothy Richards was president.
China’s helpless position without a navy could not be more eloquently shown than by the following case: In the Mexican revolution of 1911, Chinese lives and property were destroyed to the estimated amount of $33,000,000. China put in a claim to satisfy the heirs and claimants, but no attention has been paid to it. How different it was when Germany and Britain held Venezuelan claims only a short time previously!
In the interim, before the establishment of an effective diplomacy and parliaments or congresses in China, the guilds, with their boycott, have to a degree acted as the foreign office of the people in obtaining concessions which armies, navies and courtiers were not yet powerful enough to obtain. Their effective boycotts are a proof that the people really ruled in China, and without the expense of armies and navies. They, moreover, proved that the Chinese people can think together, and keep their word of faith so fixedly that it is seldom necessary for the central committee of the guilds to put in effect the heavy money penalties involved. There is this conclusion among others to be drawn from the interesting history of guilds and boycotts in China, especially in the last fifteen years, that the provincial and central parliaments, or congresses, which began work in 1909 and 1910, will remain, and with some improvement each year reach ever higher toward the standards of liberty and righteousness, or, in expressive American slang, the “square deal”.
Who will gainsay that the Chinese is a long-suffering being even in his own land? I quote the following from the Hongkong Telegraph of September 1, 1911: “At 6.00 P. M., on August 25, a German in the employ of a British company, and an Italian priest went into a shop at Shek Ki (near Canton). The German, who disliked the demeanor of the shop employé, dealt the man a nasty cut on the head. The foreigners afterward left the shop and went to a money changer’s. As the changer was slow, the German snatched a lamp from a table, and smashed it on the ground. The German assaulted two chair coolies. A riot developed. The two foreigners rushed into the dwelling of a missionary lady doctor.” Such abuse as this leads to international troubles, and the consuls at the ports, to whom the patient Chinese turn over foreign offenders, should be more severe than they are. These foreign offenders should really be brought back to the village where they create a disturbance, and in the presence of the consul, and Chinese taotais and mandarins, should pay to the headman of the village sufficient damages. Then the Chinese would know that the foreigner is sincere in his legal measures. Thoughtless or drunken action, like that of the German, often leads to missionary and other riots before the resentment of the indignant natives cools. One brutal fool of this kind, violens in vino, can place at jeopardy the lives of thousands of foreigners and the peace of the nations. We must scrupulously show China that we are sincere. She has some cause to feel that when we established our extraterritorial courts we meant to cheat her of justice. We shall later hear from Wu Ting Fang on this subject, as he is making a specialty of codifying the laws.
The British government introduced to the foreign office (Tsung Li Yamen and Wai Wu Pu) for many years, Sir Walter Hillier, as adviser, but since his appointment was to a degree forced he had less influence than in the case of the voluntary appointments of the Americans, Dennison and Stevens, as advisers in the foreign offices of Japan and Korea, respectively. The four-nations bankers will have foreign advisers on the Chinese Finance and Foreign Boards, and great tact and patience with China’s difficulties will at all times be required.
Long before the revolution, as well as after it, the masses of the Chinese had commenced to think of national and international politics. Whenever missionaries opened new “tan” (preaching or “talk” halls, as the Chinese call churches) the auditors listened respectfully for a while to the “doctrine” or “tao” (way). When the missionary came down from the platform, and joined the audience on the benches for a familiar “tan” (chat), religious subjects were not the first spoken of, the following questioning being common:
“Our first question is, what is your name, age and number of children?”
“Did you come from your country by railway or steamship?”
“How far is it and what was the cost?”
“What is your real business outside of your kindly avocation of achieving merit by temporarily talking about Jesus?”
“How long have you been in this province of China?”
“Were your clothes made in a China port, or in America, and at what cost?”
“You do not shave your head and face or change your outer clothes often, so we suppose you do not bathe often.”
“What do you think of this talk of republics, foreign loans, centralized government, armies and railways?”
There is no sycamore tree for Zacchæus to climb; he must come down. They know you are peaceful as an amateur, but they insist on your professional opinion, and they believe your profession is something more practical than talking religion. Are you a doctor, a government employé, a farmer, a soldier, a spy, an artisan, a merchant? If so, you must know about these practical things, and can answer the questions propounded.
The emigration treaties now stand in almost a humorous attitude in one respect. To save Japan’s “face” (the Oriental idiom for pride), Japan is granted permission to land coolies, but Japan by a secret postscriptum agrees not to let her coolies make the slightest use of this permission, as she has room for them in Korea, Manchuria, the navy, etc., at present. China is not permitted to land her coolies, but land some of them she does by the “underground”, which runs via Canada, Mexico, Central America, Cuba, etc. Our Pacific coast is correct, notwithstanding the exigencies of diplomacy, that she can not and will not absorb Oriental labor, any more than we foist Occidental labor on the Orient. The Pacific coast is quite consistent for the “square deal”, though it took her some time to trust the signing of the 1911 Japan Treaty, the immigration clause of which it is secretly understood is not to be taken advantage of. America can not welcome too many Chinese students and travelers, and a certain number of specialized merchants, agriculturalists, agents, artisans and artists, whom we can well accept as our tutors in their specialties.
On the subject of Asiatic immigration, the authority on American naval and foreign affairs, Admiral Mahan, writes as follows: “A large preponderance of Asiatics in a given region is a real annexation, more effective than the political annexations against which the Monroe doctrine was formulated. Free Asiatic immigration to the Pacific coast in its present condition of sparse population would mean Asiatic occupation—Asia colonized in America. This the United States government can not accept because of the violent resistance of the Pacific states, if for no other reason.”
In a former book I have recommended the immigration of a number of Chinese into the Philippines. The Straits Settlements cover only a small area. Their population is 300,000 Malays, who are akin to the Filipino. Four hundred thousand Chinese were brought in, and the little colony in 1911 exported $200,000,000 of tin and other products. Sir Frank Swettenham, the famous governor of the settlement in its formative period up to 1904, says of the Chinese: “The industrial development of the country is entirely due to the Chinese. They are the only people in the peninsula who can be depended upon. They tolerate no interruptions in the performance of their daily labor, and save their money to make prudent investments. Without the Chinese nothing would have been done in the Malay states. No progress would have been made, and the enormous natural resources of the country would still be lying dormant.” A remarkable instance of the orderliness of the Chinese was exhibited in the deportation in 1908 of 60,000 Chinese emigrants from the Transvaal gold mines to China. Such a body of any other labor would have shown many signs of rebellion against their removal from the scenes to which they had grown attached, and where they were prospering, and against the hot journey of 8,000 miles, made the more unpleasant because of the crowded quarters on shipboard. No friction or disturbance marked this unusual industrial event. Coolies though they were, they kept their word like statesmen, and said: “We promised the colony that we would only substitute black labor for four years, and as the blacks now are ready to return to the field, we are going.”
The nations should get together, and permit China to levy a provisional import duty of twelve per cent. instead of five per cent., and not keep her government helpless because of starvation. If she had an army and navy like Japan, she would not need to ask the permission of others to allow her own government to live. Advice should be given to her, as in the Mackay Treaty, to strike away the inter-provincial and inter-district fetters of likin (transit taxes) and export tax, by which method the provinces raise much of their revenue; and the government should divide up the customs receipts between the provinces, or permit the provinces to keep all their land tax.
France, which owns the only railway to Yunnan at present, is imposing an unjust transit tax of ten per cent. on American, British and German goods, shipped from Hongkong to Yunnan, or vice versa, and which must cross French China. Canada in the same situation bids for American freights by making no transit tax, and indeed quoting lower freight rates; this is intelligent modernism. China and the three commercial nations should have this Indo-Chinese tax removed, and demand equal rates on French railways. This rate equalization is what America has demanded of Japan and Russia on railways in Manchuria. It is the same thing that Germany, at the point of the Panther’s cannon, demanded of France in the Agadir incident in Morocco. In other words, the “square deal”, and it must be put in effect, say the Chinese people and the nations which advocate the “open door”.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The Gothic type of architecture introduced by the French; the Catholic cathedral on Caine Road, on the slope of Hongkong. Chinese contractors erect these buildings.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Nan-Tang cathedral (French) towering over native roofs at Canton. Up to the revolution, this offended the feng-shui superstition of old China, and was a constant source of difficulty.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Cement hill roads, South China, Kwangtung province. Bamboo water-buckets. Note luxuriant vegetation, in a moist hot climate; fern, rubber, tamarind, banyan, mulberry trees.
The political economists of Japan are beginning to denounce the exportation of coal, and recommend the reservation of the fields as a war supply. The proposition is to use foreign coal in manufacturing. Accordingly, measures have been taken to develop the Manchurian, Korean, Saghalien and Formosan fields, as well as purchasing from the rich Chinese supplies. This conservation method will certainly be followed by Australia, England, Germany and America, as the years go by. The export of coal is not a benefit; it is an impoverishment. The Japanese make into briquettes the anthracite coal of Ping Yang, Korea, so as to produce a smokeless navy coal.
An interesting aftermath of the Boxer massacres in 1900 was the strange disappearance of the Manchu prince, Liang Chow, who was condemned to be strangled in private with the silver cord, which two unseen friends were to tighten behind two holes bored in a wall. Prince Liang fled to America, where he became a pauper, and was buried in the Alamosa, Colorado, cemetery. At the request of the Manchu throne his body was exhumed on November 25, 1910, and started on its way to China to the tombs of the Manchu emperors west of Peking (not the Ming tombs, which are northwest). A splendid, dragon-gilded coffin was furnished, and the Manchus sent magnificent mandarin robes, a yellow jacket, peacock feather and pearl button of honor. The Chinese whom Prince Liang found in America were not Manchus, but republican Cantonese of southern Kwangtung province.
Hongkong, the dean of foreign settlements, Shanghai, Tientsin, Singapore, Hankau, Harbin, etc., all have volunteer military companies and inter-port rifle matches. Every man in a settlement can be impressed for the protection of life and property. All these uniformed companies have seen hard active service in the taking of Kowloon, the various riots at Shanghai, the Peking Relief Expedition and the revolution which broke out at Hankau in October, 1911. The companies cover infantry, machine and field gun, bicycle and garrison corps trained in the use of cannon. Hongkong’s uniformed contingent at King George’s coronation in London attracted much attention for the smartness of their swinging march. “We didn’t think the jaded tropics could turn out such ambition,” was the remark of many onlookers.
The English historian, Creasy, who lived in the Far East, in writing his book, Decisive Battles of the World, as early as 1852 recognized the importance of America’s mission across the Pacific. These are his words: “The conquests of China and Japan by the fleets and armies of the United States are events which many now living are likely to witness. Compared with the magnitude of such changes in the dominion of the old world, the certain ascendancy of the Anglo-Americans over central and southern America seems a matter of secondary importance.” If we change Creasy’s favorite idea of physical conquest to that of moral, educational and commercial, with physical power only as an auxiliary in the case of the heinous jealousy of those not concerned, we shall agree with him as to America’s advance across the Pacific. It was nevertheless a wonderful prophecy, made as long ago as 1852, when the tide of America’s western advance, with the exception of one meager settlement, had not yet risen over the Rockies. All the Chinese leaders, republican and conservative, look for the growing evidence of America’s interests across the Pacific, and American affairs and history are keenly studied.
Some of the Chinese proverbs on international politics are the following:
“He who doesn’t follow up his words with deeds is no more terrible than the wind on painted water.”
“If you have to guess at roads, the middle one will average up best.”
“Go slow; only the turtle is equipped to draw his head in suddenly.”
“Don’t cross a river with your feet in two boats.”
XI
CHINESE INTERNAL POLITICS
Almost the oldest book in China, the Chou Li, provided for village management at the same time that sacrifices were instituted, thousands of years before the Christian era. The oldest man of the clan-village, bearing the title of “hsiang lao” (village old-one) takes charge at a salary of about one hundred and fifty dollars a year, and hires say twenty police in the smaller villages. This “hsiang lao”, when necessary, deals with the district “siunkian”, who is the government’s lowest mandarin. The people express their views in an open “hsiang” meeting, which is the same as the old town meeting of New England, on which present democratic institutions in America are based; an “open primary”, for that matter.
In the guild councils of the cities, the more experienced tradesmen have had political experience in their dealings with the “taotai”, a higher class of mandarin. From “hsiang” and guild meetings, the next step was to send delegates to viceroys, or even delegates to the Board of Censors at Peking, accusing viceroys. China, therefore, had some experience in politics before the reformers of 1898 induced the impressionable young Emperor Kwang Hsu to issue his famous edicts, which started a wave that rolled on, lifting provincial assemblies, parliaments, and revolutionists into view; and the wave is rolling onward still. Kwang Hsu as early as 1891 issued an edict praising and protecting missionaries. He was never permitted to travel, but learned from books, brought to him by Kang Yu Wei and the other new spirits, what was going on in the outside world. In 1894 Kwang Hsu sent to the American Bible Society at Peking a request for copies of the two Testaments, “such as are sold to THE PEOPLE”. His immortal edicts began to appear in the Peking Gazette on June 23, 1898, and ended in September of that year, when he was imprisoned by the empress dowager and Yuan Shih Kai. During the issuance of the edicts the dowager was at the summer palace, eight miles northwest of Peking, where she was preparing her reactionary plans. The edicts covered the following:
1. New learning for much of the old classical essays. This reform is in force.
2. Modern army, navy, railways, telephone, telegraph. The slow progress of the Lu-Han (Peking to Hankau) Railway was commented on. These reforms are under way, and full of promise.
3. Publicity of national and provincial figures of receipt and expenditure; i. e., a budget. This reform was instituted by the National Assembly in 1911, and will be adopted by the republicans.
4. All citizens to have the privilege of memorializing the Throne independent of the Censor Board.
5. Extension of mail service. This is being brought about by the extension of the railway service, and the government taking over private post routes of guilds.
6. Prince Ching to secure assistance from foreigners in establishing a national university, with branches in provincial capitals. Departments of universities at Peking, Canton, Shanghai, Nanking, Paoting, Tientsin, Hankau, etc., have been established. The English universities, acting under the suggestions of Sir Robert Hart and Lord Cecil, will assist, as will also America. This is secular education. The mission schools are, of course, extending to many new cities.
Let us step into one of the meetings of the first partially formed Parliament, which opened in 1910. We would call it a Senate. They called it Tzu Cheng Yuan; that is, Property Laws Assembly, or Taxing Assembly. The Parliament buildings at Peking, not being completed, the Congress met in the law hall of the Peking University. This hall is a two-story western style building, the only Chinese feature being the heavy tiled roof. The windows are square and have modern sashes. The door is Roman and not Chinese in curve. The Lower House was not yet formed. In the front row of two hundred members were Mongol princes, Manchu princes, viceroys, governors, mandarins, appointed by the Crown, and farther back were men sent up by the provincial assemblies. The great Prince Pu Lun of the royal blood, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Hongkong, and who was commissioner to the St. Louis Exposition in 1904, most affable, stout and progressive, opens the assembly with bland dignity. Shen Chia Pan, the temporary vice-president, sits on his left. The debate at once opens like the small fire of machine guns. It takes up appeals by the provincial assemblies on the actions of the provincial governors. Education, foreign loans, provincial versus nationalized railways, pensions to Manchus, suppression of opium, acts of departmental secretariates, the leakage in tax collection, the corruption of courts, the police to serve the people and not against the people, high tax rate against the poor and low tax rate against the rich, taxation without representation, foreign aggression in Manchuria and Turkestan, insults to the flag abroad, nepotism, etc., are discussed, and the secretariates have a lively time defending themselves from the critical, eloquent pure Chinese Cantonese; the independent Hunanese who have many Cromwells among them, and who are foremost for running Chinese mines and railways without foreign money; the tradition-loving Szechuen men; the literati and capitalists from Kiangsu; the traveled bankers from Shansi province; the cosmopolitan men from the imperial province of Pechili and Shangtung; the rough-rider Mongols from far west Shensi and Kansu provinces; and the Patrick Henrys from turbulent Fukien province. The Throne is compelled to promise a Lower House in 1913 instead of 1915, and at last, in its edict, gives all credit to the crushed reformer, Emperor Kwang Hsu, who learned reform from the Bible and other western books surreptitiously introduced despite the eunuch spies of the reactionary Empress Dowager Tse Hsi. This preliminary Senate stormily sends a suggestion to the oligarchic Grand Council of the Regent that reform shall be evidenced by the regent and the infant Emperor Pu Yi having their queues cut off. Thus the spirited debate rolled back and forth between the old Grand Council and the new Congress or Parliament, until the guns of the impatient revolution thundered at Hankau, like Cromwell on the doors of the Long Parliament.
Confucius himself was a politician. He lived in an age of able prime ministers of some ten highly civilized, equal states, fighting generally by diplomacy for mastery, on the pretext of the right to monopolize the succession to perform the sacred rites of the parent Chou state, which alone was weak. These prime ministers were all abler men than were the titular rulers of the states. Confucius studied diplomacy in the writings of Kwan Tsz, premier-philosopher of the adjoining Tsi state. Kwan Tsz’ writings are sometimes published with Lao Tsz’ works, but should not be confounded with them. Confucius was also influenced by his friend, the great diplomat, Shuh Hiang, prime minister of the Tsin state, which was situated far to the northwest of his native state of Lu; also by the very able minister Tsz Chan of the state of Cheng, which lay west of Lu. He had to keep his wits awake to save the small and weaker Lu state from succumbing to the policies of the ambitious Yen Tsz, prime minister of the Tsi state, which was situated immediately north of Lu, and from falling before the intrigue of Kupeh Yu, prime minister of Wei state, lying to the northwest. This last state afforded Confucius a long exile, when his vicious, ungrateful, new prince hounded him for fourteen years by an ancient system of “Black List” out of his positions with some thirty states, content neither to use his eminent services, nor to let him live that other states might avail of them. He knew too much about law-breaking by those who occupied the “seats of the mighty”; and “such men are dangerous”! Devoted as they are to the study of Confucius’ life, the Chinese thereby imbibed politics.
History throws light on some of the insidiousness of ancient Chinese intrigue. As long ago as 626 B. C. the ruler of the Chinese principality of Ts’in, which state was oppressed by the manly Tartars, sent to the Tartar chief two companies of singing girls “that he might be too weak to ride the saddle at the head of his cavalry”. In 486 B. C. the prince of Tsi state, lying to the north of Lu state, sent to the prince of Lu state, Confucius’ master, a company of singing girls to ensnare manliness in the lap of debauchery, with the result that Confucius in disgust left the service of his prince and became a hounded exile, laughed out of his court by the powerful who for the time were above the law. Where have been that most venerable family on earth, the Kungs of Shangtung province, who have lived at Kufu near Yenchow, in all the recent turbulence in China? We have heard of Manchu princes, of leaders of the Chinese like Kang and Sun, Yuan, General Li, and Wu Ting Fang; of descendants of the old Ming emperors, etc., but why have not the lineal descendants of Confucius put forward a man able to handle politics, war and literature as did their great ancestor? What an opportunity they have had recently. What an opportunity they have yet to put forward a man for the presidency, whom all China and all the world will be delighted to accept if he is only one-twentieth as able as his immortal ancestor.
The secret society, too, has played a great part in internal politics. It is not so necessary now as it was. The pitiless publicity of a democracy or constitutional monarchy makes secret duplicity unnecessary. The Kao Ming Tang was Yuan Shih Kai’s and Prince Ching’s society. At the other extreme was the Kao-lao-Hwei and other anti-Manchu secret societies. It was the union of the Triad secret society with the Taiping rebels that made that revolution powerful enough to spread from Canton to Nanking. In the Boxer days of 1900 the Buddhist secret society, Tsai Li Hwei, extended its scope to cover the new movement. Their watchword was: “Store grain for war; collect forage; revolt”. The Sia Hwei (reform association), Tung Men Hwei (sworn brother), and other secret societies established in China and throughout the world by Sun Yat Sen, had much to do with the successful preliminary work that made the revolution possible.
The old lines of political demarcation are passing away, and new lines will be drawn in some instances. The powerful viceroys of the fourteen main provinces were located and named as follows:
“Viceroy of Pechili” province, at Tientsin.
“Viceroy of Shen Kan” (i. e. Shensi and Kansu provinces), at Singan.
“Viceroy of Kiangnan” (i. e. Kiangsu, Nganhwei and Kiangsi provinces), at Nanking.
“Viceroy of Hu Kwang”, or “Viceroy of Liang Hu” (i. e. Hunan and Hupeh provinces), at Wuchang.
“Viceroy of Min Che” (i. e. Chekiang and Fukien provinces), at Fuchau.
“Viceroy of Liang Kwang” (i. e. Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces), at Canton.
“Viceroy of Yun Kwei” (i. e. Yunnan and Kweichou provinces), at Yunnan.
The favorite retreats for these retired officials are the five cities of cultured Kiangsu province: Shanghai, Suchow, Chinkiang, Yangchow and Nanking; and one city in adjoining Chekiang province, Hangchow. If the clubs of these cities could by a dictograph breathe what they have heard, volumes of wonderful interest would keep a score of publishers busy. China has entered the world arena because of her human interest on a vast scale.
The Manchu may try to come back, as the irreconcilable Major General Yin Tchang has been plotting from Japanese Dalny. The doctrine of sacred right, as strongly as the Hohenzollern has enunciated it, has been preached before in China. The Manchu, with this in view, would not abdicate until he was assured that in him would lie the ancient right to pay the sacred Chou sacrifices, which are 4,000 years old. The builder of the Great Wall, the Emperor Tsin, 200 B. C., said “Shao Ming Yu Tien” (Heaven gives me my decree to reign). Sunyacius and the republicans of 1911 said: “Tien Ming Wu Chang” (The divine right lasts not forever).
Some of the political proverbs of the people are the following:
“An oligarchic government bites harder than a tiger.”
“A good hearer knows twice as much as a foolish talker, for he knows himself and he knows the talker, too.”
“The great statesman makes public opinion his opinion.”
“When the whale gets out of his element, even minnows can safely laugh.”
“In the rise and decline of his country, each man has his share.”
Chang Chih Tung, the famous viceroy of Wuchang in 1909, used to say, “Treachery can turn fame to everlasting stench.” May the New China not be a traitor to progress. Chang was the progressive who established, among many other modern plants, the wonderfully successful Hanyang steel plant, whose products are used in Europe, both coasts of America, Japan and in China on the roadbed from Canton to Harbin, 2,000 miles of shining steel, in that “Celestial” land that is beginning to find that it has a grand terrestrial future.
XII
SOME PUBLIC WORKS IN OLD CHINA
Will the spirit which instituted the ancient notable public works of China revive again? That is the question. The greatest irrigation work in the world, 2,100 years old, is in China at Chingtu. It was invented by Li Ping, the engineer-governor, B. C. 250. A plain seventy-five miles by forty miles is irrigated. It supports nearly 4,000,000 people. The water is taken from the Min River at Kwan Hien above Chingtu in April, and is permitted to run in the thousands of channels until November. Then the great banks of the Min are restored, as the rains are sufficient, and the river runs in its old bed to join the “father of waters”, the Yangtze River, at Sui Fu. The dikes are made of iron, cement, stone, timber and bamboo cradles. Li left this message, which is cut in the stones of his tomb outside the walls of Chingtu: “Shen Tao Tan Ti Tso Yen” (Dig deep the bars, keep low the dikes). The Chinese are going to use these works to produce power and light as well as irrigation.
At Li Ling, over the Lu Ho River in southeast Hunan province, is a high wooden cantilever bridge of six spans, four hundred and eighty feet long and twenty feet wide, paved with cobbles, and covered with an awning. The substructure is masonry, and the cantilever principle is obtained by increasing the length of the pier timbers as they are laid on one another. I want to describe a beautiful suspension bridge over the Yang Ti River near Tali in Yunnan province, which shows that engineering ability was generally spread throughout the provinces to reach thus far in the extreme southwest. The double piers on each side of the stream rise in great strength, and the arch is joined and roofed over most artistically in characteristic Chinese style, like a temple. Eight suspended iron chains make the floor of the bridge, which is anchored half-way up the stone piers, under the arch. From the chains arises a bamboo fence, which is kept from spreading by stanchions, under which you must stoop at regular distances. There is a commemoration statue of a recumbent water buffalo at the foot of one of the pairs of piers. It and the bridge are all that remain of the forgotten assemblage of orators, patrons, troops and society which ages ago graced the occasion, another triumph of the doers over the talkers. The engineer and the architect alone build their own monuments. As in the case of Christopher Wren at St. Paul’s, “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”
China thinks more of the engineer than we credit her with thinking; otherwise she would not have criticized the Manchu so much of late. Between high banks over the River Lou, in west Szechuen province, is the famous Lou Ting Haio bridge, built in 1700. It is one hundred and ninety-two feet long and has nine suspended iron chains, with loose planks laid across. At Chow Chu, near Swatow, there is a beautiful stone pier bridge over the Han River. Shops are established at each pier, and the floor of the shop protrudes, and is supported with great poles that retreat back to the piers. A daily fair is held upon the bridge, because it is the most central point for the travelers from many villages. Each village of the district has its own day for its fair. At Changchow, near Amoy, is a wonderful bridge, from engineering and artistic points of view. The great Chah Siang built it eight hundred years ago from voluntary subscriptions. It is one thousand yards long. There are one hundred and twenty piers, and the height above the water is forty feet. Five stones of one hundred tons each, twenty feet long, compose the roadway, each stone being several feet wide. The piers up-stream are made with a cutwater bow. At Kweiyang, the capital of Kweichau province, a massive stone bridge of ten piers, with cutwaters, shows what ancient China could execute in masonry. Near the rich coal mines at Ping Hsiang, in Kiangsi province, there is a high five-arched, pier-pinnacled, balustraded bridge, which is singularly beautiful. There are shrines on the piers, which also have cutwaters. Chinese engineers discovered the principles of the true arch; that is, a complete ring of voussoirs, and not the succession of protruding corbels invented by the Hindus. The Chinese are just discovering western industry and inventions, but we are just discovering Chinese engineering, with engineers like their Yu and Chah Siang, and the modern “Jeme”, which will cause not a little surprise and enthusiasm in the practical Occidental world.
At Yangchow, on the Yangtze River, there is a remarkable pavilion bridge. The heaviest part of the stone bridge is in the middle of the stream, which is let through the masonry in a number of half and full arch tunnels. Over these tunnels rises the heavy masonry pile, topped with an artistic balustrade. On this is a superstructure of five beautiful pavilions, with prominent up-curling eaves. The bridge descends on each side to the banks along a sloping abutment. It is an exceptional structure even for varied China, both from an artistic and engineering standpoint. The ancient Liu Ko stone bridge over the Hun River north of Peking is famous for its lion-pier terminals, its carved stone balustrade which is in the ornate style. After leaving Szechuen province, on the road into Yunnan, over the Niu Lan River, at Kiang Ti, is a noted suspension bridge, hung between two heavy piers in a gorge, the piers being surmounted with curve-roofed pavilions. The carvings of monkeys, lions, etc., are very fine. The bridge, which is one hundred and fifty feet by twelve feet, is made of iron chains, pulled very taut, showing the unusual strength of the anchorage. There is also a hand chain. The pavilions are, as usual, used as a restaurant and an inn for travelers.
The two most famous suspension bridges are over the Mekong River in Yunnan province, between Tali and Yungchang, and over the Salween River on the main road to Burma. These chain bridges are hung from heavy piers deep down in the vast gorges, and show that men were mighty enough in those old days to tackle so mighty a problem. The Ban Chiao bridge at Yungchang is worthy of the famous engineers of that province. Strong stone piers are sunk down into the swift stream and anchored to the high banks. A secure bridge has been laid down over this support. The abutments are raised and roofed with a glorious double pagoda, the ridge, curling eaves, flying supports and ornaments all being splendidly carved. The bridge itself is protected with a balustrade, and is roofed with tiles throughout. It is both an artistic and a substantial structure. So much for the beautiful bridges of the old régime, nearly all it will be noted in the native Chinese section of the country. Herr Dorpmuller and other German engineers are teaching the Chinese the revival of stone bridges by the massive structures which they have erected on the line of the Tientsin-Pukow railway.
A beginning has been made in erecting iron truss bridges. The very long pier bridge carrying the Peking-Hankau (Belgian built) railway across the Yellow River is well known, and has stood longer than it was thought it would because of the shifting foundation. The eight-pier steel bridge over the Hwei River on the line of the Tientsin-Pukow railway was erected by the Wright-Headson Company, of Motherwell, Scotland. At Shanghai there is the wide Garden bridge. A steel bridge has been erected over the Yellow River at Lanchow, the capital of remote Kansu province, and at Tientsin is the Chin Kung truss bridge. At Chungking a structure has been erected across the Yalung River. The Hongkong-Canton, Tientsin-Nanking, Peking-Hankau, North China and Kiachou-Tsinan railways of course have many steel culvert bridges. There are already a considerable number of remarkable steel truss bridges of eighteen to twenty-four spans over Liao, Nu Erh, Hsiao, Taling, Sha, Tawen, Yellow and other great rivers of China. The French railway, from Haiphong to Yunnan City, is built over one hundred small bridges in the crossing of the Red River, Namti and Song River valleys.
From Peking to Tungchow, at the head of navigation from the coast, about twenty miles, runs a broad road paved five hundred years ago by the Ming kings with immense blocks, three feet square by two feet thick. The road sadly needs resetting, but one can readily imagine what a splendidly substantial road it once was in those spacious days of the last of the pure Chinese kings. The Ming thought of art and public works. The Manchu has thought more of intrigue and private dinners since he gave up riding horses and living in tents. One of the strongest charges against the Manchu was that he threw the great public works which he inherited into ruin. This Tungchow Road is the road over which commerce, invasion and many a dignified embassy have gone during the recent strenuous centuries.
The Che Ling Road runs from Chinchow, in Hunan province, to Canton. This is the road the new railway will take. The foot road is fifteen feet wide and composed of great stone blocks one foot thick. Before traffic was gathered at Hankau and Canton by steamships, the traffic on the Che Ling foot road was very heavy, and shops lined the long stone highway. Another famous road, the Mei Ling, also composed of stone blocks, climbs the great Nan Shan (Southern Mountains) and connects Nangan in Kiansi province and Canton. This is the road that Abbé Huc took in 1849 when he made his daring journey from Tibet to Chingtu, Chungking, Hankau, Kowkiang, Nanchang, up the Kan River to Canton and Macao. There is a famous imperial road from Peking to Jehol, through Kupikan pass, where the Manchus may finally be segregated. The road from Peking to the Ming tombs is paved with a course of large stones. The “Great Road” runs from Peking to Canton along the coast, and answers to the old Japanese “Tokkaido”, which runs from Tokio to Kioto. It was a Mongol road, dating back to the Great Wall. The best Chinese roads, however, were made in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries A. D., during the Sung dynasty, whose capital was Hangchow.
In 1890 the province of Szechuen built sixty-five miles of a mountain river road in the gorges of the Yangtze River, starting from Kwei-chow and running eastward. The road is from one hundred to five hundred feet above high water and is cut six feet wide and eight feet high into the limestone cliffs, truly a splendid revival of the noble works of the Ming kings, and in a sublime situation not to be equaled anywhere. The Szechuen people boast that their “road goes where a monkey couldn’t hang”. The road was planned and executed entirely on Chinese initiative. The best known road in China, and considering its length, the best conditioned road in the empire, runs for four hundred miles in Szechuen province from Wan Hsien on the Yangtze River, overland to Chingtu City, the capital. It is called the Siao Pen Lu (smaller north road), and is paved to the width of six feet. It has many wonderful staircases cut up mountain faces. The road could be shortened one hundred miles if bridges were built at the gorges. An internationally owned railway was planned for this route. From Chungking to Chingtu in Szechuen province, up hill and down, and across fields and marshes, runs a traveled road paved much of the way with large stone slabs. From Chungking to Sui Fu, along the Yangtze River for two hundred miles runs a notable stone road five feet wide. Along all these old roads the freight of 400,000,000 people has been carried on the backs of men and women, and even children, whether by barrow or shoulder load, during the long quiet centuries, at an awful cost of money; for too large a proportion of the nation has been engaged in the transportation as compared with the producing department, and this is one reason why China has been poor so long.
Wells have been sunk by contractors, with whom the mayor of the village (hsiang lao) dealt. A brick caisson, fitted on a bamboo frame, is dug under and sunk. On this caisson the upper wall is built. Sometimes iron-pointed bamboo pipes are driven through the bottom of the well. These old methods will give way to the new, and windmills will begin to hum in old China.
The modern water-works of Peking take the water from the Sha Ho, a clear stream in the Western Hills. There are settling tanks, pumping stations, stand-pipes, etc. One hundred and thirty thousand families are supplied from the mains. The same concession to labor has been made as at Hongkong, in that the cleaning of the filter sand and gravel is done by hand instead of by machine. Nearly all the treaty ports are putting in modern water-works, which have been sorely needed. China’s death rate is decreasing, and it is not necessary, even from a Chinese point of view, that there should be so many births or dual wives any more.
Electric light plants are in operation at nearly all the coast treaty ports, as well as at some of the Yangtze treaty ports and West River ports inland. In the Occident, intellectual and spiritual light preceded lighted roads and the light of science, but as everything is opposite in China, it seems that science is preceding intellectual and spiritual light. But “these twain shall meet in one equator round the globe”.
The Lighthouse Department of the National Customs is employing foreign engineers in harbor and channel work, and some improvements have been made on the coast and along the rivers, the provincial authorities making a special tax wherever possible to foot the bills. Often the boatmen, merchants’ and bankers’ guilds are required to subscribe.
The first systematized attempt to handle public works scientifically was undertaken by the provincial assemblies of Nganhwei and Kiangsu provinces in the summer of 1911, during the awful famines, which followed the great floods. America has sent large contributions of flour and money for rice. The assemblies put the men, whom the floods withheld from their fields, on railway building, canal dredging, bridge building, and road making. It was along these roads that the triumphant right wing of the republicans marched, headed by Generals Hsu and Ling, in the memorable attack on Nanking, which broke the imperial resistance, and threw the Manchu over the yamen wall!
Self-reliance is half brother of independence. I have found that with these improvements has grown up not a little talk of “China for the Chinese”. One finds constant complaints in the native Chinese press that lucrative contracts, such as the erection of government buildings, are given to Japanese and other foreign contractors instead of local firms. The signs, taken altogether, are hopeful, and West and East have enough to interchange without overlapping each other. Nice adjustments will have to be made in some cases, but tact, patience, mutual sympathy and altruism will in the end overcome any misunderstandings that may arise.
XIII
THE INFLUENCE OF JAPAN
In 1911 Japan’s tariff agreements expired and a new high tariff was put into effect in the effort to raise $300,000,000 a year as the state’s revenue. The same result was experienced as in India. Home manufacturers operated in the smaller industries, and many larger foreign capitalists opened Japanese branches. For instance, the Lever Soap Company, of England, came to Osaka, and the Armstrong-Vickers-Maxim Company, of Newcastle, the gun-founders and warship builders, came to Muroran in Ezo Island, to be near the coal mines, the iron ore being imported largely from Tayeh, China, and much of the pig iron from Hanyang, China. Prices of living have advanced beyond wages, and in 1912 the municipalities of Tokio, etc., had to open free rice kitchens to feed crowds of the impoverished and unemployed. The poor bear the heaviest share of the new taxes and the increased prices levied by the trusts. The profits of some of the large trusts go out of the country. There is the same complaint as in China, that foreign capital and home monopoly are exploiting franchises, subsidy chests and tariffs. The new high tariff is a success for the monopolists, just as the American tariff was from 1865 to 1911. The complaint among the people of the privilege-made-wealth running the government and burdening the taxpayer is as bitter as in some other countries. The suffrage being limited in Japan to five millions out of sixty million people, this discontent does not yet show itself so quickly as in America and Britain. American and British newspapers, magazines and books which voice reform, and real and not deputized representation of the taxed, are translated, and widely read, not only in Japan, but in China.
The world knows the effective work of the Japanese press bureau, organized with the aid of foreign advisers, before the Japan-Russia War. This included the publication of Professor Nitobe’s book on Bushido in Philadelphia, glorifying to the highest pitch of the warm Oriental imagination everything Japanese. This had much to do with preparing the way for the Japanese advance in Manchuria. That press bureau has been strengthened, and has its inspired organs in some of the large cities of the Occident. No other country is able to color the news on occasions as Japan is able. With the cry of lèse majesté, Japan, Germany and Russia seem to be successful in stamping out much of the independent criticism of the taxed, or those to whom equal opportunity has been denied. There seems to be only one hope for real liberty in Japan and elsewhere, the rise again, as in Bunyan’s, Milton’s and Franklin’s time, of the independent pamphlet and book, whose one motto shall be, “No taxation without real representation.”
The Japanese have appointed the Koreans, Count Yi and Viscount Cho, to represent the absorbed Korean people, and these two men are expected to sign every document praising the rule of the Japanese, which document is then wired over the world by the thoroughly organized press agency. The former immense missionary influence of the Americans among the common people is slowly being choked out, and the large foreign gold and other mining industries of Korea, which promised so well, are also now under strict watch. In other words, the system of dummification has been applied to Korean politics, and the famous American teachers and political advisers have found it well to leave the peninsula. I would instance the long articles in the New York Times of June 6, 1912, and the New York Herald of September 1, 1912, in which the American Presbyterian and other churches charge the Japanese bureaucracy with wholesale persecution, “planting” of evidence, imprisonment and torture of thousands of Korean political prisoners as late as 1912. Two methods of colonization face each other in contrast at the threshold of China—the Japanese method in Korea, and the American method in the Philippines. Both are progressing commercially, but the latter alone is progressing educationally and altruistically, so far. It is noticeable in Korea that the Japanese are breaking down many beautiful walls and temples to build in their place ugly utilitarian houses. They pay very little respect to those whom they have conquered. They are obliterators of art, where art detains utility. The name of the land has been changed to Chosen. In Manchuria, despite conventions, the Japanese maintain ten times the railway guard of soldiers agreed upon. Japan will bear friendly watching everywhere, as the American writers, Millard and Homer Lea, are constantly urging. Her armaments cost her a heavy taxation and she is searching for ways to recoup herself. If Manchuria is to be saved to China, it will be owing more to America’s insistence than to Britain, for Britain at present is tied up to Japan, and Britain in India has given a hostage to the East. Perhaps the best way to save Manchuria is to encourage Chinese emigration, and this plan is now working out, tens of thousands of Shangtungese leaving yearly for the three rich Manchurian provinces. The American suggestion that the Russian and Japanese railways in Manchuria should be made international is possibly not so good a plan as to sell those roads to China with money loaned for the purpose, and clean Manchuria of Russian and Japanese troops. There seems no permanent reason why China should not run Manchurian railways and mines as well and as profitably as she has run the North China Railway and the Kaiping mine of Pechili province. To illustrate how Chinese officialdom looks upon the general subject, I quote from Viceroy Liu Ming Chuan’s memorial, approved by Li Hung Chang, written in 1893: “Japan attempts now and again to be arrogant—like a mantis when it assumes an air of defiance—and to despise China, and gives us no small amount of trouble on the smallest pretext.”
The advance party has its critics in Japan. The Tokio Nichi, the Osaka Mainichi, the Tokio Jiji and the Tokio Yorodzu take the nation to task for attempting to compete with America’s navy. They cry out against the expansionists’ slogan of “Japan’s supremacy on the Pacific”. Here is the Yorodzu’s plaint against the heavy taxes involved: “Go to the hamlets and villages, and you find the sons of our soil wearing the sad and worn appearance of the ‘man with the hoe’. Ask the shopkeepers and merchants, and they tell you that they are at a loss to know how to make ends meet. So do small manufacturers and men of moderate salaries, and in fact all who come under the general term of the middle class. Why? What else but that their taxes are too heavy, and because the price of commodities has risen too high since the war? The war has increased the wealth only of the contractors, speculators, and a small group of millionaires, which accounts for the sudden rise of the prices of the necessaries of life. Thus the chasm between the poor and the rich is widening every day. What will become of the country if the government does not bend all its energies to the recuperation of our national strength, which has been overtaxed during and since the late war? The only course which the government should follow at this critical moment is to curtail all the unnecessary expenses of administration, most of all, those of the army and navy.” This succinctly covers what volumes could not cover better. The average Japanese income is twenty-three dollars gold a year, out of which one-fifth goes to taxes.
Freight rates and tariffs are in some places as powerful as battleships and battalions in keeping out the commerce of a rival. When Japan and Russia rejected America’s proposition for an international control of Manchurian railways, so that the commerce of all nations would pay the same duty and receive the same car supply in Manchuria, Japan and Russia made a secret treaty regarding Manchuria on July 4, 1910, and another agreement in 1912. Among other points, it covered interchange rates. The Russian railways can by high rates keep out competitive Japanese goods, and the Japanese railways can retaliate. On non-competitive goods needed for local consumption, low through rates are accorded, Japan favoring the famous Harbin flour, timber, kaoliang spirits from the Harbin distilleries, and Amur salmon and fish. Russia accords low rates northward to Japanese (i. e., Fushun and Yentai) coal, cement, fresh food, etc. On export competitive soybeans, for instance, by low rates Japan tries to coax Russian shipments southward via Dairen, and Russia makes a similar effort to route Japanese-controlled beans via Vladivostok, but should a Russian shipper try to send ten miles in the direction of Japanese-owned Dairen he would find the soy rate higher than all the five hundred miles to Vladivostok.
By indirect methods, such as loans at low interest, rebated godown charges, rebated rates, and what not (for where there’s a will there’s a way) Japan can militate against the competition of American and British cottons, woolens, machinery, etc., in Manchuria. When the Chinese junks on the Liao River compete in the open season for the soy-bean traffic for Newchwang, the Japanese railways quote as low a rate as five mills per ton mile to Dalny, as compared with the lowest rate in America of eight mills. Japan is a David when she goes out to slay! Japan was the whole cause of the denial by China of an American-financed and constructed railway from Chin Wang Tao through Manchuria northward to Aigun. Yet she says she doesn’t mean to stay in Manchuria! She did not broad-gage Kuroki’s difficult Antung-Mukden railway recently in such a permanent way as to suggest that she ever intended to retire or sell out, “treaties and conventions notwithstanding,” to use the apt phrase of the London Times. Though America would under no circumstances accept a square foot of land in China or Manchuria, except on lease in an international municipal settlement, America must protect her growing and potential trade in Manchuria and in China, and that trade will always be withstood in one way or another by Japan. There is nothing now to go to war about, but there will always be a good deal to argue about, and Japan, as well as the Manchus, knows a dozen ways of presenting a smiling evasion. Have you ever proposed a difficult question to a Japanese at a curio auction, and watched his face! We have all voted that he was a success in making language hide thought; a born diplomat.
The Japanese government debt outstanding is £300,000,000, as compared with China’s debt of £93,000,000, and Japan’s industrials have borrowed privately abroad an added £60,000,000.
| Japan’s Debt in £. | Annual Interest. | Due. | |
| 4% sterling | £10,000,000 | ||
| 4½% sterling | 29,750,000 | ||
| 4½% second series | 29,750,000 | ||
| 4% 1905 Russia war | 25,000,000 | After 1921 | |
| 5% 1906 Russia war, railways, ships, Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, Saghalien, etc. | 183,000,000 | ||
| 5% 1907 | 11,500,000 | After 1922 | |
| 4% 1910 | 11,000,000 | After 1920 | |
| Total Japan’s debt | £300,000,000 | £12,000,000 | |
| Total China’s debt | 93,000,000 | 4,642,000 | |
| Total India’s debt | 170,000,000 |
Great as is Japan’s debt, she can make heavy payments on it because she owns her railways, and can allot the railway surplus to the diminishing of the debt, which China and India can also do because of the nationalization of most of the railways.
In April, 1912, the Lodge Resolution in the American Senate brought out the fact that a Japanese trans-Pacific steamship company, acting doubtless on behalf of the Japan forward party, had long been endeavoring to obtain from Mexico a strategic base on Magdalena Bay, which could, as a coaling station, threaten the whole Pacific coast. How would Japan like it if America obtained a coaling station in Manchuria? She and Russia compelled China to refuse America a railway franchise in Pechili in 1910.
What is the comparative strength of the American and Japanese navies? The German specialist, Count von Reventlow, and the American, Homer Lea, who accompanied Sun Yat Sen to China as military adviser, though he is not a military man, have in several books prophesied that Japan will and can defeat America. Japan has four dreadnoughts, the Settsu, Kawachi, Aki and Satsuma, completed since the Russia War, but they have only half the gun-power of the ten American superdreadnoughts. Japan has eight battleships of the 15,000-ton Mikasa type, including the salvaged and repaired Russian ships, against America’s thirty battleships of the first class. America can therefore patrol the Pacific from a Philippine base as soon as she has docks enough, and if America and Britain ever approximate on world questions, the British navy can be drawn to the Atlantic and waters west of Ceylon. Two things are sure: first, that America and Britain will never fight each other; and second, that Britain’s and America’s commercial and political policies in the East are identical in destiny. As long as America maintains a two-power standard on the Pacific, that is, two ships to one of Japan’s she need fear no opposition from Japan, and Japan has certainly nothing to fear from America, as China ceaselessly praises the altruistic and non-land-grabbing policy of America over the world. It is true that Japan has an almost irresistible army, but sea power dictates, as Admiral Mahan’s brilliant books show. Japan whipped Russia because she controlled the sea. If America controls the Pacific, the Japanese army could do nothing in Korea or Manchuria.
Now, as to Russia, the navies of America and Britain pounding on the Baltic door, if necessary, as a last resort, could make Russia behave in Manchuria; but if this did not prove wholly effective, a reformed Chinese army, trained by American and British officers, could in time do to the Russian battalions that were left what Oyama’s, Nogi’s and Kuroki’s regiments did. China should not yet be called upon to waste her money on a navy, as she has no interests for a century beyond the great countries of Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria, which America and Britain, with their navies, desire to enable her to retain. Britain and America should have a persistent, consistent policy, and there will be no naval war, the whole world over; and Germany can reduce her navy and army charges, which are a curse to her people. If Germany wants to do a noble work, let her use her army to influence parliamentary and sociological reforms in tyrannical Russia, where men are blighted by the curses of opinion-paralyzing detectivism and oligarchism. If a consistent, persistent policy is maintained there need no more be an Anglo-German feud on the Atlantic than an American-Japanese feud on the Pacific.
England needs a two-power navy because she has Africa, India and Atlantic Canada to defend. America needs a two-power Pacific navy because she has, as a foster mother of civilization, to help defend Australia, South America, the Philippines, Pacific Canada and republican China. Looked upon in this way, a navy becomes a policeman, and not a swashbuckler. Money is going to be invested to develop all these countries, and property should be protected, not looted. Those nations which have the most efficient naval police, and the most altruistic policies, are the nations which should patrol, and they are America, Britain and possibly Germany, if the last nation advances, as it seems now to be doing, in parliamentarism to real representation. America and Lloyd George’s Britain alone are essentially democracies, and therefore qualify in international altruism. With Britain’s control of the Suez Canal, and America’s ownership of the Panama Canal, efficiency is assured in these two nations effectively standing by to protect political progress and world commerce on a fuller and freer basis than it has ever been. In amenability and high mechanical intelligence, Britain, America and Germany alone have qualified in the management of navies.
Japan and America will not fight on the Pacific, as Count von Reventlow and Homer Lea prophesy, but America will overbuild Japan instead. Japan has been more carefully reading the new lesson taught by America and Britain that there must be no absorption of old China, and she is now thinking of a possible new rôle, as the interpreter of the East to the West, and the West to the East. The head of the First Imperial College, Doctor Nitobe, the coiner of “Bushido”, is foremost in propagating this idea. Japanese school-teachers are most numerous in Chinese government schools, especially as teachers of English, in learning which, however, they are not half so expert as the Chinese themselves. Doctor Nitobe is a Christian.
At the time of the Japanese War, Professor Nitobe, then with the Tokio University, wrote a fanciful book on the theme, Bushido (Japanese pronunciation of “Wu Shih Tao”—way of warrior). It was quite on the style of Lafcadio Hearn’s apotheosis of the Japanese. Its effect in Japan was to produce some hysteria and not a little conceit. Foreigners were led to believe that the Japanese must be right because they were reckless. The Japanese bureaucracy of the Choshiu, Satsuma and other clans used the fetish to entrench themselves. No one can say that Japan has real representative government. Her government is exactly the government that Russia has. Her Diet is no more representative than is the Duma. The ministry decides on the budget, and it is put through by steam-roller when necessary, and ready-made opinion is given to the press. There is no such thing as the British parliamentary system of the commons absolutely controlling supply bills, or the American principle of the Lower House being finally supreme. The extensive press bureau which was established to popularize the Japan side of the Japan-Russia War, encouraged hara-kiri and telegraphed over the world in exaggerated terms the details of every hysterical and self-advertising suicide. For instance, if the warriors could not take the fort, instead of trying again, they were to march up and blow their brains out before the moving-picture film, so to speak, leaving a letter for the Mikado as follows: “We could not do what you asked us; it is our fault. Therefore in shame we hara-kiri. Bushido! Banzai, etc.” This thing is being kept up to a degree, and as long as it is encouraged by the bureaucracy, constitutional government in Japan will be postponed, the emperor being worshiped in his old office of pope of Kioto instead of constitutional emperor at Tokio.
I quote the following of many press despatches which constantly appear in the Japanese and world press: “To give his life as an atonement because the emperor of Japan had to spend an hour in a common waiting-room, Moji Shijiro Shimidzu, a trainmaster, threw himself under a train. Shimidzu had been in charge of arrangements for a journey the emperor made from Kyushu, after witnessing the army maneuvers. The imperial train was delayed by a derailment at a misplaced switch. Shimidzu left a letter saying that he considered it his duty to pay for the emperor’s embarrassment with his life.” The spectacular suicide of the immortal captor of Port Arthur, General Nogi, and his wife at the time of the funeral of the Mikado Mutsuhito on September 13, 1912, comes under the same category of godless savagery forbidden mankind by the Sixth Commandment of Sinai. It is time for Japan to cease posing through her press bureau. We all admire her for many sane and grand things done, and to tell the truth, we admire the Japanese people more than their present system of a privileged government where only five millions out of sixty millions enjoy the franchise. It is a government of the people, but not sufficiently a government for the people, and certainly not a government by all the people, all of which conditions Lincoln said should obtain if liberty was to be assured. That is the aim of the whole world, and it has been accomplished now in England, America, France, China, Portugal and Switzerland. The Shimidzus, who commit suicide, do not exhibit patriotism but hysterical conceit, and the thoroughly organized Japanese press bureau, and the Choshiu, Satsuma, and other privileged clans, in their own best interests, should discourage the nonsense; and instead of elevating the man as a god in the Shinto shrine, they should exhibit him in the foyer of fools. Christianity teaches that there is only one being for whom we should give our lives, and that anything else is idolatry. It is not the emperor or the president whom we are to serve, but the emperor’s men and women; the president’s men and women; that is, the state, and a real emperor and a real president must, too, serve the state, which is all the people. Such is the modern logic Japan should teach her people, and not the hysteria of Bushido. Japan is not ignorant of her disabilities, and each of the Seiyukei, Kokuminto and Yushinkai parties are endeavoring to extend the educational system which Guido Verbeck fashioned for the favored Satsuma, Choshiu, Fujiwara, Gen, Tosa, Hizen, Kago and other clans of five millions, to the forty-eight millions of agriculturalists, miners, factorymen and fishermen, and twelve million Koreans and Formosans. Success to Japan’s educational extension, is America’s and Britain’s hearty wish, for it “will calm a sea of troubles”.
Japan has been the first nation in the world to attack the land taxation question, and Germany and Britain have followed recently, a long way off, however, and America will probably also follow the example. Until recently the large estates held by barons and corporations have been taxed on the old feudal medieval system of an infinitesimal valuation, while the small holder has been taxed on the full selling value. This has now been changed, and large owners in Japan can not hold at little cost to await unearned increment. They must work the land or sell it. Until this system is adopted the poor of the nations will be decapitalized by tariff, food, clothing, building material, head, war, permit, excise, export, subsidy, educational and other high taxes. Land values are about one-tenth what they are in America, and the land tax is about eight per cent. on selling value. As in China under the Manchus, land in Japan is nominally the property of the emperor. Perpetual leases can only be owned outright by Japanese subjects, or by a company which is incorporated only in Japan. A foreigner in Japan can not own land, but his Japanese incorporated company can, as the land would then be at Japan’s command, Japan having no extraterritoriality exemption law favoring the foreigner, as has China, in civil and criminal matters.
As is well known, the police are an arm of the central government and not of the municipality, which savors of despotism and Russia’s example. There is therefore no really free press in Japan, for state trials may not be reported or commented on. The police exercise a censorship of news under their Marunouchi Club of Tokio. There could be no Roosevelts, Wilsons, Bryans and Lloyd Georges in Japan as in America and England!
They have their money trust question in Japan, for while there are thousands of small gathering banks, they all deposit in the trust banks, which thus control the use of “other people’s money”, i. e., credit. These large banks, whose presidents confer in the meetings of the “Eel Society”, are the Bank of Japan, Yokohama Specie Bank, Hypothec Bank, Japan Credit Mobilier, Hokkaido Colonial Bank, Bank of Formosa, Bank of Korea, and Mitsui’s Bank.
Japan must have its Gifford Pinchot somewhere. She has taken quick action against states’ rights when conservation was endangered. It was found that the provinces were selling water-power concessions to speculators and dummies of the monopolies. The central government in January, 1911, immediately suspended all provincial and colonial grants until a national survey could be made, and applicants looked into. It is proposed to harness several million horsepower of waterfalls on the Switzerland, and not the Niagara plan (so as not to mar the scenery), which, with cheap labor, will be a great asset of industrial Japan.
CHINESE REPUBLIC
([See larger])
That Japan has taken up officially the correction of complaints which have been made in scores of books and hundreds of magazines on her trickiness and lack of commercial honor is shown in the following article by Minister of Commerce Oura, in the Jitsugyo no Nihon (Industrial Japan), written after his world tour, in which he praises the sturdy honesty of old free-trade England. “I could not help regretting to find that in commercial morality Japan was too young and weak to be classed among the world’s foremost countries. Everywhere I went I heard denunciations of and complaints against Japan. Japanese business men not being particular about commercial morality, people could not carry on business with our merchants with confidence. I soon felt ashamed on reflecting upon the fact that we Japanese had defects, subject to attacks and complaints in the matter of commercial morality. Our merchandise can not pass the customs authorities on a mere invoice, but is subjected to a rigorous examination. British merchandise is always more substantial than is advertised. In short, British-made goods never fail to justify their advertised description. Quite the opposite is the case with Japanese goods. Complaints are raised against Japanese manufactures that they are not up to sample. It is usual, for instance, for a layer of larger-sized fruit to be arranged on top of the box. Instances of overcharging, and tricky inferior imitations of standard goods are common, and damage our reputation.” Confession and contrition are the parents of reform, and Japan is waking up.
Japan worked her mines in 1911 to the following extent: Coal, 16,000,000 tons, value, $30,000,000; copper, 120,000,000 pounds, value $15,000,000; pig iron, 60,000 tons, value, $1,500,000 (Kamishi and Sennin mines); zinc ore, 22,000 pounds, value, $300,000; lead, 8,000,000 pounds, value, $250,000. The coal came from Japan mines only, and does not include the great product of the Fushun and Yentai mines in Manchuria. The copper was mined principally at the Kune, Kosaka, Ashio and Besshi mines at a cost of nine cents, which is lower than the American cost. Japan is exhausting the ore in the islands, and is, therefore, looking to rich Korea and China for her supply of this war and industrial necessity. Her need of copper is another incentive to expand politically.
Japan is building a railway along the western length of the main island, and will need $18,000,000 of railway equipment for it. She will probably go abroad for half of this. Small as Japan is, this railway will open up scenic and productive districts and add vastly to the riches and strategic resources of the country.
The method by which Japan built the Kobe harbor piers out into deep water was most modern. Cement boats, or caissons, one hundred and nineteen feet long, thirty-five feet high and thirty-four feet wide were built on a floating dock (planned by a Westminster, England, concern) at the shore. They were then conveyed to sea, the dock being sunk from under the cement boat. This latter was floated into position, and gradually sunk with cement, rubble and sand in the comparatively cheap but massive piers. A tonnage of 135,000 tons can be warped alongside the dredged sea walls at one time. It is not so long ago that everything had to be lightered out to the steamers in the wind-swept roadstead of Kobe, and many days were lost waiting for smooth water. The writer recalls being held at Kobe for eighteen hours during a typhonic blow because no launch or sanpan could bring off the passengers who had gone ashore during a calm. There are now no delays. There are power-driven cranes and travelers, godowns, and every facility for the quick handling of cargo. As at Montreal, Hamburg, Liverpool, Hongkong, etc., the government directly or indirectly assists, advances, or guarantees in securing the necessary harbor works, railway connection and dock machinery at Kobe. Kobe is Japan’s great import harbor, as Yokohama is her export harbor. Tokio is to be an export harbor, as a long canal for 10,000-ton ships is now being dredged to Yokohama Bay.
Japan’s petroleum is found in the Echigo district, straight across Hondo Island from Tokio. The oil is excellent for illuminating and lubricating, and the industry, which is highly protected, employs 3,300 people, and pays twenty-five per cent. to the Nippon Oil Company. Fuel oils and crude oils are brought from Sumatra, America and Mexico.
Much complaint was heard in England when the Grimsby steam trawlers, owned by syndicates, drove the small owner and the hardy fisherman from the seas, affecting the recruiting of the navy, as well as driving a hardy independent class into a condition of economical and political servitude. Japan has copied this unfortunate example, and steam trawlers have been introduced in her fishing waters. The government promises to control it before it seriously affects recruiting for the navy.
The Japanese have gone into shirt-making, the duty on raw material being rebated when the shirts are exported. Foreign designs are copied. The men receive nine dollars a month and the women six dollars. The hours are nine and one-half a day. The companies, like many of the Japanese industrials, grant a few holidays, and provide theatrical entertainments, moving-picture shows, baths and tea, none of which is costly, but seem to keep the workers from realizing that their wages should be three times what they are, even in Japan, for taxes amount to one-third of the income.
Winter clothing for the masses in general, and service clothing for the navy, army, artisans, etc., under modern conditions of hard wear, has become a stern problem in both Japan and China. Silk will not do. Cotton will not answer in this field. Wool has been adopted, and the gorgeous colors and texture of the Orient begin to vanish before the requirements of a practical age. Two of the largest woolen mills in Japan are the Mousseline (Boshuku) Weaving Company, at Osaka, and the Japan Woolen Company, at Kobe. Eighty per cent. of the total area of rocky Japan is not under cultivation, being ruined with tough bamboo grass, which seems impossible to eradicate, and which destroys the delicate mouths and throats of sheep. Japan has, therefore, to import her wool from Mongolia, Manchuria, England, France, Germany and Australia. Not having a full supply of yarn mills, she imports yarn also from England, France and Germany. Goat’s and camel’s hair is also imported from South America and Mongolia.
The movement for the conservation of timber has taken hold in Japan, reinforced cement poles, as well as creosoted poles, being used. The largest creosote works are at Osaka, and the preserved wood is now used for Japan’s famous light buildings, railroad trestling, ties, bridges, etc. Japan has an exceedingly rich treasure forest (one of the world’s last) east of the South Manchurian Railway, and also bordering the Fusan-Mukden line. Much of the hard wood of Japan and her colonies is being brought to America for furniture-making at present.
Japanese steamers will doubtless run to the east coast of America through the Panama Canal. Micki Shonzo talks of sending twenty of his vessels through. A Japanese line now carries nitrates, hides, salt, horses, beef, wool, fish, grain, etc., from Chile, and coal, rice, tea, silk, oils, bean cake, manufactures, matting, etc., to Chile. Japanese shipping in 1912 amounted to the enormous tonnage of 1,000,000, as compared with 170,000 tons on the day before the Chinese indemnity was paid to Japan in 1895.
Perhaps the rich dividends made by the Oriental Consolidated (gold) Mining Company, at Unsan, in the Yalu district of Korea, made Japan as anxious commercially as diplomatically to secure Korea. This American company, with which Leigh Hunt was connected, and whose concession was obtained through the offices of United States Minister Allen, has made in a concession 500 miles square 4,000 per cent. in ten years. One hundred thousand dollars was put into the gold mining plant, and $4,000,000 has been paid in dividends, the mines themselves, instead of added capital, paying for their own development. The Unsan plant is largely self-contained, having crushers, a foundry, machine shops, a fleet, a railway and lumbering plant, hospital and barracks. The mining costs only one dollar and forty cents per ton, hand labor, the Koreans being the best miners in the Far East, owing to their docile patience. Some of the mines are one thousand feet deep. The Korean Exploration Company (half American and half Japanese) has a gold mining concession at Chicksan, south of Seoul. The new terms that will probably be imposed on foreign mining by Japan will be at least twenty-five per cent. royalty on the net profits, machinery imported and ore exported to be duty and loti taxes remitted, respectively. If Japan can do the smelting, of course ores must go there for treatment.
In Formosa the three largest Japanese sugar companies are the Niitaka, the Taihoku and the Minami Seito (Southern Sugar Company), capitalized at about $2,000,000 gold each, with an output of 300,000 tons a year. Japan can increase this, and supply the world. The government grants subsidies to the cane growers for fertilizer, and money prizes for model plantations, the high tariff against Hongkong, of course, being a subsidy for the Formosan sugar mills, as far as supplying Japan is concerned.
Japan has opened an electric-driven cotton mill, the Naigai Wata, at Suchow Creek, Shanghai, sending to America for the boilers, to Germany for the dynamos, and to England (Oldham) for the spinning machinery. The owners and foremen are Japanese, the workers Chinese. Eighty-five per cent. of the material is local grown, and fifteen per cent. comes from India in Japanese steamers. The finished product, mainly yarns, is sent up the Yangtze River and along the coast in Japanese steamers, and is admitted into Japan preferentially as far as foreign products are concerned. The Japanese are extending their ownership of cotton mills erected in China, for the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha has bought the Hua Hsuan, the Shanghai and the San Tai mills at Shanghai, and the Wuchang Spinning Mill at Wuchang. The Mitsui Bishi Kaisha has bought the Chen Hua mill at Shanghai, and the Nippon Mill Company has bought the Jih Hsin mill in China. There is much food for thought in this situation. The Japanese also own one-third of the largest translating press in China, the Commercial Press of Shanghai.
The Japanese firm of Mitsui has established a refinery at Hankau to handle the famous nuts of Szechuen province, which produce the oil known as China wood oil. The Mitsui firm also handles the production of soy-bean oil in Manchuria, shipping the oil and the cake in great quantities in their own steamers to Europe and America. The Mitsuis do their own banking. The soy-oil is used for cooking, soap making, and as a substitute in paints for linseed oil, which is becoming scarce. The cake is used as a milk food and a fertilizer in Europe and America. To what proportions the industry has grown can be judged by the following figures: Newchwang (Chinese) shipped 230,000 tons of beans and 400,000 tons of bean cake in 1911. Dairen (Japanese) shipped 450,000 tons of beans and 300,000 tons of bean cake. Vladivostok (Russian) shipped 250,000 tons of each. The soy-bean oil amounted to about 700,000 hundredweight. This immense crop speaks eloquently of the richness of the black soil of the three provinces of vast Manchuria. The bean is also now being planted in Szechuen province in the rows where the nefarious poppy once bloomed, and America is using quantities of seed in the southern states in connection with enriching land which has been impoverished by cotton. The soy-bean, being nitrogenous, adds to, instead of taking from, the life of the soil. One ton of beans, besides two tons of soy hay, can be produced per acre.
Canadian and South African railways may own hotels, express, telegraph, telephone and land companies, but here is what the charter of the South Manchuria (Japan owned) Railway Company permits them to do: operate railways, cities, steamships, hotels, mines, electric light and gas plants, tramways, laboratories, laundries, shops, dormitories, go-downs (warehouses), hospitals, Y. M. C. A.’s, schools, libraries, mills, selling agencies, stockyards, forests, sawmills, farms, kaoliang distilleries, etc. This reminds one of the ancient East India Company’s powers before Warren Hastings was impeached, or of the ambition of Incoporator Dill in the palmy days of the incorporation laws of New Jersey State before the Interstate Commerce Commission got into its stride.
The pernicious influence of the yoshiwara and the demi-monde in Japan and the Japanese settlements and colonies throughout the Far East, is fully covered in the tenth chapter of Price Collier’s The West in the East. If the fire which destroyed the extensive, obtrusive yoshiwara quarter in the Susaki section of Tokio in 1911 had swept the whole institution away, womanhood throughout the world would not have the grievance against Japanese society which it now has. Neither China nor India ever sank this low in morals, despite all the talk about concubinage and slavery. The fault lies in the inherent weakness of religion in Japan. The Buddhism and Confucianism (Shintoism) which Japan imported, have degenerated and lost soul in the exotic state. If China needs Christianity, Japan needs it more. The Japanese women are delightfully vivacious; it is a pity so many should lose their self-respect. Possibly some of it substantiates the eternal teaching that no nation can persistently ignore poverty and not suffer in morals. The Japanese government is now doing something to remedy conditions and raise the moral tone. The fault lies largely with the people themselves; too great a love of money and too little a love of real religion, with the usual result that sacred womanhood is the first to be driven down at the wall.
XIV
PRESSURE OF RUSSIA AND FRANCE ON CHINA
Many books have been written on the Russian advance to the Pacific, and they eventually induced Britain to hurl Japan on the aggressor. These volumes include Putnam Weale’s fervid volumes, works by Lord Beresford, Senator Beveridge, Norman, Chirol, Colquhoun, Alexandria Hosie, Younghusband, Krausse, Lord Curzon and others. That advance has been pushed back as far as the borders of Shingking, the southernmost of Manchuria’s three provinces, and out of the Korean Peninsula, but it is marking time in the other two Manchurian provinces of Kirin and Helung-Kiang, and in vast Mongolia, Jungaria and Turkestan. Some critics have said that in having Russia pushed back from the Pacific, the wave has backed up on Persia. The American one-time treasurer of Persia, Mr. Shuster, believes Britain has recently lost to Russia in the buffer states of the Indian border. Certainly a new party has risen in British diplomacy, whose writers are Maurice Baring, Hardinge and others, which is not at all Russophobic. Many believe that Russia intends to try again in Manchuria, and others believe that Japan will concede to Russia the two northern Manchurian provinces; or again, that Japan will occupy all Manchuria, and support Russia’s occupation of Mongolia and part of the Pechili province. As long as there is oligarchic rule in Russia, there will be danger of the Russian advance, as the aristocracy wishes to keep an army employed, so as to use it when necessary on an ambitious Duma, or a people who demand real representation in return for the tax privilege. Therefore Russia will for many years press China at one spot or another, and how to checkmate this pressure is one of Britain’s hardest problems, in which America is involved because of the Hay doctrine of the “non-partition of China,” which is the Monroe doctrine of the Far East.
Early in 1911 Russia disturbed the diplomats by sending a note to the powers that she intended to make a military demonstration against Sungaria and reoccupy, as from 1871 to 1881, trade routes and frontier cities like Kuldja and Kobdo. Gullible China was induced to include in the treaty with Russia at that time permission for Russian caravaners to cross Western China under Russian arms; to trade without paying duty, and to establish Russian “imperium in imperio” settlements. The Novi Krai of Harbin admitted that these extraterritorial demonstrations in Far Western China aimed not so much at aggression in Turkestan as cajoling further privileges in Manchuria, such as navigation on the Sungari, Russian settlements, mining and railway rights, etc. On another occasion, Russia is party to the rejection of America’s proposal of the internationalization of Manchurian railways; or again Russia cites some secret coerced treaty and compels China to refuse a franchise for an American railway from Chin-Wang to Aigun, or Chin-Wang to Kailar. Yet at the same time Russia is arranging with China to drop a railway on Peking down from Irkutsk, and a railway from Semipalatinsk down on Jungaria and the headwaters of the great Tarim River. The Russian advance is not an extinct volcano; one never knows when it will be recrudescent somewhere. The party of Admiral Alexeyev, General Spiridovitch, State Secretary Bezobrazov and Count Bobrinsky, is not dead at St. Petersburg. Russia is to-day moving 100,000 colonists a year into Siberia. She is double-tracking the Siberian railway eastward to Lake Baikal.
The following memorial to the throne, written by Viceroy Liu Ming Chuan, and approved by Li Hung Chang in 1893, reveals China’s knowledge of Russia’s deep designs: “We feel Russia’s grip on our throat, and her fist upon our back, and our contact with her is a source of perpetual uneasiness to our minds. When a quarrel occurs, we have to yield to her demands.”
Though no one can show why, land-rich Russia considers Mongolia, Turkestan, Ili, Jungaria, and two provinces of Manchuria, and even Tibet, as her sphere. In the troubles of the revolution, during the last months of 1911, harassed China felt Mongolia dragged from under her feet. The Chinese amban at Koren (Urga) was discountenanced, and Russia set up the Buddhist Lama as an independent ruler. Plans were also laid to run a railway down from Kiakhta. The Mongolian princes frequently receive presents to retain their sympathy and increase their obligations. Russia even made demands that China should withdraw her troops from the outposts and discontinue colonization, for China is beginning to learn the strategy of emigration. The building of the all-Russian link on the north side of the Amur River from Stretyinsk to Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, is going on apace at great cost, because the Russians, in trying to settle the district, refuse to employ Chinese, and have brought out 15,000 Russian railway laborers. The river has too many shallows for successful transportation, and it would not pay yet to dredge it. The Chun Kuo Pao, a native paper of Peking, was so pusillanimous in its fear of Russia and Japan, as to recommend in 1910 the abandonment of Manchuria to save Mongolia. I have said pusillanimous, but I might have said venal, as an illustration that Russian money may not neglect to seek power with some Chinese editors in the northern provinces.
America desired to keep Japan and Russia separated in Manchurian aggrandisement, and instead Russia came to a secret amicable agreement with her old enemy, Japan, in June, 1912. The American, Mr. Shuster, at the desire of Persia, was satisfactorily managing the customs of Persia, but Russia successfully intrigued for his retirement. On February 22, 1912, in the Hall of the Nobility, St. Petersburg, the Nationalist Party held a meeting to denounce treaties with America. Count Bobrinsky, the president of the Constitutional Conservative Party, stood up and called Ex-president Roosevelt the “enemy of Russia,” referring to the Portsmouth Peace Treaty. Plans were laid before the meeting showing how Chinese Turkestan could supply America’s place in growing cotton for Russia. Several reasons were given why Russia opposed America. The real reason was that Russia does not like America’s and Britain’s policy of the “non-partition of China.” The aristocracy of Russia also hate the influence upon the Duma of America’s and Britain’s system of budgets and armies controlled by the lower house of the people. The oligarchy of Russia hate America’s altruism that would secure to growing China her ancient fields, mines and forests of Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria. The Chinese rely on America’s altruism. There was possibly more than humor in the Tientsin shopkeeper’s sign: “All languages spoken; American understood.”
The Chinese bitterly remember the massacre at Blagovestchensk on the Amur River in 1900. When the Europeans were besieged in Peking, the Russians drove the innocent and unarmed Chinese inhabitants into the river at the point of the bayonet. Many were drowned, and their bodies choked the landing wharves as they floated down-stream. Yet some inquirers ask why there should be an anti-foreign feeling in China! The name of General Chitchegoff, who gave the murderous order, would live in history yoked to Nero’s if we had writers to-day as able and patriotic as fearless Seneca and Lucan. If you are an American and ask Chitchegoff in the place of his retirement why he did it, he will answer: “Ask the Bureau, and blame the oligarchical system, not the miserable agent.”
There was a time, too, when Prince Henri d’Orleans, Paul Doumer, Garnier, Leroy Beaulieu, Riviere, Loti, Petit, Bert, Imbere and Bonheur wrote, when France, as Russia’s ally, had her aggressive designs on China. Hongkong, when I lived there, was haunted by continual nightmares after France took possession of Kwangchou Bay in Kwangtung province. Since the French ran their railway from Haiphong to Yunnan City, French influence is strong in Yunnan province, and the Szechuenese are looking for France’s hand at the headwaters of the Yangtze River. In a sense this puts a barrier against the British attack on Western China from Burma, and the American attack from the Philippines. While France at home and in Tonquin is a high tariff country, there is more confidence in the republican people of France on the part of America and Britain than there is in the reliability of the other mighty diplomatic competitors. Still French aggression is potential and not to be ignored, especially as France has in Indo-China a colony of 735,000 square miles with a population of 34,000,000 people at the southern gates of old China. The heavily subsidized Messageries Maritimes mail line plies between Marseilles, Saigon and the ports as far as Japan. I once sailed half around the world on one of their white boats and know their service to be excellent. At present the French monopolize the Yunnan traffic with their railway, charging in addition to the rates a high transit fee on bonded traffic. This is internationally illegal, and is exactly what incensed Germany blew out of French diplomacy in Morocco at the muzzle of the Panther’s guns, when that vessel dropped anchor at Agidir one eventful morning. In desperation, the Chinese tin miners of Kuo Chia (some of whom are citizens of Hongkong) contemplate an opposition railway to Nanning, and the old water route to Hongkong. The division of Siam between France and Britain is slowly going on, France having recently taken over one of the Shan States. To protect Singapore as a world equator gate, Britain must connect the Malay states with Burma, and in time take part of Siam. At one time France had a design of pressing her Tonquin influence through Western China, and meeting the Russian advance at Peking, but by the “entente-cordiale” France is now nearer to Britain than Russia, and this is for the good of the world, including potential American trade in the Far East. The Supreme Council of Indo-China has recently raised a loan of $40,000,000 in France for irrigation, drainage, agricultural and mining development, and extended railways and roads in Annam and Tonquin.
Chinese imperial influence in the last few centuries has not extended far south of the Yangtze River. All through French China, that is, Annam, Tonquin, Cambodia, etc., and in Siam and the Shan states (now partly absorbed by British Burma), in the old days there were hundreds of petty kings and princes (a king to a hill in that land of hills), who themselves, with the exception of the brave and intelligent Black Flag Leader, Liu Jung, were really adventurers, or descendants from Chinese adventurers from Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Yunnan provinces. Send a Chinese to America, and he tries to become a monopolist because of the ambitious example set before him; send him to British Singapore, and he strives to become a contractor with designs on knighthood; send him to Annam or Tonquin, and in the merry old days he became a swashbuckler king, and strutted upon his ant hill. The French had to pension or dethrone a hundred of these “royal” fellows from the Si Kiang valley. The dethroned one said: “As for me now, back to the pirate waters of the West River, and the admiralty of a snake-boat fleet.” They have all recently turned up in the pirate waters of Kwangtung province, and during the revolution of 1911–12 made endless trouble for the gunboat fleet of Britain, America and China, operating in the interests of civilization and trade, from Hongkong and Canton. One brigand named Luk captured the famous Bogue forts of Canton on March 12, 1912.
The Frenchman takes Paris with him wherever he goes, and as one indication I found him in all the cafés that lined the red streets of Indo-China, dropping his absinthe on ice in a long glass, though a physician would shudder at the risk taken in such a terrifically hot and humid climate. To balance “pidgin English” he has taught the Annamese “petit negre.” He has brought his costly Parisian architecture, as in the Palais, the Opera, the Cathedrals of Saigon, Hanoi and Haiphong. Since 1873 the five provinces of Indo-China, with an area larger than Texas, have cost the French $150,000,000 for military expenses. The trade last year was $50,000,000 imports and $30,000,000 exports. The colony is only beginning to exploit its great wealth, especially in coal at Hongay, Kebao and Laokai in Tonquin.
XV
SOME FOREIGN TYPES IN CHINA, AND THEIR INFLUENCE
The mainstay of Chinese revenue, and the main security as yet for foreign loans, is the National (formerly Imperial) Customs of five per cent. duty ad valorem. The organization was started at Canton in 1859 by Sir Robert Hart, an Armagh Irishman who was transferred from the British consular service. He served as head from that year until his retirement with a fortune of $500,000 in 1910. Sir Robert Hart lived in princely style at Peking and managed the service honestly. He has been criticized for taking so large a reward from straitened China by members of the India civil service, who are satisfied to retire on $1,000 a year after even more arduous service. In 1901 Sir Robert Hart wrote his book, These from the Land of Sinim. He was a brilliant propagandist for things Chinese, the most popular Occidental who ever served China, though he was not so heroic a figure as “Chinese” Gordon. Sir Robert Bredon was next in office, and in 1911 Sir Francis Aglen was put in charge. The son of an English clergyman, a well equipped sinologue, trained under Sir Robert Hart, Mr. Aglen is a thorough leader of this great work, which includes loan departments, lighthouse service, a cadet school, a pension bureau, and an internal revenue organization to a degree. As British commerce is the largest in China, being nearly four times as large as America’s trade, the British name the head of the customs service. Many Americans, Germans and French are also employed, and a thorough knowledge of Chinese and its dialects is insisted upon by Sir Francis Aglen.
In the region about Shanghai and Nanking, the name of “Chinese” Gordon (General Charles) still lives for his victorious leadership of Li Hung Chang’s army, which crushed the Taiping rebellion, and saved the Manchu throne for the time. General Gordon had many bitter quarrels with Li Hung Chang, insisting that assassination and murder must not follow a victory. That the rebels of 1911 in this same region did not forget Gordon’s precepts was shown by their leniency under great provocation, after capturing Nanking from the Manchus. No foreigner who has aided in forming the ten divisions of China’s Northern army has had the personality or exercised the influence that Gordon did, and in the great trial of the revolution and the mutinies of 1911–12 the army showed frequently that no strong personality had inspired the men with a fixed purpose, honor or patriotism.
About 1869 a nephew of President Van Buren, John Sheffield Van Buren, went out to Yokohama as an assistant in the consular office of his uncle. He was soon in Hongkong as agent of the Pacific Mail, Occidental and Oriental, and Toyo Kisen Kaisha trans-Pacific steamship companies, and was in touch with the Chinese of that great crown colony for thirty-three years. He had an intimate knowledge of China, and trained many of its commercial men who have risen high in the commercial and diplomatic affairs of the new republic. In Hongkong he was looked upon as one of the ablest minds that linked the West and the East. He was devoted to Southern China, developed its trade, dry docks and shipping, and formulated China’s first trans-Pacific steamship line, the Chinese Merchants’ Steamship Company of 1903. The famous Chinese guilds of Kwangtung province looked upon him as a sage, and sought his aerie retreat over Robinson Road on the cliff for many a conference under the swaying punkahs. He was a very tall thin man, with a long countenance, great eyes, and a slow, full, round voice. It was impossible to irritate him to heated expression. Like the mills of the gods, he ground slow but exceedingly fine. He used to bemoan the fact that Americans who managed Oriental companies generally do so from America, before being first experienced in the Orient, and he was a strong advocate of the British system of moving partners who would serve their seven-years term in the Orient, seven at home and then back to the Orient again. He was decidedly in an inferior field in commerce. If American diplomacy had been steadier in the East, freed from the spoils system, his mentality and training were perfectly fitted for a great American minister at Peking, or a great consul-general at Canton. He was a deep student of the Filipino, as well as the Chinese, but was altogether in favor of the latter. He was more pessimistic perhaps than was justified regarding what America will be able to do with the Filipino and the Philippines. A thorough student of the Far East, and the representatives of all nations who gathered there, smiling like Buddha in his vast but reserved knowledge, nothing irritated him so much in his official duties as listening to the conversation of the official American globe-trotter, who dropped into Hongkong for a week, and then drove contrary opinions down the throats of such sinologues as he was, and wrote books, most of the prophecies of which remain as a joke when compared with events. There was one American senator and another American official who wrote books of Far East prophecies whose “cocksureness”, like that of the Kanaka surf-rider, used to strike to the core of the resentment of this usually placid Solon of the East, who died in the terrific heat of the Red Sea in 1910, worn out with his long life near the equator, and never having written the books that were within him, and which he really owed the world. His sister married an Austrian nobleman. The family homestead was at Englewood, New Jersey, and on his mother’s side he was connected with the Sheffields and Phelpses, of Yale College memory.
There have been other notable Americans who served in China. Colonel John S. Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla leader, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1878–85, and General E. S. Bragg, of the Wisconsin Iron Brigade of the Civil War, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1902–4. The general had a sharp wit and tongue, and is known world wide for these two phrases which got into domestic and international politics: “We love Cleveland for the enemies he has made;” and, “You can as easily make a citizen of a Cuban as a whistle out of a pig’s tail.” The contretemps can be understood when it is explained that the general was at the time consul at Havana. Like the Arabs of Longfellow, after this incident and the receipt of some mail from Washington, he “folded his tent and silently stole away” for Hongkong! General Bragg, at Antietam, was approached by General Gibbon’s aide, with orders to push the enemy as long as it was safe, and the former’s famous reply was: “It has been d—— unsafe here for the last half hour. Forward again, Wisconsin.” Mr. Rounsevelle Wildman, author of China’s Open Door, and editor of Overland Monthly, consul-general at Hongkong, where he amused the staid Britons by his energetic efforts to sell his worthy book, lost his life aboard the Pacific Mail steamer Rio, which sank with all on board just outside the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Daniel Webster sent his son Fletcher as secretary of the famous Cushing Commission, which visited Hongkong, Canton and Macao. Secretary William H. Seward later passed over the same waters, and I have seen Admiral Greeley, of Polar fame, picking out the great war secretary’s steps at Wanchi, Hongkong. The Tibet traveler and author, A. H. Savage Landor, I knew at Hongkong. Some of us believed his thrilling tales of escape after torture and some of us were cynical. He was a worn man then, grateful for favors that are usually accorded to the traveler, an enthusiast, a student of the Western Chinese, and a courageous fellow.
In 1911, America, Britain, Germany and France arranged to loan China about $100,000,000 for railways and new currency. A neutral financial adviser was found to be necessary, and President Vissering, of the Dutch Java Bank, was agreed upon by the four nations, with Japan favorably impressed. If the loan agreements go through, and when affairs assume their normal course in China, Doctor Vissering will have opportunity to leave his mark in a wider sphere in the Far East. Mr. Hillier has long represented the British financial interests in Peking; Mr. Straight, the American; and Doctor George E. Morrison, of the London Times staff, has been adviser to both imperial and republican governments at Peking.
One of the most remarkable imperialists who ever came to China was Paul Doumer. He was a French newspaper man, and came East as consul, later becoming governor of Indo-China, which he sealed to France with an iron hand. He made Haiphong, Hanoi and Saigon remarkable centers of civilization, sanitation, music, art, architecture, commerce and French imperialism. Cost was nothing to him. He seemed to make or hypnotize money after he had hypnotized governments and financiers with his eloquence and ambition. He formed Legionary troops and held a strong navy in the East. He brought the great Messageries Maritimes steamship line from Marseilles to Saigon. He grasped Kwangchou Bay in Kwangtung province, and made Hongkong tremble for her prestige over Canton and the southwest, her old imperial sphere. Then he dreamed great visions of imperialism, as Rhodes was dreaming in Africa, Curzon in India, A. Colquhoun in Burma, Kitchener in the Soudan, and some Americans like Roosevelt and Taft in Panama and the Philippines. He, “le petit Paul Doumer,” would build a six hundred-mile railway, much of the right of way where men had never been before, from Haiphong to Yunnan, in the heart of Southwest China, turn the British flank at the headwaters of the Yangtze River, and link Yunnan, and some day Chingtu, with Marseilles and Paris. What if fever, one hundred bridges in fifty miles, a cost of $100,000 a mile of road, and a little traffic had to be conquered, he would build to the center of China, dividends or no dividends. By 1910 he and his men had done it. The British, fired by Colquhoun and Curzon, raced him from Burma, but he has beat them by fifteen years. The Chinese do not love the French, and they are building from Yunnan to Nanning to reach Hongkong; but it is largely French for the present at Yunnan. Hongkong and Mandalay have been flanked. The Chinese would have preferred the Americans, or the British, who do not covet Oriental land. The French aim to push that railway up to Chingtu, and cut China in half. Yunnan City, on its high plateau, once the farthest from Peking and civilization, is now a center of remarkable modernity, the Chinese emulating the French in lighted streets, water-works, factories, modern prisons, trade schools, uniformed police, and a provincial army and arsenal of modern type. If you ask how has Paul Doumer influenced China, circumspice at Yunnan City. Before Paul Doumer came East, following the dream of empire, if you had been asked which was the last city of China that would adopt progress, you would have said “inaccessible Yunnan,” whereas it has been almost the first. Doumer’s most notable book on China is L’Indo Chine Française, with the emphasis on the Française!
For two decades the name of Mr. Rumor (I shall call him that for the purposes of this sketch), of Hongkong, was synonymous with the rocket which seemed to have become a fixed star. He was a Canadian, born in the little riverine town of Belleville on the St. Lawrence. Adventure found him in Hongkong, a clerk in the Public Works Department of the Colonial Government, at a child’s salary in a land costly for the foreigner. The Chinese were beginning to use wheat flour in place of rice, which had become valuable for export. Rumor acted as their adviser during lunch hours, when the fervid sun of the Orient burned up the tamarind’s shade and fried the papaw’s thick leaves. In time he himself quietly imported consignments of Oregon flour. His Chinese compradore was honest and divided the profits, though the compradore did all the work. Rumor grew richer, and became an agent for Northern Pacific American mills. As the years passed, the able and honest Chinese compradore brought him orders sufficient to load many full ships that breasted the slow waves of the Pacific. The Chinese compradore lived plainly, and saved enough money to become a financial power in the great imperial colony. Rumor then went into military, naval and diplomatic society, built one of the finest aerie mansions in the Far East on Hongkong’s peak of palaces near the unique tram on Barker Road, where a thousand feet of picturesque cliff fell from its foundation. He imported Kentucky saddle horses and racers, and at great expense put Canadian sheep on the foothills of old China to see if they could conquer the bamboo grass. He owned a steam yacht and a sailing yacht, gave musicales to the military of the garrison station at both his down-town chambers on the Praya and at his mountain château, and entertained an American governor of the East who became a president. He was a handsome man, the mirror of fashion and manners in the cosmopolitan colony. His was the easy bearing of those who associate with princes and know their standing. Like Beau Brummel, of Piccadilly, he could make a griffin’s social fortune by being seen walking with him down the Praya. Stories were told of his recklessness in hours of play. He was a dashing character, altogether. He made annual trips to the great cities that line the equatorial belt of the world and to capitals of the North. He seemed to have tapped the mines of Eldorado.
At last, he would add fame to riches. Hongkong was about to enter the great educational arena in the awakening of the Far East with a splendid university. Hormusjee Mody, the Prince of Parsees, gave the land. Who would give the endowment and thus perhaps secure a knighthood? Why, Rumor, who at last was truly popular and not envied alone, for he was now about to do something for others than himself. In the meantime he had started a Chinese flour mill at Junk Bay, Hongkong. He would startle the whole economic world, as Harbin did, by grinding Chinese grain on the spot, and he would import less Australian and Oregon flour. There seemed to be no end to Rumor’s extension or the glamour which he cast over his compradore and the Chinese bankers, as well as the American mills. Many tried to emulate him and steal his trade, or imitate his “chops” on the flour bags; but the Chinese, “olo custom”, clung to Rumor, who alone expanded, came, saw and conquered. San Francisco was shaken by an earthquake, and New York by a financial panic. The twin waves went round the world, and met in Hongkong harbor one dark night, just as Rumor, purposely unaccompanied by a white man, was returning in his yacht Canada from his flour mill at Junk Bay, all the long miles of the famous harbor to the landing under his mountain palace and the university site. No one knows much about it, except that the crew at last missed him overboard. The tidal financial wave had swamped him. He could ride its crest no more in splendor. The great university will bear many names, but probably not the name of Rumor as its endower when the accounts of the estate are balanced. Three Chinese, of Singapore, stepped forward and endowed the university with nearly $500,000 gold, although they were at the same time holding up the hands of the exhausted Chinese republican revolution.
Sir Matthew Nathan came to Hongkong as governor from hot and feverish Nigeria. Hongkong is a moist hot place, very near the direct sun of the equator, and men who wish to live long go slow in the luxuries of work, liquor, etc. It is a good place to send your victim, as David disposed of Uriah “in the forefront of the hottest battle”. Sir Matthew’s enthusiasm was to be every inch a “knower” (mandarin) of the people, and a governor. He wore his staff out. He was up at unseasonable hours in addition to his regular duties. He worked as hard on the hot Praya as another man would on cool Piccadilly in March. Every emergency and occasion found him at hand, whether an awful fire, a new railway, or the launching of a great ship. The memorable typhoon of September, 1906, struck the unprepared colony which has been visited so often with these circular hurricanes. Sir Matthew seemed to superintend the rescuers at every spot of the long beach and harbor. When the steamboat Hankow holocaust occurred in October he worked, axe and arm, with the firemen. Little wonder that he died, really of exhaustion. He was a typical example of the grand old British civil service in China. He was heroic, unselfish, tireless, sympathetic, a man whose example lives to fire China with zeal and altruism.
Doctor C. D. Tenny, an American educator, has been connected with the American Peking legation and has served on many American political missions, such as the inspection in 1912 of Doctor Sun Yat Sen’s government at Nanking. His influence in the northern provinces with Yuan Shi Kai has been great. Pai Yang Technical University at Tientsin, and Paoting Fu College, both Chinese, have known the worth of his guidance, and therefore they stand as models. Doctor W. A. P. Martin, the dean of American Presbyterian missionaries for thirty years, has done almost a similar work in the north in connection with the Chinese Tungwen College and Peking University, and moreover, Doctor Martin is a famous translator of American books into Chinese. Wells Williams, of the American Peking legation, is famous not only because his father wrote that noble basic work, The Middle Kingdom, but for his own work as a diplomat in America’s diplomatic advance in the Far East. The American minister at Peking, Mr. W. Rockhill, carefully and bravely explored Mongolia and Tibet, and wrote a diary of his travels in the debatable lands where Russia, Britain and China face one another.
Doctor H. H. Lowry, for many years president of the Methodist College at the Hata Men gate, Peking, has long exercised a strong influence upon Chinese officials and students. He is a man of great tact, enthusiasm, wisdom and scholarship, and is known both to have enlisted Yuan Shih Kai on the side of religious tolerance, and to have confirmed him in modern educational methods. The American Methodist bishop, J. W. Bashford, of Shanghai, is a mighty militant man with the southern republicans. The students adore him. The patriots of young China worship him. Fiery zeal, idealism, and the courage of a lion are characteristics of this influential, learned and sacrificing man. Doctor F. D. Gamewell, of Peking, is a Methodist missionary who has been in China for thirty years. He is world-famous for his engineering skill in directing the fortification of the legations in the awful siege of 1900. He is a man of great physical courage, calmness of mind, and sanity of judgment, and is a tower of influence among the Chinese officials. He hails from Hackensack, New Jersey.
C. W. Kinder, a Briton, of the Kaiping mines, built the first locomotive, and instituted the successful railway and mining policy of North China. He has done nearly as much in technical education at the Tongshan shops and school. For thirty years he has led the Chinese in mechanical development, and has reconciled officialdom to modernity in utilitarian matters. Mr. Kinder’s assistant has been Mr. Alston. The British engineers who have established China’s great railway development are Messrs. Collinson, Tuckey and Pope. The engineers in charge of the Hanyang smelting and mining development are the Germans, Ruppert and Leinung; and the German, Herr Dorpmuller, constructed the northern section of Tientsin-Pukow railway. Doctor G. E. Morrison, the Australian at Peking who represents the London Times, has long held the world bound to his prompt despatches regarding Chinese politics, of which he is past master. With all the currents which have been dragging and crossing in Manchu Peking, a man who can steer the ship of prophecy must be a master hand, and Doctor Morrison is a master hand, both in acquiring and digesting difficult news. His book, An Australian in China, speaks for itself.
The influential and typical authors who have lived in China for long terms are known by their books and by the prominent positions they have held. The genial and humorous Professor Parker, of Manchester University, was a British consul at Fuchau, Canton, etc. His books reveal his deep knowledge of antiquity, religion and the language. Professor Giles, of the University of Cambridge, was British consul at Ningpo. No man has done more to reveal the East to the West. His books speak for themselves. My old friend, Dyer Ball, with whom I sat for many a year while we questioned Chinese emigrants in the musty old harbor office at Hongkong as to whether “they sold themselves like a pig” (the Chinese idiom for contract slavery), and with whom I have taken many a walk over Hongkong’s noble peaks, was for thirty years in Hongkong’s civil service as registrar, protector of the Chinese, etc. His text-books on the dialects of the language are well known, and among others his book, Things Chinese, is an encyclopedic authority. The late Professor Legge, of Oxford, lived for many years at Hongkong, where he translated the Chinese classics. He opened a window which let the light of Cathay shine out on our surprised Western world. Shanghai, too, has had its many authors. The American, Jernigan, wrote China in Law and Commerce, a most illuminating work in a sadly neglected field which is coming into prominence with the modernized times. Canon Moule wrote brilliantly of his surrounding provinces, and many other Shanghai men have taken up a gifted pen, notably the late Robert Little, who for sixteen years was the scholarly editor of that sapient authority, the North China News and Herald. Mr. Little was succeeded by the eminent editors, Montague Bell and Owen Green. The National Review, a brilliant illustrated weekly, is ably conducted by Mr. Walter Kirton, of Shanghai, and G. B. Rea, M. E., conducts the famous Far Eastern Review, of Shanghai. Professor Hirth, of Columbia University, a German, served in Hart’s Chinese customs service, and has written interesting books on his experiences. Sir Henry Blake, of Hongkong, married into the British court, governor and author, was a ponderous type, once of the stern Irish constabulary, an ideal disciplinary officer, a splendid type of the strong Briton not unlike Lord Cromer in temperament. Up at Mukden, Doctor J. Ross, of the Scotch church, does wonderful things in authorship, medicine, education and theology for the Manchus; and over all the land the scholarly, indefatigable Alexandria Hosie, one time British consul at Newchwang in its strenuous days, wanders, collecting accurate trade data and making maps for the guidance of diplomacy, trade and letters. Two of his books are, Three Years in Western China; Manchuria, Its People and Resources. Chester Holcomb, interpreter and secretary at the American legation, Peking, in the eventful Boxer days, wrote an illuminating book, The Real Chinese Question. I regret that he died while in America in 1912.
Russia has her own scholars and explorers like Prejevalsky, whose works should reach us in greater abundance than they do. Doctor W. M. Hayes, the American Presbyterian, guided Yuan Shih Kai in founding his Provincial College at Paoting Fu. Stewart Lockhart, up at Wei Hai Wei, has been governing that crown colony for Britain for many years and writing books. I knew him at Hongkong as the brilliant colonial secretary, and indefatigable student of the exceedingly difficult language and written character, worthy in his scholarship to bear the name of Scott’s son-in-law. Under Lockhart serves Johnston, author of Lion and Dragon in North China, who was one of our Hongkong cadets, Sir Henry Blake’s secretary, and an Oxford man. All of these men, and scores more whom we knew, have been interesting types of the West in China, all the while they were, in their own way, interpreting China to Europe and America. The Chinese have copied, and will copy, their faults and their virtues. Until lately one has seldom heard of a defalcation by a Chinese. In the rubber panic of 1910 at Shanghai, the Chinese taotai, Tsai Nai Huong, absconded, owing several million dollars, and financial China was shaken to its foundation. Whether the fault was ignorance or cupidity, no one can say. He was given the loan by the government to sustain the Chinese banks which were beginning to fail because of speculation in the rubber estates (and the estates that existed only on paper!) of Malaysia. Would that more Chinese were admitted to Manila, where they might note the methods of the leaders in the splendid paternalism now being developed there in manufacture, building, education, road-making, hygiene, and every department of progress and government.
Doctor C. W. Mateer, who founded the leading American Presbyterian University, situated at Wei Hsien in Shangtung province, is perhaps best known as the translator of the New Testament into northern (Mandarin) Chinese. President A. J. Bowen, an American, of the great Nanking Union University (Presbyterian, Methodist, Disciples), wields a vast influence with the rising republicans and officials of Middle China. Doctor Paul W. Bergen is president of the great Presbyterian College at Wei Hsien, Shangtung province. These men have vast power to influence the East in favor of the West, if the western business men were not so parsimonious in providing funds for the colleges and hospitals in China. An endowment of $30,000 is given for a university where at least $100,000 should be given, because the missionary of the educational and medical class is the pioneer of trade. Cure a Chinese, teach him modern methods, and he will in his gratitude favor western trade and intercourse. The debt American and British expansion owes to the missionary educator and medical man is greater than is owed to the man behind the gun, or the diplomat behind the flag and the protocol, who, while they serve, often serve harshly. Doctor J. H. Judson is president of the American Presbyterian College at beautiful cultured Hangchow, and has great influence with the sons of officials and leading merchants of Southern China. The most influential and interesting foreigners in China are the medical missionaries. There are too any names to quote, but all the church boards in America and Britain will furnish scores of names, if the inquirer is interested in the men and women who are doing the forward work of his denomination. Next to these men come the translators and educators, the great college presidents and professors in China, like Doctor Pott, of St. John’s, Shanghai. Missionaries of the old type, diplomats, merchants, travelers, treaty port editors, etc., are also performing their interesting part as types in interpreting the West to the great East, and ten thousand Chinese are gathered around each, eagerly watching every act and listening for every word. As one travels into different sections of China, some foreign name or personality stands there for good or ill, more prominently than the native’s own pailoo arch, before the eyes and in the speech of the awakening people, who are weighing the types of men who, coming among them, have excited their emulation in most and their revulsion in some cases. No course of reading can afford more material for thought than the hundred books devoted in recent years to things Chinese, and written by various types of foreigners during their long sojourn or exile in Cathay. The traveler who goes to Africa generally writes about animals, for they seem to be more interesting than the old races that are there, but the sojourner in China writes, not about monkeys, but about men and women who have been thinking in a continuous civilization which is at least 4,000 years old. As to the Chinese monkeys, there are a few of them in Szechuen and Yunnan provinces but since there are 400,000,000 men and women in China to write about, if one cares for works on monkeys, one must go to the literature on Africa! As for me, I confess to partiality for Cathayan literature because of its absorbing humanities and many types, which distinctly facet interesting differences.
No foreigner in China was as accurate in his prophecies of coming political events and massacres as the Roman Catholic Bishop of Peking, Monsieur Favier, who recently died. This was partially owing to his remarkable judgment, and partially owing to his wide sources of information, as Catholic converts are four times as numerous as Protestant converts. Monsieur Favier, ahead of events, was the best informed foreigner in China regarding the “Boxer” movement of 1900, and if his advice had been followed by the legations, the foreigners would have left Peking for the coast before the siege was instituted. He did not intend to leave himself, as he felt it to be his duty to die if necessary with his converts. Every one has admired his successful defense of the Pei Tang cathedral.
The following prominent American educationalists in China visited America in November, 1912, and spoke for China at the World’s Oriental Congress at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts: Vice-president Williams, of Nanking University; President Edmunds, of Canton Christian College; President Goucher, of the University of Chingtu, and Professor C. W. Young, of Union Medical College, Peking. It was regretted that President Sheffield and Doctor Arthur H. Smith, the eminent author, of the American Congregational College of North China, were not present.
Late advices state that the Chinese government at the close of 1912 has taken into its employ in the administration of the salt gabelle, J. F. Oiesen, a Dane of Tientsin; and as legal adviser, Monsieur Recouse, a prominent Belgian. Wherever Belgians are used, it is generally for the purpose of hiding the hands of France, and sometimes of Russia.
XVI
THE MANCHU
When the republicans rebelled against the dynasty, the following was the indictment issued to the world’s press, and signed by Foreign Minister Wu Ting Fang and Assistant Foreign Secretary Wen Tsung Yao, at Shanghai. Wu, all the world knows as the Jefferson of the new republican China. Wen is a very able modern lawyer, who made his name as a resourceful amban at Lhasa.
1. Incapacity.
2. Reactionary.
3. Benighted and barbaric.
4. Opposes modern knowledge, science and industry.
5. Favors a closed door; stultified national service.
6. Opposes government by the people; favors Manchus who are only one in about one hundred of the population.
7. Pensions a vast horde of non-working Manchus.
8. Barbaric against life and property, when opposed.
9. Constitutional promise insincere.
10. Manchus hold back world-progress.
11. Gave away Chinese territory.
12. Despised the Chinese and prohibited intermarriage.
13. Taxation without representation.
14. Haughtily refused to adopt Chinese system of three names, thus maintaining a separate society.
15. The Manchu has no literature, and, therefore, is a barbarian.
This Chinese Declaration of Independence first appeared at length in the North China Daily News, of Shanghai, on November 15, 1911. Similar complaints had been brought against the Manchu when the Taiping rebellion opened in 1850. The Manchus were a hunting tribe whose preserves lay along the wooded foothills of the Long White Mountain (Chang Pai Shan) northeast of Mukden. The region is well described by James in his Long White Mountain (1888). The chieftain who whipped the Manchus into shape for conquest was Nurha-Chu. He drilled their cavalrymen from 1559 to 1626. From scattered tribes, dwelling in felt michung-tents, he organized them as a Manchu horde with an ambition. The Great Wall was not erected against the Manchus, but against the ancient ancestors of Tartar cousins of theirs. The Manchus themselves erected a palisade-barricade against their cousins, the Khitans, on the west. It ran from Shan Hai Kwan, on the Pechili Gulf, where the Great Wall meets the sea, northward five hundred miles until it reached the Sungari River and encircled Kirin. I think it is difficult now to find any part of the stockade, but I believe that James and Younghusband found evidences of it in their exploration of Manchuria about 1886. The North China Railway embankment west of Mukden absorbed part of the historic mounds. The Manchus had no script. Nurha-Chu gave them one based upon the Mongolian, which in turn was copied from the vertical Syriac. This showed that Nurha-Chu talked with traveling priests who had come down the Tarim valley. You will note the character on the back of any Chinese cash coin, which has a square hole in the middle. Obtain one of these coins, for they will be minted no more, and they are historic; in fact, the oldest coin known. They are the oldest as far as the Chinese face is concerned; the Manchu merely put the name of the reign in Manchu on one side of the Chinese coin, ten of which exchange for one American cent.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
A splendid view of the Great Wall, at its most picturesque angle. Note tree-denuded mountains, the cause of the awful floods and consequent famines. To pierce the wall was formerly a religious sacrilege and a political folly.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Mule carts of North China: note serrated wheels, which are a commentary on the muddy or sandy roads.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Pailoo memorial arch, a splendid type of the Chinese roof and screen carving.
The Manchus had learned that the host of Chinese people, one hundred to his one, had no transport service (ponies); that they, therefore, were not cohesive or mobile; that their capital could be held by any bold clan which would at the beginning not exact too heavy a tribute, and which would allow the people practically to rule themselves by the classical examination and democratic civil service. The Manchus informed this civil service that they could hold their places if they adopted the Manchu style of hair-dressing, which was done, and in time Manchu yellow instead of Chinese blue became the official dress of honor. The Chinese women were unconquerable. They never adopted the Manchu style of dressing the hair over the ears, or of not compressing the feet. The Manchus refused to adopt the Chinese system of using family names first, making a three-named system, as Li Hung-Chang. The Manchus used merely their double names, as Na-Tung, but their family names were entered on the roster of one of the eight military banners. Gradually the Manchu garrisons bullied the Chinese out of their walled cities, and the Chinese had to build a second wall around the suburbs. The events and dates of Manchu history, as it affects their own Ta Ching (Great Pure) and foreign (Fung Kwei) civilizations, are told shortly, as follows:
| The Manchu Tien-Tsung overthrows the Ming King Hwai Tsung and occupies Peking | 1643 |
| Tea brought to Europe in English ships from Canton | 1660 |
| Kang-Hi, greatest and most artistic Manchu Emperor, ascends throne, Christianity almost established | 1661 |
| Galdan, Prince of Jungaria, conquers Kashgaria and becomes supreme in Central Asia | 1678 |
| First treaty with European power (Russia) | 1689 |
| Commerce with East India Company begins at Canton | 1680 |
| Yung-Ching ascends throne; anti-Christian | 1722 |
| Jesuits expelled | 1724 |
| English send first man-of-war, Centurion, to China, English being active at Canton, Ningpo, etc. | 1742 |
| First American vessel, Empress of China, from New York, Captain Green, reaches Canton, China | 1784 |
| First American Consul, Major Shaw, at Macao, China | 1786 |
| Philadelphia opens China trade with ship Alliance | 1788 |
| Boston opens China trade with ship Massachusetts | 1789 |
| Earl Macartney’s mission arrives at Peking, throwing light on the Empire, which appeared to contain 4,402 walled cities, population 333,000,000, the Tartar and Manchu army being 1,000,000 infantry and 800,000 cavalry. Government absolute | 1793 |
| Macartney ordered to depart, the Chinese deciding to seal the country against foreigners | October 7, 1793 |
| Sir G. L. Staunton, at London, in three volumes reveals the heart of China and the capital to the world, fixing the nations in their determination to open China to modernity | 1798 |
| First English Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, arrives, and in American factory of Milner & Bull at Canton translates Bible and compiles Chinese-English dictionary | 1808 |
| Edict against Christianity | 1812 |
| Lord Amherst’s embassy, which failed because he would not make “kotow” to Emperor as a bearer of tribute from an inferior nation | 1816 |
| Exclusive rights of East India Company cease | 1834 |
| Lord Napier arrives at Macao to superintend British commerce | 1834 |
| Opium dispute begins; the trade prohibited by Emperor | November, 1834 |
| Opium burned at Canton by famous Chinese Commissioner Lin | February, 1835 |
| Captain Elliot and British merchants leave Canton | May, 1839 |
| British and American seamen fight Chinese at Canton | July 7, 1839 |
| Hongkong taken by British | August 23, 1839 |
| British retire from Macao | August 26, 1839 |
| American frigate Powhatan and British sloop Rattler fight Chinese pirates in Kowloon Bay, opposite Hongkong | September 4, 1839 |
| British trade with China ceases by edict of Emperor | December 6, 1839 |
| Opium war between England and China, in which old China received the soundest thrashing she ever received from any foreign nation; many engagements; many ports taken | 1840 |
| Treaty of peace signed before Nanking on board ship Cornwallis, Sir Henry Pottinger for England and Ki-Ying and Neu-Kien for China, China paying indemnity of $21,000,000, throwing open as treaty ports Canton, Amoy, Fuchau, Ningpo and Shanghai, and ceding Hongkong Island to Britain | August 29, 1842 |
| American Commissioner Cushing, Daniel Webster’s son Fletcher, etc., arrive at Canton | 1844 |
| Manchu yellow instead of Chinese blue adopted as official color | 1855 |
| Famous Empress Dowager Tse Hsi and Viceroy Li Hung Chang arise to power | 1856 |
| Non-fulfilment of Nanking treaty with Britain causes war again | 1856 |
| Coolie slave trade for Peru, Cuba, California, etc., opens at Macao | 1860 |
| Britain and France war with China | 1860 |
| Taiping rebellion, beginning at Canton, sweeps to Nanking; opposed by the American, Ward; Chinese Gordon, etc., on behalf of Manchus | 1863 |
| Yung Wing brings first Chinese students to America (Hartford) | 1872 |
| Terrific Mohammedan rebellion in Shensi, Kansu, Yunnan provinces and Turkestan, suppressed by ferocious General Tso Tsung-tang, Mohammedan leader, Yakub Beg, being assassinated in Turkestan | May, 1877 |
| Sir Robert Hart establishes Chinese national customs, first guarantee for foreign loans | 1886 |
| China-Japan war over Korea; Formosa lost; indemnity also paid | 1894 |
| Emperor Kwang Hsu’s reform edicts, influenced by Kang Yu Wei | 1898 |
| Siege of Peking by allies | 1900 |
| Russia-Japan war over Manchuria | 1904 |
| America, Britain and China at Shanghai agree to end opium curse | 1909 |
| Death of Emperor Kwang Hsu and Empress Dowager Tse Hsi together | 1909 |
| Republican rebellion, led by Generals Li and Hsu, and planned by Sun Yat Sen | 1911 |
| Abdication of Manchus | 1912 |
One serious charge against the Manchu is that he has been continually signing away China: Formosa and Korea to Japan, Manchuria to Russia, Kwangchou Bay and Tonquin to France, Kiaochou to Germany, and Wei-Hai-Wei to Britain. The Manchus themselves are to blame for the lack of respect shown the throne and dynasty in the last fifty years. Prince Chun might have taken the throne himself, but in fear of the cabal of jealous princes he named his child Pu Yi. This system of a long regency had several times been put in force by the Manchu intriguer, especially by the Dowager Tse Hsi with Kwang Hsu. When the latter grew up and asserted himself, he was destroyed, and another child, this Pu Yi, named as his successor. The same murderous and unstable system has been followed in putting up a new child Dalai Lama at Lhasa every few years, the old Dalai being informed that “it is time for him to pass his soul on to a new incarnation”. He can commit hara-kiri or be murdered. The Chinese people felt that there was no emperor to worship and obey, but rather a cabal in usurpation at Peking, and an irreligious cabal at that. From the time of the Chou founders, 1200 B. C., to make light of the sacrifices by letting a child do a man’s duties, was a cardinal sin.
Moreover, the Manchu in his long rule at Peking debased the idea of government by women and eunuch favorites. No one concerned will ever forget the power of the notorious eunuch Li Lien Ying at Peking in the years which led to the coup d’état of 1898, when reformers and emperor were crushed to the ground. This notorious “grafter” really shared the throne power with the Dowager Tse Hsi, and the Emperor Kwang Hsu was in continual disgrace. The Manchus knew that it was unconstitutional to honor eunuchs. During the minority of Kang-Hi, the greatest emperor of the Manchus, the regents degraded the eunuchs and had the law engraved on iron plates of one thousand pounds each. Why did not Tse Hsi observe this law during her long regency? Did she think the people would not remember and that her successor, Prince Chun, and the dynasty would not suffer? Because of her hospitality when at the close of her life she permitted her portrait to be painted for the St. Louis Exposition by a talented American woman, and when she entertained several of the charming legation ladies at Peking, books have been written by her guests, in their womanly kindness of heart, and one book by a talented editor friend of mine at Hongkong, palliating her offenses as a tyrant, a reactionary and a murderess. The long cold history of British and American diplomacy; the domestic history of China during her period, the Boxer siege, the written testimony of the Emperor Kwang Hsu, her “dummy” policy, the experiences of the great reformers, including Yuan; her persecution over the whole world of Kang Yu Wei and Sun Yat Sen by her spy system; the national newspapers, the publications of Ching-Shan, her household controller; the statements of the American secretaries of her chief viceroy, Li Hung Chang; the republican revolution and Declaration of Independence of 1911, are all insistent that egotism and reaction sat closest to the heart of this powerful woman; that she belonged to the class of Catherine and not to the class of Elizabeth or Victoria. If this was the character for seventy years of the leader of the Manchus, what was the character of the followers!
Owing to the Manchu’s lack of an art sense, he has neglected the beautiful bridges and broad roads left by the Sung dynasty; the artistic towers left by the Tang dynasty; the gorgeous pagodas left by the artistically incomparable Ming dynasty; and the fine canals left by the Mongols. There should, perhaps, be less surprise over the difference in the intellectual powers of the Manchu and the Chinese. Three hundred and fifty years ago the Manchu was only a hunter, a warrior and fisherman, like his cousins, the Buriats and Tungus up in Siberia to-day; whereas for immemorial centuries the Chinese has been a merchant, a scientific agriculturalist, and a scholar, and has always earned his own living without benefit of government subsidy or class privilege in any way, which have enervated the Manchus of to-day and yesterday. The reaction of the patient Chinese in the October, 1911, rebellion against the Manchu conqueror was natural. The surprise is that it was withheld for three centuries. The Manchus have never mingled with the Chinese. All the large cities, even to distant Canton and Yunnan, 1,200 and 1,400 miles away from the center of power, have separate walled Manchu cities, or Tartar cities as they are generally called, which were taken from the original Chinese. In an effort to appease the complaints of insurgents, the Regent Prince Chun in 1909 recalled the edict which until that late year prohibited Manchus from marrying Chinese.
Like all minorities that try to intrench their privileges, the Manchu is much of a “snob”. It is not uncommon to hear this sneer at Peking regarding the Chinese women of the south: “Oh, she’s a woman from the southern provinces; you can’t expect manners from her.” The fact is that the Chinese women of Nanking, Hangchow, Soochow, Canton and other southern cities have more refined manners than the rough-riding Manchus, the daughters of raiders. The wearing of the queue and the skull cap is a Manchu custom, imposed in the seventeenth century upon the conquered Chinese. One of the first things the Han republicans did in the October, 1911, revolution was to cut off the queue which they declared was a sign of servitude to the dynasty which they were trying to displace. The head-dress of the Manchu women shows the bunching of the hair over each ear instead of behind the head and on the neck, as is the Chinese custom. The Manchus do not deform the feet, nor paint, both of which have been Chinese customs. The gown of the Manchu women is longer than that of the Chinese women, the latter showing the divided skirt, or rather wide trousers. Other distinctive Manchu styles are the jewel-buttons, denoting rank, worn on the peak of the conical official hat; the peacock’s feather worn at the back of the hat; the peacock design in embroidery; the yellow riding jacket.
Manchus drink kaoliang spirits in place of rice samshu. Their battle flags have been triangular instead of oblong. The peculiar daylight audiences given by the throne to the grand councilors and viceroys showed the fear of publicity, and a recognition of estrangement from the people. They seemed to think that a throne that was surrounded with a good deal of mystery, exclusiveness, smoke of incense and darkness was stronger than a throne that was clearly outlined in the love of the people. A curious worship of the Manchu leaders, who are more superstitious than religious, is that of the fox. The great Fox Temple at Mukden, the ancestral temple of the dynasty, is famous. The Chinese leaders have never been as crude as this in their grossest superstition. The Chinese, especially the hard-working southerners who pay most of the taxes, have objected to the pensions accorded to a million Manchus gathered under the eight banners, and quartered, with the privilege to bear arms, in walled cities, barracks and arsenals throughout the land. In the fall of the Manchus, intrenched so long behind a spy system, control of taxation, trade routes and judicial appointees, all oppressive systems and tyrants should take notice that however intrenched they may seem to be against the people, the people will in the end become supreme, with a long, long memory of the wrongs that they have endured against their will, and the theme of “Restitution” on their tongues. To quote the words of Wu Ting Fang, the Jefferson of China, well known to Americans and Britons: “The hand of the people is now at the plough, and they must of necessity push on to the uttermost end of the furrow.”
The books written on Manchuria include James’ Long White Mountain; Sir Francis Younghusband’s Narrative of Travels in Manchuria, 1896; Hosie’s Manchuria, Its People, Etc.; Howarth’s Origin of the Manchus; Doctor J. Ross’ Manchus or the Reigning Dynasty; E. H. Parker’s Manchus in China. Doctor A. Wylie translated the Manchu grammar and the Tsing Wen Keung. These are all British writers. Professor I. Zacharoff compiled a Russian-Manchu dictionary and wrote on the Manchus in 1875, and Von Mollendorff composed a Manchu grammar. It is possible that in exile from the throne the Manchus may revive the little literature and language that they possess; or, champion intriguers that they and their race are, Prince Tuan, Prince Su, the Tsai Princes, General Yin Tchang and others may continue to plot from Jehol, Kalgan, Urga, Mukden, Dalny and other places of exile. Manchu literature consists of only two hundred and fifty works, nearly all of which are translations of the Chinese classics.
What greater proof was ever given of the irreconcilable differences between the Manchus and Chinese, than the ominous silence of the Chinese members of the momentous meeting of the Grand Council called by the Empress Dowager Tse Hsi at Peking on June 16, 1900, to decide on the final attitude toward the “Boxers”. When the Manchus showed an insane determination to destroy their dynasty, the Chinese members by silence assented, and the republican rebellion of 1911 was only the outward manifestation of the spirit of the silence of 1900.
XVII
CHINA’S ARMY AND NAVY
The revolution of 1911 made known to the world the Chinese generals on the northern and southern sides, who were really able to command a modern army in action as well as in field maneuvers. Generals Li, Ling, Ho, Hwang, Hsu, etc., were the leading southerners. Generals Feng, Chang, Chao and Sheng were among the leading northerners in active service. All of these are Chinese. The much-heralded Manchu generals proved a failure, and few of the old-style Tartar generals, like Chiang and Chen of Pechili province; Na Yen, of Kalgan; Tuan, of the Red Banner Corps; Prince Su, of the Peking Gendarmerie, etc., were called upon to serve in the field. The latter decidedly had the ferocious temperament, but they lacked the knowledge of modern tactics. General Chao Ehr Feng, conqueror of the Tibet mutiny and the Dalai Lama in 1910, an effective old-style general, was cooped up in Chingtu City at the opening of the rebellion in September, 1911. General Yin Tchang, the Manchu general-in-chief; Brigadiers-General Ha and Liang, who visited America in 1910; Major General Ho; Prince Tsai Tao, the Manchu minister of war; Prince Yu Lang, of the dapper gray Imperial Guards, etc., never got much nearer the war than the point of mobilization, and their private car on the Hankau-Peking railway, with the engine pointed northward! The military princes of the royal blood, Tsai Pu, Tsai Jin, Duke Ling, Prince Pu, etc., all kept their dress uniforms innocent of the dust of field and the grime of powder. Prince Tsai Hsu, royal admiral of the navy, kept aboard his luxurious steam yacht which the Kiangnan Dock Company of Shanghai built for him, and sulked away from Admiral Sah’s service fleet, which was making a last dash to cut the rebel’s left flank between Wuchang and Hankau.
The modern Chinese army dates back to 1894 and the defeat in the China-Japan War over Korea. Viceroys Li Hung Chang and Yuan Shih Kai were bent on drilling an effective service. Chiefly German and Japanese instructors were hired, though there were a few other foreigners also. General Upton (U. S. A.), of Civil War fame, once made a trip to China and planned with Viceroy Li Hung Chang the establishment of a Chinese West Point in the north, which has been begun in the Pei Yang Military College at Tientsin. Emperor William personally instructed General Yin Tchang in Germany. An army of Imperial Guards and ten divisions, mostly territorial for facility in recruiting and mobilizing, was whipped into shape chiefly in the northern provinces, and twenty other divisions were partly formed as provided for by the famous Army Edict of April 16, 1906. Modern arsenals, headquarters offices, field maneuvers, Red Cross, foreign instructors, the Pei Yang Military College, etc., were all provided for. The old-style provincial turbaned troops allotted to each viceroy, and the pensioned soldiers of the eight Manchu banners were not all disbanded. They were quartered among the 4,000 walled cities. No conscription was necessary, as the men seemed anxious to serve for the wage, or the promise of six dollars a month. The plan was to keep the men three years with the colors, three years with the reserve, and thereafter for ten years with a landwehr on the German plan. By 1900 the new army was not cohesive, or the reactionary empress dowager, Prince Tuan, General Tung Fu of Kansu, and Yu Hsien, of Shangtung, would have wiped out the foreigners in the legations and Admiral Seymour’s international relief expedition at Tientsin. When the 1911 rebellion opened, the Eighth Division joined the republicans at Wuchang, and earned immortal glory. Their brothers of the Third Division opposed them at Hankau. The Ninth Division of Shangtung and Kiangsu territorials held Nanking for the imperialists, but the Kiangsu Brigade of that division later deserted. The Twentieth Division of Manchurian territorials at Lanchow Camp near Peking earned immortal glory by sending up to the National Assembly and the throne nineteen constitutional articles which they said had to be signed before they would war for the throne. This was lèse majesté with a vengeance! The Guards Division was at Peking, where it stayed, watching the hoards of bullion and sycee more than constitutional articles! The Sixth Division was in Shansi province. The First Division of Manchu troops, and the Second and Fourth Divisions at times shuttlecocked along the railway between Hankau and Peking. The Fifth Division was at Tsinan, capital of Shangtung province.
Had China’s army not been territorial, the rebellion might never have got into swing, because it would have been impossible to have intrigued with a mixed Eighth Division. Again, had China’s army not been territorial, President Yuan could have used the Third, Fourth, Sixth and Twentieth Divisions at Peking in March, 1912, to suppress the mutiny, whereas these divisions remained in sympathy with the First Manchu Division and the Imperial Guards Division, and refused to obey the constitutional head of the government at a climacteric time. A mixed army is not easily mobilized, but when mobilized it is more amenable to discipline, and the ignoring of local feeling in view of the larger aims of statesmanship. England’s, Germany’s and France’s armies are territorial. Italy’s and America’s regular armies are not. America’s vast militia army, however, on which she mainly depends, is, of course, territorial.
General Yin Tchang, who had much to do with organizing the effective ten divisions of the northern army, is a graduate of Peking University. He served five years in the Austrian infantry, and as minister to Germany, at Emperor William’s request, he enjoyed that unusually able and enthusiastic monarch’s private instruction in army matters. In 1900 General Yin Tchang came in contact with the allied forces at Tientsin, and held his retreat together well enough to elicit much admiration. General Yin and the regent, Prince Chun, both visited Hongkong in 1901 and there gained sympathy from us all for the great promise which they showed in guiding the New China. Yin Tchang’s excellent idea was to take the provincial armies away from the viceroys, and make the new divisions answerable to the Board of War (Ping Pu) at Peking. Prince Tsai Tse’s, the finance minister’s plan, was to inform each governor what amount he was to send to Peking as the province’s share in maintaining a central army. There was considerable conflict over this issue, many southern governors saying that they paid for two armies, one modern army which was held in the north, of which they never received their allotted division or brigade, and the old-style provincial troops which they had to maintain to preserve order. General Ha Han-Chang, a Chinese by blood, came next to Yin in drilling the new army. He is also a Pei Yang graduate, and trained with the Japanese army. General Liang-Pi, a Manchu, had an experience similar to that of General Ha, before accepting command of the First Brigade. None of these men is like Tieh-Liang and the other well-known old-style generals, strong in classics but weak in tactics. They reversed the order. General Li Chin Hsi at remote Yunnan City raised and drilled an excellent division. The division at Canton went all to pieces before the republican troops of General Wu Sum, but the Shansi divisions were effectually held together by General Sheng Yun, a Mongol, who later captured the Tongkwan pass, which commands the road from the west to Peking. Many soldiers of the southern divisions, in the first few weeks of the revolution, fired from the hip, as they were not used to the recoil on the shoulder. They, of course, soon did better. One of the best and most popular marksmen of the Singapore Rifle Team which competed at Bisley in 1910 was Sergeant Tan Chow Kim, a Cantonese Chinese.
The name of Frederick T. Ward should be linked with “Chinese” Gordon’s in connection with Chinese military records. General Ward, born at Salem, Massachusetts, lost his life in the service of China. He organized and led the only great army that China ever had before 1906. His name stands linked with Gordon’s as the maker of the “Ever Victorious Army,” the conqueror of the Taiping horde.
A modern rage for dull-colored new uniforms has struck gorgeously gowned old China. I shall recite an amusing instance. In the fall of 1911 a band of rebels organized in Sining, in far-western Kansu province. They chose a boy of fifteen as their prophet leader because he bore peculiar birthmarks. He was given the fanciful name of Savior of the Land (Chu Shih Waang). The generals reported that the new force should wear modern uniforms of cotton. The stores were swamped with orders, and every bolt of foreign cotton was immediately bought up, no matter what its design. The Imperial Guards wear gray, and the other divisions wear blue and khaki.
Aviation was introduced in China (really Indo-China) at Saigon on December 1, 1910, by the Holland-Frenchman, Vanderborn. He was followed later in the year at Shanghai by the American, “Bud” Mars. The first Chinese aviator was Fug-Yu, who was trained in America, and who experimented at the Lanchow (east of Peking) camp in 1911. During the revolution a number of Chinese students took lessons in aviation in America and left for the rebel front. Had the war continued it was the intention to destroy Peking by dynamite dropped from air-ships. Both Sun and Yuan are to be congratulated that this necessity was obviated by diplomacy.
China’s antiquity, vast population and warlikeness have been brought in question by some writers. That she had a vast population as far back as the third century before the Christian era is proved by the army records. The Ts’in clan, operating under their celebrated General Peh Ki, slew and beheaded in 293 B. C. 240,000 Hans; in 275 B. C. 40,000 Ngwheis; in 264 B. C. 50,000 Hans; in 260 B. C. 400,000 Chows, and in 256 B. C. 90,000 more Chows, thus exterminating the imperial ancestral clan which instituted the sacrifices and held the sacred tripods. Szma Tsien, the historian, writing at 100 B. C., says the allies lost a million men in fighting this Ts’in clan. After the Christian era the Chinese took fewer plural wives and fought fewer wars. Twenty years ago, an emperor who raised the despised military class to the equal of scholars, farmers and merchants, would have been decapitated. Compare one of the military edicts of the regent, Prince Chun, dated Peking, April, 1911: “We are of the opinion that militarism is the first thing necessary to the upbuilding and preservation of a nation.”
Some of the military proverbs of the old Chinese are:
“The best general thinks of wise strategy before blind courage.”
“A mob does not make a regiment, for a trained man is as effective as a score untrained, and much easier to save in a retreat.”
“A good general can’t blame defeat on bad soldiers, for a good general has no poor regiments.”
“The pike only grabs the duck’s lame leg that can’t kick.”
“The battle may not be for a cycle of years, but the soldier must awake for it every day.”
“A dog that bites the hardest shows his teeth the least.”
“A whisper can bring on a war.”
“Keep your good cannon masked, and your bad guns on brave parade.”
“If the enemy doesn’t know your weakness, you are not weak.”
“It’s the man behind the gun more than the gun, and the man inside the fort more than the wall.”
Chinese literature is not without its stirring war songs, which breathe not only the pathos of the suffering of those at home, but the sacrificing patriotism of the ranks. The following is quoted from Confucius’ Odes, B. C. 551:
THE SOLDIER
I climbed the barren mountain,
And my gaze swept far and wide
For the red-lit eaves of my father’s home,
And I fancied that he sighed.
I climbed the grass-clad mountain,
And my gaze swept far and wide
For the rosy light of a little room,
Where I thought my mother sighed.
I climbed the topmost summit,
And my gaze swept far and wide
For the garden roof where my brother stood,
And I fancied that he sighed.
My brother serves as a soldier
With his comrades night and day,
But my brother is filial and may return,
Though the dead lie far away.
The following far older poem was written in 800 B. C. by Li Hua to commemorate a battle between the ancient Chinese tribe of Wei and the Northern Mongols:
THE BATTLEFIELD
Many men with but one heart;
Many lives to sell as one.
Foes and Nature interlock;
Sands arise; hills join the shock.
Rivers, death fills like a flood;
Red, Wei’s Great Wall too with blood.
Slaves ye shall be if ye yield;
Dead men if ye fight the field!
Fled no warrior; name on name,
Ghosts approach me, starred with fame.
With such Spartan poetry the early Chinese were able to fire the race with militarism. The ideograph is virile and laconic in the highest degree, just as the Anglo-Saxon of “Beowulf” is more condensed than our later Latinized speech.
Confucius believed in revenge upon a murderous enemy of one’s family. He replied to a question of a pupil on this matter: “Have only your weapons for a pillow.”
Two of the promising colonels in the southern republican army are graduates (1909 class) of the American West Point Academy. They were admitted on the personal recommendations of President Roosevelt. One is Colonel Wen Ying Hsing, a nephew of Wen Tsung Yao, who is assistant minister of foreign affairs of the Nanking Republican Assembly. Colonel Wen has seen hard service as military adviser of the Canton Provincial Assembly. The other “West Pointer” is Colonel Chen Ting, brother of Doctor Chen Shin Tao, minister of finance of the Nanking Republican Assembly.
On one of my rambles through the narrow streets of Canton I dropped into an artist’s shop on Yuck Tsze Street and selected some treasured, delightful opal-colored paintings, full of spirit, of the old picturesque three-masted Manchu war-junks which in the early days one saw sometimes beating into the reaches and broads of the flooded waters of Kwangtung province. The yellow shields, emblazoned with ideographs, hang over the midship bulwarks of the ship. The latticed red rudder is high above the water so that it may drag the unwieldy keelless boat around. The great blue sweeps, with yellow eyes, stretch from the galley-ports. The ship itself has eyes on the bow. The overhanging cabin in the high stern is crowded with men, stores and bronze cannon. The low red prow cuts the olive green sea into white foam. The red triangular flags flaunt challenge from all the masts. The great square brown matting sails spread like clouds above the blue-gowned leadsman in the bow. Dipping under the horizon are the fleeing black banners of the enemy, and the sea-gulls scatter in terror. Only the serrated blue hills are brave along the iron shores.
The first important names in connection with the building and drilling of China’s modern navy are Captain Lang, R. N. (British), and Captain Siebelin (U. S. N. and H. S. M.). These men prepared the fleet for the war with Japan in 1894, which developed Admiral Ting and Captain Teng as China’s sole naval heroes, who, however, could do little with an inefficient war board (Ping Pu) behind them. The captured battleships Chen Yuen and Ting Yuen are in Japan’s retired list. They were very fine ships for their day, and resisted heavy punishment in the battles of the Yalu and Wei Hai Wei. The navy training schools are at Tientsin, Chifu, Nanking, Fuchau, Shanghai, Amoy, and there will be another at Nimrod Bay, south of Ningpo. Admiral Beresford, on his visit to China in 1898, advised with the Chinese officials, especially Li Hung Chang, regarding navy matters, and some cruisers were built in England, though the two best battleships were built in Germany. Captain Bradley Osbon, an American, served for years in developing the Chinese navy.
The Chinese cruiser Hai Chi, painted the regulation gray, and spreading the gorgeous yellow dragon flag, took part in King George the Fifth’s coronation festivities at Spithead in July, 1911, and in September, 1911, she came to New York and anchored beneath Grant’s tomb. Conspicuous friendliness on both occasions was shown to the officers and crew as a mark of the new interest in China which has arisen in Britain and America especially. Similar cruisers, the Hai Chow and the Hai Yung; gunboats of the Po Pik class; and torpedo boats of the Wu Pang class, were in constant use in China in the ante-republican days. One day they were watching that Portugal did not encroach at Macao; a week later shelling rebels around the great cities which line the Yangtze River or making a dash to the Gulf of Pechili to be ready to take on board the infant emperor. The cruiser Fei Hung, the first Chinese warship built in America, was launched at Camden, New Jersey, on April 24, 1912. Larger cruisers are building in England, and when Chinese politics and finances are more settled, it is proposed to order battleships from both Britain and America, and form three fleets, the Northern, Yangtze Central and Southern fleets. Shanghai can dock the smaller vessels, but British Hongkong alone has up to this time been able to dock battleships in Chinese waters. China has as yet no submarines. The British navy maintains several submarine torpedo boats at Hongkong, and in that land-locked harbor, of all others in the world, the moral effect upon an enemy would be terrifying.
In recent years the naval policy of China has been developed by Prince Tsai Hsu. Admiral Sah Chen Ping, who commanded the Yangtze fleet which operated against the republicans in October, 1911, and against the pirates who attacked Yale College, at Changsha, in 1910, has visited America, and entertained the American round-the-world fleet at Amoy in 1908. He has a son in a western American college. General Li Yuen Heng, one of the two greatest republican generals, was really trained for the navy at Pei Yang and Chifu Colleges, and in Japan. Admirals Jiu Cheng, Li Chun, of the Canton riots of April, 1911; Tan; Ching, who entertained the American fleet at Amoy; Commander Hsu Chen Pang, who was educated at Hartford, America; Admirals Liu and Hai Chun; Admiral Chin Yao Huan and Commander Wu Chung Lin, both of whom visited New York on the cruiser Hai Chi, are all well known. Commanders Chen, Yang and Wong represented China when the cruiser Fei Hung was built at Camden, New Jersey, in 1912. When the republican troops took the Shanghai arsenal it discouraged the navy, which could not secure ammunition in time for effective work. The fleet then went over to the red, white and blue sun flag, and later landed a republican army in Shangtung province at Chifu to flank the imperial left wing operating at Tsinan. The fleet also made a demonstration against Chin Wang Tao on the gulf of Pechili, thus forcing the imperialists to hold several divisions in the north to protect Peking. This enabled the republicans to follow up the Nanking victory, drive General Chang out of Nganhwei province, and made the Whei River instead of the Yangtze River the republican front. If America undertakes with a Pacific fleet to back up for all time the “non-partition of China” policy, the writer is not a believer in a Chinese navy at present, outside of possibly one dreadnought a year when the finances are revised. Of course a strong revenue and police fleet for the rivers should be provided. Attention should rather be given to China’s army, so that she may be able to do her own police work as far as Russian or other intruders are concerned. Having no oversea colonies, she really has no use for a navy at present, excepting that one dreadnought a year would, if necessary, lend a little more than moral support to America’s altruistic and non-land-grabbing policy in the Far East.
The Chinese are splendid sailors, and as is well known, they invented the water-tight compartment in their junks, sanpans and wupans forgotten centuries ago. I have had much intercourse with the watermen of the southern provinces and can speak well of their seamanship. They compose the crews of the mercantile fleets which cross the Pacific, and have brought their ships through those awful circular typhoons which rage for days. They have also developed modern yacht designers like Ah King at Hongkong, and they are quick at the tiller and boom. I have, in writing of the Chinese, given perhaps a hundred instances of things which they do oppositely to the Occidental manner. Here is the one hundred and first: Holding their nostrils, they dive feet foremost, like the pearl fishermen of the Manaar Gulf of Ceylon! When our launch screws would get tangled with the many ropes of Blake Wharf, Hongkong, I have often seen half of the crew merrily jump overboard with knives in their teeth, and work under water for an extraordinary length of time; and though some writers call the Chinese stolid and humorless, I have always seen them highly appreciative of applause and good-natured laughter over the unexpected incidents that arise in an Oriental day’s work. On one occasion the writer, who was exhausted with the tide, was saved from drowning at Junk Bay, Hongkong, by the quick-witted efforts of a native laota (coxswain) who deftly swung his launch within reach, and whose ready arms reached out to “chiu ming” (save life).
The short story of China’s navy would not be complete without a word on the naval engagements of the China-Japan War of 1894–5 over Korea, when the whole world breathlessly watched the first trial of modern ironclads, and when the Chinese on several occasions really showed fearlessness under hopeless conditions. At the end of July, 1894, Chinese troops arrived at the Yalu River (which divides Korea and Manchuria) to reinforce General Yeh and Yuan Shih Kai, under cover of the cruiser Chi Yuen (2,300 tons, 17.5 knots), the Kuang Yi (1,030 tons, 16 knots), etc. On July 25th this fleet was met by the much superior Japanese fleet consisting of the Yoshino (4,100 tons, 23 knots), Akitsushima (3,150 tons, 19 knots), and Naniwa (19 knots). After a hot exchange the Chi Yuen escaped from the faster Yoshino by superior work in the stokehold. The Kuang Yi ran aground. Admiral Ting, the one big name in China’s navy, with a weak squadron, daringly sailed from Pechili Gulf on September 14th for the Yalu, landed stores, and skilfully evaded Admiral Ito’s and Rear-Admiral Tsuboi’s squadrons. On September 17th, Admiral Ting led the way with the Chen Yuen (7,400 tons, 15-knot German-built battleship) and the Ting Yuen, a twin battleship, in the center, the other vessels on the wings, to meet the Japanese fleets which were advancing in column. Ito passed wide of the right wing of the Chinese. At 6,000 yards the Chinese opened fire ineffectively, but the Japanese reserved their fire until 3,000 yards’ range was reached. The Japanese passed through to the rear, and drove off the smaller Chinese warships. The larger Chinese vessels swung to starboard to keep their bows toward the circling Japanese. The Japanese armored cruiser Fuso (3,700 tons, 13 knots), built in England, steamed in close to the Chinese line. The Hi Yei, protected Japanese cruiser (2,250 tons, 14 knots), crossed between the Chinese battleships Chen Yuen and Ting Yuen, and as could be expected, both were so damaged that they had to seek the Japanese rear. The slow Japanese Akagi, gunboat (614 tons, 13 knots), was hit by the Chinese left wing. The second Japanese squadron now came up, and at once attacked the Chinese front, the first Japanese squadron having completed the circle, attacking the Chinese rear. The Japanese then withdrew and reformed, but the Chinese were not able to reform their line. The Chinese Yuen Wei (gunboat, 1,350 tons, 16 knots) on fire, headed for the Yalu, where she sank with the brave Captain Teng. The Chinese Chao Yuen (gunboat, 1,350 tons, 16 knots) was accidentally rammed by the unmanageable Chinese Chi Yuen (coast defense, 2,300 tons, 17 knots), and both sank, leaving only the two Chinese battleships, which kept fighting and following the Japanese as best they were able. The second Japanese squadron sank the Chinese King Yuen (coast defense, 2,900 tons, 15 knots), while the first Japanese squadron circled around the two Chinese battleships, which could not be maneuvered to advantage. The Chinese Ting Yuen cleverly planted a shell into the Japanese Matsushima (coast defense, 4,277 tons, 16 knots, French built). At 5:30 P. M., after seven and one-half hours’ fighting, the Japanese withdrew for repairs, although they had three armored coast defense, 4,200-ton, 16-knot ships in good condition, two armored and six protected cruisers, all of which answered their helms.
On October 18th, the Chinese battleship Chen Yuen struck at Wei Hai Wei and was seriously injured. On February 5, 1895, at 2 A. M., by a bold move, the first of its kind in naval war, the Japanese torpedo boats raced for an entrance to narrow Wei Hai Wei harbor. Eight boats got in under the high-pointed guns of the fort and fired eleven torpedoes. One torpedo from boat “9” struck the Chinese battleship Ting Yuen, which steamed for shallow water, where the Chinese blew her up (this is the battleship which the Japanese later raised and used against the Russians in 1904). The Japanese lost torpedo boats “9” and “22”.
On the morning of February 6th, five more Japanese torpedo boats headed for the harbor, and four entered, torpedoing the Chinese Lai Yuen (coast defense, 2,900 tons, 15 knots) German built; the Wei Yuen (corvette, 1,300) and tender Pan Fah. The Chinese torpedo fleet attempted to escape from the western entrance, but were captured or destroyed by the first Japanese squadron. The Japanese towed mortar platforms near the western entrance, and pounded the remaining Chinese battleship Chen Yuen, which sank, as her deck was not armored (later raised by Japanese and used against the Russians in 1904). On February 17th, Admiral Ito steamed in, and China’s one fighting naval hero, Admiral Ting, brave but unfortunate, committed suicide. The Japanese secured as prizes the Kang Chi, third-class cruiser (1,030 tons, 16 knots), built at Shanghai; the Ping Yuen (coast defense, 2,600 tons, 10 knots), built at Shanghai, and the Kuang Ping (third-class cruiser, 1,030 tons, 16 knots), built at Shanghai. The battle showed the world that a large, fast mosquito fleet, with longer-range guns, can whip even a few bulldog battleships, if the maneuvering of the latter is crippled by lucky shots early in the engagement. In other words, a fleet of faster unarmored cruisers, converted Lusitanias, for instance, whose full gun and engine power is effectively maintained, by choosing and keeping their favored range, could in the open sea finally whip poorly handled units of slower battleships.
On one other occasion the crew of a Chinese warship quitted themselves like men. That was when the gunboat Chen Wei alone engaged the whole French fleet of armor-clads at Foochow, August 23, 1884. I quote the report of an independent eye-witness, Commissioner Carrall of Sir Robert Hart’s Imperial Customs Service: “Exposed to the broadsides of the Villars and the D’Estaing, and riddled by a terrific discharge from the heavy guns of the Triomphante, the little Chen Wei fought to the last. In flames fore and aft, drifting helplessly down the stream and sinking, she plied her guns again and again, till one of the French torpedo boats, the Volta, dashing in through the smoke, completed the work of destruction with a well-placed torpedo.”
The successful rush of an unsupported republican torpedo boat at Hankau on November 19, 1911, past the whole line of blazing imperial shore batteries, in broad daylight, is considered by the foreigners of Hankau as dangerous and courageous a piece of work as the recent revolution exhibited.
XVIII
MODERN EDUCATION IN CHINA
There are twelve modern universities available for the education of the four hundred millions of people in China, located respectively at Hongkong, Shanghai, Nanking, Changsha, Wei Hsien (Shangtung province), Tientsin, Suchow, Tai Yuan, Peking, Hangchow, Wuchang and Canton. One of these is British, nine Mission, one Chinese, and one American Collegiate.
Hongkong University counts among its former law students Wu Ting Fang, foreign minister of the Nanking republicans; among its medical students Doctor Sun Yat Sen, president of the Nanking republican government; and Kang Yu Wei, the original reformer of China, who inspired the imperial reform edicts of 1898. The university is a growth of Queen’s College, Anglican (London Mission), and other foundations. Part of the land was given by a generous Parsee, Mr. Mody, and part of the endowment by Sir Paul Chater, both residents of the colony. One gift of $1,000 came from Chang Ming Chi, at the time viceroy of Canton (Kwangtung province). The Hongkong and Cantonese Chinese are generous contributors. The colonial government and other private founders intend to put the university on a broad basis worthy of the great colony, and equipped for the vast opportunity offered to influence China in the ways of permanent progress. The Cantonese are, and have always been, leaders of republicanism and modernity, and most of their advanced students will avail of the superior advantages offered by the new Hongkong University. There are nearly half a million Chinese in the crown colony itself. Chinese pupils of the London Mission Girls’ School on Bonham Road, Hongkong, have recently won high honors in the art examinations of the Royal Drawing Society, London.
The splendidly housed and equipped St John’s University at Shanghai is American Episcopal. The tourist should take a rickshaw out to Jessfield suburb, five miles from the River Bund, and see its modern buildings, with adapted Chinese roofs. Its leading spirit has for years been a New Yorker by birth, Doctor Francis Pott, son of the noted publisher. Its theological school is, of course, Episcopalian. Most important is its famous medical school, headed by Doctors Boone, Lincoln, Jefferys, Tucker, Myers, and Fullerton, whom all Central China loves. Chinese doctors, such as Tyau, Waung and Koo, assist. The school of arts is equally famous and brilliant, though perhaps not so imperative. I hope the day will soon come when this model university will have a larger science school, not of mediocre equipment, but endowed by some American at least half as richly as a standard American college would be endowed in science. The library, museum, dormitories and teachers’ school all need endowments. The university has a full-fledged modern athletic department, and it is thrilling to see the Chinese boys “play up, play up, and play the game” of American football, baseball, etc. The football team has mowed down the Municipal Police team on many occasions. Track teams and rowing teams from St. John’s are yet going to make China famous at Olympics and Henleys. Military drill is exceedingly popular, and many of the four hundred boys, who represent every province, jumped into the front rank in winning China’s republican revolution, though St. John’s has not yet taught politics. It should and will perhaps add a strong branch in political economy. The debating society is popular, as one could expect in the New China, and the dramatic society is successful, for the Chinese are born actors. The students also have a modern orchestra. The university is not a “griffin”, for it dates back to 1879. Five large buildings stand on the twenty acres of campus.
The Chinese pay in fees $20,000 a year, which is the record for “self help” in China. The college does a work free that it should not be compelled to do, and that is to instruct the families of missionaries. Soon schools for this purpose will be opened at Shanghai, Kowkiang (Kuling mount), and elsewhere in the Far East. Even the poor of foreign families are instructed free at St. John’s whose bowels of compassion so move for the whole East that verily she would exhaust herself in her altruistic zeal. One hundred dollars a year keeps a medical, science, art, political, pedagogical or theological student at St. John’s. St. John’s asks what added American tourists and others will take a “share”, as they call it a Jessfield. The answer is that thousands will. Six hundred dollars keeps one of the best students in America a year to finish. St. John’s asks who will thus enable America to teach the leaders of China, and forever sit closest to their hearts, as they rule the widest political and economical opportunity on earth. America and England should remember that if good does not sit on the bench in the New China, evil will. Japan coerced China out of that immense 1895 indemnity. She should morally pay part of it back, and part should go to the famous St. John’s University of Shanghai, where America has stood so long as a lighthouse amidst the dark waters of remote places.
The University of Nanking (New York State charter) is a union work of the American Methodists, the American Presbyterians, and the Disciples of Christ. Its strategic situation at the cultured capital of the imperial Mings, the high-water mark of the Taiping rebellion, and the capital of southern republicanism, is at once apparent. The leaders of the University took a dramatic part in bringing about the bloodless surrender of Nanking to the victorious republicans, who might have avenged the imperialist Chang’s atrocities. Doctor A. J. Bowen is president, and the following noted educational and medical leaders assist: J. E. Williams, J. W. Drummond, E. C. Lobenstine, Doctor Garritt, Alexander Paul, Frank Garrett, C. S. Settlemyer, Doctor E. Osgood, the noted Doctor J. C. Ferguson, Doctor Henke, Mr. Martin, Mr. Millward, Mr. Bailie, Doctor R. Beebe, and W. F. Wilson. This university does its immense work with only $44,000 a year, because every one works for a pittance, the salary of the president being only $1,500 in a land where life for the foreigner is expensive. That is to say, the president of the University of Nanking altruistically accepts in salary less than would the shorthand writer in the railway office at Nanking, both of whom come from America; the one a cultured gentleman of power, the other probably only a machine mind. The five hundred Chinese students themselves contribute the remarkably large sum of $13,000 a year in fees. The departments include science, arts, theology, pedagogy, athletics, and practically the all-important medical department, because the East China Medical Association (dean, Doctor Shields) works in connection with the University. Nanking will always be a political, naval, military, scientific and cultured center, and therefore the university will have a great influence in teaching the coming leaders of the New China.
There is nothing narrow-minded about the college, for it teaches the Chinese language, literature and philosophy. The extensive grounds cover in the aggregate forty-three acres. There are several dormitories, chapels, residences for staff, and a Y. M. C. A. The best building is the large science hall. The university, surely run economically, needs larger funds for an endowment from America, because it has not the heart to turn away many promising but poor students who must be accommodated practically free. Thirty dollars boards a worthy student for a year, and the college is always glad to hear from those who will support scholarships, increase the buildings and equipment, or add to the library and endowment. Athletes of the university are making their mark, and may extend their triumphs to the Olympic games. Football and track athletics are popular. There is a library, museum, students’ magazine, press, and of course a debating society. The college band, the largest in China, numbers seventy pieces. The boys showed their mettle in benevolent activities when they contributed five hundred dollars for the famine and flood victims, and besides volunteered for work in the stricken districts of Nganhwei province. Model farm colonies in the distressed sections have been undertaken by the university. The university now makes a special appeal for a larger library and reading room building, or institute, to throw open to the great metropolis, and in Chinese fashion, they propose to have a self-supporting tea-room which will be a college club and city institute; a people’s institute in other words. This would be a very popular move in a city which politically will remain either as the first or second city in China. The Chinese themselves prefer it for the capital; the foreigners in North China are using their influence to have Peking retained as the national capital. While hot Nanking is not so healthy as Peking, the writer believes that the foreigners should bow to the wish of the Chinese, and have Nanking named as capital. The higher classes of Chinese are timid as yet of the religious hall, but they are enthusiastic attendants at lecture halls, libraries and clubs. Nanking University intelligently proposes to miss no opportunity.
Yale University (Missionary Society) has its collegiate school and splendid medical school and hospital at Changsha, the capital of conservative inland Hunan province, the former center of “Darkest China.” The staff, in addition to the Chinese members, are Dean Brownell, W. J. Hail, D. H. Leavens, K. S. Latourette, Doctor E. H. Hume, Nurse Nina Gage, and the wives of the staff. All the men are from Yale University, New Haven. As might be expected, wherever a Yale man goes, there is to be found the manly athletic temperament, and Yale at Changsha has its champion football team which is repeating the Camp round-the-end runs, the Heffelfinger plunges, etc.! Yale in China agrees with the Nanking plan of including Chinese in the curriculum. While Yale College mainly supports the work, help for the hospital has come from such churches as the Broadway Tabernacle, of New York, and private donors. Chinese physicians, fully equipped from a western standpoint, like Doctors Yen and Hou, assist. This is the intelligent educational, medical and mission plan throughout all China: “Help the Chinese to help themselves.” Yale College took a leading part in curing opium habitués, and in this astonishing reform in China Yale has been prominent. That the Chinese are not parsimonious or unappreciative is proved by the following facts. Among many others, the governor of Hunan province sent his check for seven hundred dollars, covering his own and the subscriptions of the officials under him, though he felt free to criticize foreign intervention in financial and railway matters in his province. The governor of Chekiang province subscribed one hundred dollars, Ex-grand Councilor Chu gave one hundred dollars, Colonel Niu gave two hundred dollars.
The University of Pennsylvania has a similarly popular medical department at Canton, and Harvard University plans shortly to have a medical branch at Shanghai. Their choice of effort is perfect in wisdom.
Copyright, American Episcopal Church, Foreign Board, N. Y.
The splendid military company of St. John’s University, Shanghai.
Copyright, American Presbyterian Church, Foreign Board, N. Y.
Shangtung University, at Wei, leading Presbyterian University. Located in Confucius’ province, and influential in the new intellectual China.
Copyright, American Episcopal Church, Foreign Board, N. Y.
The largest foreign University in China, St. John’s American Episcopal, at Shanghai. Very influential in the New China.
The Shangtung Union University, now located at Wei, will probably be moved to Tsinan, the capital of the province in which Confucius and Mencius were born. It is a union of the American Presbyterian and the British Baptists, and later the Anglicans, the American Baptists, Congregationalists and Methodists will join. The total endowment of this effective university is only $35,000. There are five hundred students. There are collegiate, science, pedagogical, medical, Chinese, athletic and women’s departments. There is an attractive, towered, large main building, science hall, dormitories, museum and a unique observatory. The chief members of the faculty are the well-known Messrs. Bergen, Hayes, Bruce, Burt, Luce and Whitcher, and the college is able to draw upon the many foreign notables at Peking and Tientsin for popular lectures. China urgently needed advanced education. The individual missions, brilliant in parts, were in general endowed so poorly that they could not furnish it. Therefore they united all over China, and better results are being obtained in specialization by this intelligent method, which has established an example for the western world to follow. Subscriptions should as usual be sent to the mission favored by one’s early training or allegiance, and when they reach China they are applied in some needy department of the union work. In union, there is no lapping over or duplication, and the result is efficiency. When any member of the union lags, a united appeal is addressed to the home board. The high aim of this extensive University of Shangtung is to have an income of $150,000 a year. In all these universities the preparatory and pedagogical departments are not neglected. The need is urged of a large assembly hall, library, science hall, dormitories, scientific equipment, Y. M. C. A., etc., at Tsinan for this university, which stands where four great roads of influence meet and its opportunity is therefore inspiring. China, Britain, Germany and Japan come together closely in Shangtung province, and the university’s sphere is so wide a one that the present constricted income is insufficient. The students contribute nearly $2,000 in fees, though many students must necessarily be taught free. Shangtung University has always stood high for its special work in translating and printing important books into Mandarin Chinese. It is interesting that the students have developed choral work perhaps more than most of the colleges. China has neglected music in the recent centuries, but St. John’s, Nanking and Shangtung Universities are teaching it to her again.
The Pei Yang University, of Tientsin, is the leading engineering and technical institute of China. Its teachers are Americans, British and Germans. English is taught. It aims to be the Stevens Institute, or Boston Tech. of China. The Chinese board has been sometimes obstructive, depending on the intelligence of the directors. However, the school does wonderful and will do better work when affairs become settled in China. Its hope, as in every other institute, is in its graduates even more than in its professors, and certainly more than its native directors of the old type! It will soon have the fine German technical schools of Tsingtau to emulate. The Pei Yang University has sent out many notable graduates who have at once advanced to leadership in China. One is now vice-president of China.
The Shansi University at Tai Yuan, the provincial capital, was established in 1901 by the English Baptists with “Boxer” indemnity funds restored to China at the request of Doctor Timothy Richard, the promoter of the Red Cross in China, and president of the university for ten years. It is English and Chinese in personnel, and has passed through bloody waters in the many disturbances which have surged around it.
Peking University is also a union in educational work of the American Congregationalists, American Presbyterians and London Mission, and in medical work, of the Methodists and Anglicans in addition. This is decidedly the leading medical college in China, and includes a women’s medical college, nurses’ training school, hospital and dispensaries. World famous names in connection with the university are Doctor W. A. P. Martin, Doctor J. W. Lowrie, Doctor Smith, Doctor Wherry, Doctor Fenn, Doctor Leonard, Doctor Hall, Doctor Mackey, Doctor Young, and Doctor Lewis. The medical school led in the heroic efforts to stamp out the virulent pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1911.
At beautiful Hangchow, the “bore city,” the American Presbyterians are erecting a full college equipment on a lovely site outside the city wall, on a hill near the water. The students run the grounds, gardens, roads, etc., on a “self-help” plan. The famous mission press, which is doing wonderful work in translating and publishing, is retained, however, at cultured Soochow for the present. At Soochow the American Methodists have established a large university. It has a prominent clock tower, an unusual feature, which is highly appreciated by the modernized Chinese.
At Wuchang, where the republican revolution broke out in October, 1911, the American Episcopals have Boone University, and Oxford and Cambridge will establish here the extensive university on which Lord Salisbury’s son, Lord Cecil, after his visit to China, wrote a charming book in 1910. At Canton is the Canton Christian College.
These are the leading universities. The Chinese themselves intended to establish government universities, high and preparatory schools, at all the twenty-one provincial capitals, but to date only those at Peking, Paoting, Tsinan, Tai Yuen, Nanking, Shanghai, Chingtu, Yunnan, Tientsin, Hangchow, Fuchau and Canton have been established, and they have drawn mainly on the mission universities and foreign-trained students for professors. The new education was naturally organized by the government first in the metropolitan province of Pechili. It included a university at Tientsin, a provincial college at Paoting, seventeen industrial schools, three high, forty-nine elementary normal, two medical, three foreign language, eight commercial, five agricultural, thirty middle, one hundred and seventy-four upper, one hundred and one mixed, eight thousand six hundred primary, one hundred and thirty-one girls’ schools and one hundred and seventy-four night schools in the industrial cities. Is this not an inspiringly comprehensive program? Both the Board of Education and Yuan Shih Kai deserve credit for largely taking the suggestions of the foreigners at Peking and Tientsin in establishing in Pechili province this system of modern education, which stands as a model for the other twenty provinces and territories. Many modern buildings have been erected, but where sufficient money was not available, the fine old temples and barracks have been impressed, and the surprised sad gods overthrown. In many cases the gentry and guilds have donated buildings. The government finds its greatest difficulty in securing teachers, and they are exhausting the supply that the mission universities are able to certificate. This new proof of the friendliness of missions had much to do with the disinclination of the republicans and imperialists to take the lives of foreigners during the recent revolution. In preparing pupils to go abroad for further training, the government has maintained at Peking a special school. At Chingtu, the capital of Szechuen province, the provincial government established railway, medical, normal, mining, engineering, agricultural, foreign language and military schools, and owing to its success Szechuen led in the agitation for provincialism versus nationalization in railway and other matters, and this really opened the revolution in September, 1911, a month before the outbreak in Hupeh province. The students in the universities at the provincial capitals are clothed and boarded at government expense, the student signing for three years and promising to answer a draft for government service.
Japan has lost her grip to a degree, and America particularly and Britain have taken her place in educating China. The Chinese complain of the “enormous” cost of a foreign teacher, but have him or her they will! The American educational advance has been astonishingly brilliant. What America is doing for Chinese education can be judged by the statement that the American Presbyterian Church alone has three hundred and fifty-nine institutions of learning in China, and I believe the Methodist denomination has even more, for that church leads in world missions, as is well known. America does not pay for all of this, for no race surpasses the Chinese in generosity and “self-help.” The Hackett Presbyterian Women’s Medical College of Canton, under the charge of the celebrated Doctor Mary Fulton, aims “to supply each city with two modern physicians.” What a brave contract! Charities and orphanages are the special field of the Roman church; there is no work that can equal theirs in China in this regard. The Protestants and Chinese prefer to train the more advanced mind. The American Presbyterians have a beautiful high school at Fati, Canton; an academy at Ningpo, a high school at the south gate of Shanghai, and an academy at Peking. The list is too long to enumerate. The annual reports of the various Foreign Mission Boards make illuminating reading and give the names of the heroic educational pioneers. The brilliant work of the presses, like those at Shanghai, Peking, Wei Hsien (Shangtung) and Soochow, the ten thousand little rills of income, the contributions of the broad-minded Chinese officials and students, are all surprising. How much they are doing with so little money! How much they could do for American and British educational influence in China with only a little more money! It is “up to” the American and British business man, if he decides to be both kind and “wise in his generation.”
The women of America and Britain are doing their share, especially in hospitals and nurses’ and girls’ schools. The American Presbyterian women have at Canton and elsewhere model institutions, similar to many throughout the crowded land, which land is going to heal itself, with foreign help, of all its diseases: bodily, mental, economical and international. I have known several people of late who have inherited legacies, and happening to read a China book, they were curious to see what a little money, that came so easily, altruistically “invested” there, would do. They have erected a few hospitals and schools, and their joy has not ceased when they saw the wonderful results in the able hands to which the philanthropy was committed. The impetus they thus gave to the progress of the world was greater than the same amount would have caused anywhere else.
For the girls and women of China, St. Hilda’s School, at Wuchang, where the revolution broke out on October 10, 1911, does a great work under the auspices of the American Episcopal women of Philadelphia, a few of whom bought land outside the east gate of that old capital, where the famous Chang Chih Tung was for many years viceroy. The girls’ college sprang up under the watchful eye of Bishop Roots, who has made a noble name among the Chinese. The opportunity of this school is to be yet the Barnard College or the Girton College of China, and of the need of it, by women for women, all this volume could not say enough. No land is sure of its progressive condition until the women are freed, educated and progressive. The enjoyment of continued progress by the men is not certain until the girls and women are swinging alongside of them on the great road of life at the same pace, and with equal opportunity. There can not be real companionship between inferior and superior; women and men must be equal. Therefore the eyes of all China and America and Britain are on such institutions as St. Hilda’s. It, too, is run on the share principle, fifty dollars per girl per year, to put a modern woman as a lighthouse in China to advance the world cause of womanhood.
The Yangtze valley, in particular, is the sphere of America’s influence, and where the high tide of rebellion swept, America’s educational influence will now follow, since fate has launched her there in the colleges mentioned, and others not mentioned for want of space. Lord Cecil plans to have the vast English foundation of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges at Wuchang (see his enthusiastic book), and if America has its equal at the other end of the brimming Yangtze at Shanghai, honors will be equal. Germany is not going to neglect the opportunity, as she has plans for Nanking and Hankau. Much luck to her. Contentia in bona! America and England have won a vast advantage, however, over Germany and France, in that China, on recommendation of the Board of Education, has adopted English as the official language for the study of science, geography, travel and international politics in all Chinese universities, technical colleges and high schools. This victory was brought about through the influence of the Chinese students who had studied in Britain and America, and a comparison of the technical and educational books issued by the different countries, the report being that the English language had three to one in its favor. When the nations wish to study about China or any foreign country, they have to take up or translate books written in English, for the American and Briton are the most curious concerning the world’s countries and naturally the authorities on comparative ethnology and international economics.
The Y. M. C. A. has come to China, and at Tientsin maintains a school as an adjunct pf the religious, literary and athletic work. Industrial schools have been opened, and they will do a vast work in recovering China’s lost arts and extending her commerce. There is a government industrial school at Peking for the production of the famous and almost lost cloisonné, rugs, furniture, etc. The patterns for rugs are memorized. At Tientsin the pattern is hung over the worker’s head. The schoolboys of old China were most familiar with the first two lines of the Trimetrical Classic: “Man in the beginning was essentially holy.” In Mandarin this is pronounced: “Jin chi tsu, sing pun shen.” The pronunciation of the province of Szechuen is a little heavier, viz: “Jen dze tsou, sin pen chan.” Now the boys of New China are concluding that “Man in the beginning was essentially misinformed!”
That the Chinese can become linguists has seldom been more uniquely illustrated than in the following experience related by Prince Henri d’Orleans. He was about to travel through the territories of the aboriginal Lolo tribes of Yunnan province. The difficulty was to find an interpreter. The general interpreter who only knew the Mandarin pronunciation of the north, or the Cantonese pronunciation of the south, would not do. The prince found at the Mission d’Etrangeres at Tali, in remote Yunnan, an interpreter who knew the Lolo dialects, and though he could not converse with the prince in French or English, he could converse fairly well in Latin, and they got along splendidly. It appears that the Catholic fathers had taught the convert from the Latin Fathers, Jerome, Chrysostom, etc!
Eager as the Chinese are to learn from text-books, they more eagerly cry for exhibits which appeal to the eye, and the establishment of museums, heretofore neglected, except in the few universities already mentioned, should be undertaken. Take one week’s records at the Hongkong Museum, for instance. Four hundred and sixteen non-Chinese and 163 Chinese used the library, but 193 non-Chinese and 3,100 Chinese studied in the museum. The resourceful Canadian government sent a traveling exhibit through China. It is what the Chinese call for. We shall yet see floating and wheeled museums, in parvo, throughout the empire, as educational bodies and merchants appreciate this as the quickest way to approach the Chinese mind.
When the revolution of 1911 had developed strength, the Chinese government found itself unable to remit to the thousands of students who were studying in foreign countries. The American and British universities, without exception, nobly offered to aid any needy Chinese student. The move was brilliant and humane, and will be bread scattered upon returning waters of appreciation some day.
The new representative assemblies have necessitated the introduction of shorthand in China. The Tsze Chen Yuan (National Assembly) in session at Peking as early as August, 1911, ordered night classes to be opened for learning the art, so that the civil service clerks might attend. I know that missionaries, helpless in committing to paper accurately the sounds of the scores of Lolo, Miaotsze, and other dialects in Yunnan, Szechuen and Kweichou provinces (where aborigines abound) have had recourse effectually to phonography. If the brilliant Dickens, John Hay, the American secretary of state, who founded the policy of “non-partition of China,” and many others, were phonographers, why might a missionary not be one also!
Some of the educational proverbs of the Chinese are the following:
“A lion breeds lions, and a brave father has brave sons.”
“Learn easy, forget easy; learn hard, forget hard.”
“Life is a river; if you are not going forward on it, you are falling behind.”
“Youth jumps and slips; age picks its steps and crosses safely.”
“Measure words by the height of the brain, not the height of the body.”
“A loose rein for a good head; a tight rein for a loose heart.”
“Faces are alike, but minds are myriad.”
“It takes longer to determine than to do.”
“Fate doesn’t plan the lot of a fool.”
“The mind chisels the face.”
“It isn’t far at the turn of two roads, but they end far apart.”
“With weeds, and with learning, get at the root.”
“Nothing that is human is alien to a good man’s interest.”
“He who has no ambition is like an ax without edge.”
“Moments are more precious than jewels, for the first can not be recovered if lost; the second may be found.”
“A right beginning makes a proper ending.”
“A tight mouth keeps back much mischief.”
“Heaven never put a bar against resource.”
“When you know yourself thoroughly, you know everyone else.”
“Prejudice is the thief of persuasion.”
“Two things strangle, the tongue and the cord.”
“Be as cross to yourself as you are to others; be as sweet to others as you are to yourself.”
“Never too great to learn.”
“The last step must be as steady as the first in climbing a hill.”
“The downy chin goes over it; the bristly chin goes round it; or, the young head for the long jump, and the old head for the long thought.”
“Good gives the tangible, evil but the shadows.”
“If you insist on every one being like you, look nowhere but in your mirror.”
XIX
NOTES ON CHINESE LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
Among the treasures of Buddhist monasteries are the stone tablets called “Pei Tze.” It used to be the custom of celebrated visitors to write an epigram, a witticism, a poem, or a sentence of philosophy, which the monks had a stone-cutter engrave as near the beautiful chirography as possible on these tablets, which constitute through the empire a great literary treasure which is not likely now to be renewed. Not a little of the sententiousness is humorous. A sign hanging up in a celebrated Buddhist monastery in the Chingtu plain, Szechuen province, makes this merry reference to fleas, which constitute the largest part of the present immense population of China: “There are animals with more legs than ponies at Inns other than this Inn.” Another popular humorous motto is: “One can carry kindness too far, such as the fisherman who had such pity for fish that he would only go fishing with straight hooks.” The idiom for inaction is: “keeping one’s hands in one’s sleeves.” For “eating crow” the Chinese say: “eating a dumb man’s bitterness.” More of their wisdom follows:
“Meekness and gentleness are the boat and the sail for crossing the rough stream of this world.”
“The truths that we least wish to hear are those which it is most to our advantage to know.”
“The way to glory lies through a palace; to riches through a market; to virtue through a desert.”
“The Manchu court is like the sea, where everything depends on the wind.”
“He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.”
“The prison is shut night and day, yet is always full; the temples are always open, yet you find no one in them.”
“He who lets things be given to him is not good at taking.”
“The dog in the kennel barks at his fleas, but the dog who is hunting does not feel them.”
“The finest roads are the shortest ones.”
“Man may bend to virtue, but virtue can not bend to man.”
“The wise man does not speak of all he does, but he does nothing that can not be spoken of.”
The Occidental manner of emphasizing a plea is: “If you don’t follow this advice, look out for the consequences.” Here is the Chinese phrase, as concluding Wu Ting Fang’s plea, in December, 1911, to the Prince Regent Chun to abdicate: “Our voice is hoarse and our tears are exhausted; no more can be said.” Their idiom for: “I’m not my own boss” is: “I eat another’s bread; I watch at the door.” More of their proverbs are:
“Who is he, though he never goes out, yet has seen all that is under the sky? The scholar among his books.”
“If the ruby is unpolished, it is not a gem.”
“Age for a sharp chin, and a sharp tongue.”
“It is with human nature as with wines: age sweetens some and sours others.”
“Happiness and misery both come in doubles.”
“Going through college doesn’t mean that the college has gone through you.”
“You can lead a boy to the right book, the rest depends on himself.”
“The deeper the water, the slower the stream.”
“It is easier to escape a splinter that you see, than a beam that you don’t see.”
“Familiarity takes the height off a mountain.”
“Wit may purchase wealth, but wealth can not purchase wit.”
“Originality can go so far back that it becomes aboriginality.”
“Your parents died when you were a child,” is the bitterly sarcastic way in which the Chinese express that one has no manners, or up-bringing. The following repartee is credited to almost every traveled Chinese official, but it originated in the imagination of an Occidental wit, because the Chinese consider manners and forgiveness the first rule of public conduct. Official Bu was asked by an impertinent Occidental why he wore such a ludicrous appendage as a queue. “Why do you wear a mustache?” asked the Oriental, “Because I’ve such an awful mouth.” “I thought so, from your first question,” was the Oriental’s rejoinder.
Yu Yuen, a satirist of 400 B. C., when China was divided into many states, ruled by inferior princes, wrote in defense of the able prime ministers who were trying to save the states: “I, too, am glad I can not fall to the intellect and moral level of princes.”
Chang Jo Hu, A. D. 800, with Isaiah-like emphasis reminds even long-lived proud China that
“There’s no rock of empire man shall make,
But tooth and tide of time shall shake.”
He also wrote:
“The waves of the Yangtze that pass to the sea,
Nevermore shall return to me;
So, friend of my soul, ’tis with me and with thee.”
Po Chuh Ih, A. D. 772, once president of the Board of War, and later an exile, wrote some Scott-like lays, including the Never Ending Wrong, and the famous Lute Girl, which is full of silver music coming over a moon-lit lake. At the lake he meets the lute-girl, once a court favorite, but now old and deserted. The poet does not try to disguise the truth. He says:
“The eye of Beauty wins a monarch’s soul,
And wrecks an Empire, too.”
Tai Chen, a poet, speaking for the Emperor Ming Huang, who is pursued to Mount Omi, in Szechuen, by the rebel, An Lu Shen, writes: “The star of empire pales before the morning beams of conquering foes.” Some of his lyrics show pretty conceits like: “The pansies are faces of loves that have died.” His Ruined Home reads like parts of Solomon’s wisdom.
Tai Chen was preceded by the most famous poet of China, Li Po (A. D. 702). He was born in Szechuen province. His patron was the Emperor Ming Huang, then a wanderer, as we have stated. A Browning-like poet of the world, he talks of the Tang emperors of Nanking, patrons of sculptors, “calling down the dreams of the gods and imprisoning them in stone.” In an ode to Nanking, he tells about: “a woman asleep by a loom, and a beautiful dream guiding her fingers along a glorious pattern that is known only to the gods.” He believes in the high mission of the poet, for he sings of “the fadeless lines of fire, running back to the births of immortal poets, who now walk amidst the stars.” Like others of the Chinese, and many of the new race of American poets, he has a strong sympathy with trade unions. He addressed an ode To the Golden Presence of Guild Brothers. He sings mightily of war in a song To my Fatherland, and then lapses thus into a sadder note when he reflects upon whom the sorrows of war come: “The pensive washwoman sends her heart to the Tartar war in far Kansu province to find her conscript soldier husband who suffers in the snows.”
Kao Shih, a contemporary poet, was a tremendous believer in the personal soul. He wrote striking verse because of his love of the occult, and his tendency to give to natural phenomena dramatic personalities.
Ou Yang Hsiu, of the following dynasty, the Sung, 1007 A. D., himself a governor, and historian of the Tang dynasty, wrote a famous “Autumn” poem, which is truly a march of Elizabethan metaphors. He showed, too, a cynicism which was like the Elizabethan:
“Fame, after all, is such a little thing!
Behold the fox and weasel’s young now play
Where lie the ashes of the great Man-Ching.”
Abbé Huc’s servant, Wei Chau, picked up in the book stores of Nanchang, in Kiangsi province, pamphlets with the following brilliant epigrams, which are not surpassed in any literature, and which might have been written by Wilde:
“My books speak to my mind; my friends to my heart; all the rest speak to my ears only.”
“One needs his wits most when dealing with a fool.”
“One forgives anything to him who forgives himself nothing.”
We call our printed Bible the “Word of God.” The Chinese have an expression somewhat similar. Their beautiful ideographs are delightfully called “Eyes of God.” The following is an effort of the Manchus in literature, translated idiomatically, and it shows the literary feebleness of the relapsed old conquerors. It is the national anthem which the dynasty gave by edict to the Chinese to sing at the opening of the rebellion in October, 1911:
“May the Golden Round be kept intact;
May Heaven help us;
Let the people and Nature live as quietly as ducks among lilies;
Both peoples (Chinese and Manchu) now dress alike; therefore be alike;
In this time of the Manchu (Ta Ching—Great Pure) dynasty we are fortunate to see true splendor and greatness;
May Heaven protect the Emperor and his line;
For Heaven is greatest,
And Nature is infinite” (the suggestion being to fear God, or Nature’s god).
The omnivorous Goethe made some investigation of Chinese literature, and here is his opinion of what he had read: “The people think, act and feel almost entirely as we do, although with them everything is clearer, calmer and more moral. In their arrangements everything is sensible, bourgeois, without great passion or poetry. What is moral, proper and in strict moderation is considered.” Now and then more or less distinct evidences of Chinese influence on the Greeks come to view, though the thread west of the headwaters of the Tarim is now lost. Many of the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato are similar to those of Chinese Lao Tse, and therefore they may have been instructed by the Chinese sage, whose book could have gone overland to Greece with the caravans of silk.
The advent of the many newspapers has made a great difference in the nerves and consciousness of the Chinese. From being the most stolid of peoples, indifferent to famine, flood, war, persecution by the officials or by the favored, poverty, pain, hardships physical and mental, they have become as restive, impatient, nervous and self-conscious as other races. Famine and flood used to sweep down and destroy millions. What was the use of complaining, since no one knew, nobody cared, and the victim might as well not care? Now, if disaster takes off not a million men, but one man, it is important, the newspapers chronicle it, and show how the lot of others may be the lot of the individual. The sufferer himself cries: “Woe is to me; isn’t this unendurable; help me; I can not, I WILL not bear it.” The newspaper has developed the ego. The Chinese has become self-conscious and nervous. He can not, he will not hereafter bear anything more than other peoples. In the August, 1911, floods and the October, 1911, revolution more fuss was made over the loss of a thousand men and women than over the loss of hundreds of thousands in the Taiping rebellion in the same region in 1853.
Not long ago, a weekly at Hongkong appealed to its public for a new name. I quote some of the names to reveal what the Far East thinks of itself in a humorous or serious light: “Bird of Freedom”; “Bubbles”; “China Answers”; “Cathay’s Looking Glass”; “Chop Sticks”; “East of East”; “Fragrant Waters” (the translation of Hongkong); “Fire Crackers”; “Murmurs and Funnosities”; “Mixed Pickles”; “Peak and Praya”; “Topical Tropical Times”; “The Griffin” (a beginner in the Orient); “The Gong”; “The Hit”; “Humming Top”; “Imperial Outpost”; “The Lantern”; “Merry-Go-Round”; “The Palm”; “The Pearl”; “Sun of Cathay”; “The Typhoon”; “The Ferret”; “The Colonel”; “Maskee” (the Chinese way of saying “never mind”); “Puckee” (the Oriental way of saying “O.K.”). The Chinese newspaper is a success, commercially, patriotically and educationally. Millions now read it every day. It gave the best and earliest news of the October, 1911, revolution. There are Chinese newspapers in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Singapore, Penang, Hongkong, Sydney, Paris and London.
Chinese plays recite the history of the clans and early states. Even the boatman and laborer are familiar with them. Every hill, valley, and reach and fall of a river north of the Yangtze has its hero and story. This would seem to prove that the race first came through the Tarim and Kansu gates to the new land. The rich, who aim to control trade routes and privileges depending upon popular tolerance, in Roman fashion give free theatricals to the village folk. The acting is excellent and spirited; the feats of memory remarkable, and the costumes gorgeous. “Once an actor always an actor,” they say, regarding the custom of youths being bought or apprenticed by the traveling troupes. Guild halls and some monasteries have theaters in connection with the compound. A restaurant is run during the long series of plays. You hurry out to dine when the play you are least interested in is rung in by cymbal. Bets and lawsuits between the guilds and villages are often settled by the loser paying for the visit of a theatrical troupe. Beautiful specimens of the blue and gold gowns of the emperor-actor can be secured at the silk shops of the treaty ports, and in some of the Oriental shops of New York, San Francisco and London.
The American and British college graduate wears a hood; the Chinese wears a yellow panel on his breast and back (it may be changed under the republicans to blue). When Yuan Shih recently took the oath of office as provisional president, two bonzes of the famous Lama Temple at Peking stepped up, and presented him with honorary panels of yellow silk.
The incident will be recalled in Judges, Chapter 12, where the Gileadites slew the Ephraimites who could only pronounce the word “shibboleth” as “sibboleth”. The Manchus are thicker of tongue than the Chinese. An ingenious story got about in October, 1911, that the rebels of General Li’s army were testing some disguised Manchus with the pronunciation of the numeral six, “Liu”, before killing them in retaliation for a massacre, the Manchus being unable to get the sound far enough back in their mouths and around their tongue in the proper Chinese fashion. The proper tone, lisp and aspirate makes all the difference, for the same written word “ho” means river and fire; the word “shui” means water and sleep; “chih” means gas and red, and so on.
English, and not German, has been prescribed as the language to be used in the study of science and world politics. The Chinese idiom and ideograph could not come near enough to distinct expression. For instance, the best they could do with fire-engine, steam-roller, Elijah’s chariot of fire, and automobile, was to call them all “fire carriage”; and electricity, globe, and flash-light were all three “lightning breath”. Geography, the world, and panorama were all called “All Under Heaven” (Tien Hsia). “Heavenly Literature” (Tien Wen) represented the words theology and astronomy. Lacking pronouns, the language adopts peculiar expedients. Thus an affix meaning “near” answers to “my”, and “that side” answers to “your”. That is, “near house” is my house; “that side house” is obviously your house. If this does not clearly convey the idea, the arbitrary ideographic affix of “honorable” and “despisable” will; that is, the “honorable house” is your house of course, and the “despisable house” with so effusively mannerly a people could only be my house. On account of their experience with the difficult and beautiful Chinese character which requires accuracy, the Chinese penman who learns to write English, does it in the most beautiful Spencerian copper-plate. The same care and skill is shown in copying drawings from our modern text-books, which have been translated for their new schools. The Chinese think in pictures. The characters for “many stars, clouds wait” means a clear night, as “clouds many, stars wait” means a gathering storm. This is why they have chosen English for its exactness, as they can not well express the word gathering. “It is bad walking” is rendered by “Walk not attain” (Tsou puh te). Passenger boats or skiffs are not so named. Those in use at Hongkong are called “san pans” (meaning three boards), and the famous light boats of the Yangtze gorges between Ichang and Wan Hsien are called “wu pans” (five boards). The forcible etymology of some Chinese words is illustrated by the words for “fan tan” gambling, which literally means “turn and part”. The cup is turned over a lot of coins, and the rest of the heap is brushed aside. Then the cup is raised, and the croupier, with his separator-stick, parts four coins at a time from the lot, until four or a particle are left, this being the winning number of the game. That the old southern Chinese, as contrasted with the succeeding northern Mongol invaders, invented the language is shown in many of the words. For instance, the word for road or path is called throughout China a “dry way”, and not a road or street. Only the central and southern provinces flood the fields for rice culture, leaving the raised dry paths.
Samuel Pollard, a missionary working in Yunnan, is compiling an alphabet and reducing to writing the speech of the hitherto unrecorded aboriginal tribes, the Miao and Lolos. He plans then to give them some western literature in return for the ethnological riches which they give us. They are the most unique people in the world, older even than the Chinese. Their fortresses are in Szechuen, Yunnan and Kweichow provinces, and there are, perhaps, two millions of this fearless fighting race. From dimmest history they have been pressed back to the mountain tops by the Chinese, who have spread out from their original home in the Yellow River valley with four hundred million people. That the Chinese have impressed some of their language, as far as necessary trade goes, on the aborigines can be seen from the following table, there remaining only two (two and five) sounds in these eight, which have not been somewhat influenced:
| MIAO ABORIGINE | CHINESE | |
| 1 | Ah | Ee |
| 2 | Ow | Erh |
| 3 | Tsz | San |
| 4 | Peu | Su |
| 5 | Peh | Wu |
| 6 | Glow | Liu |
| 7 | Ya | Pah |
| 8 | Chow | Chiu |
The writer in the Antiquity chapter of a former book adopted the Biblical account of the creation, that the original Chinese (Chou clan’s ancestors) spread through Turkestan, along the Tarim valley, to their first known home in Shensi province. Doctor Stein has found on the site of the ruined temple of Hangayi Tuti at Khoten, in Chinese Turkestan, birchbark and other manuscript in an unknown language. These point the way to a further search. The Asiatic Society, of Bengal, Calcutta, has acquired from a Montenegrin gentleman, who traveled in Turkestan, five leaves of brownish yellow manuscripts eight by six inches, in an unknown language, which wait to reveal possible wonders of China’s prehistoric story. The pages show that they were one part of an extensive work now lost in the sands and camp ashes of central Asia. There is room for emulation by America, Britain and China of Russia’s archeological research in Chinese Turkestan, for the world wants to know more of ancient China, now that the New China has become important. The professors of the American colleges in China are sufficiently learned to make a beginning in preserving China’s antiquities, which are now in great danger of being lost forever. The rage, as far as the Chinese themselves are concerned, is altogether for the new and utilitarian. The modernized Chinese have already forgotten their conservative Hanlin Academy.
XX
LIFE OF FOREIGNERS IN CHINA
I know of no place where music, lanterns, romantic mountain scenery, seascapes far below and delightful society in an alien setting combine more pleasantly than at the Peak Club, Hongkong. Above the passing clouds which now and then whirl around as in Rubens’ pictures, over the purple Pacific Ocean which foams around hilly islands, over the high hills as you ascend from the royal colony of Victoria, on a terrace, they have graded a velvet lawn. Here the military and naval bands are brought for a promenade concert in the soft night of the fragrant Orient, beneath Bowring’s “wide Cathayan tree”. The band of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, from Mt. Austin barracks, plays the stirring Welsh national march, The Men of Harlech. The men sing the chorus:
“See! the bonfire light before ye,
How its fiery tongues do call ye,
Come as one to death or glory,
Heroes of the fight.
“Lest by fire they kill and plunder,
Harlech! Harlech! make them wonder
At thy power that none can sunder;
Freedom thou wilt give.”
Flowering plants in large colored Chinese kongs are set out everywhere. The stars and moon shine. The pictured lanterns gently swing, and the horn lanterns of Ningpo are opal soft. The light flashes from swords, uniforms and jewels. The blue-gowned Oriental servants noiselessly pass refreshments. Not a Chinese house is in view, though half a million Chinese live hidden in the foothills. On the hundred peaks of Hongkong Island, the lights of a hundred palaces and villas of the merchant princes shine out. Down the winding cement paths, chairs bearing lanterns and carrying guests are borne with their rhythmic swing.
Every lady and every man present has come from far, and knows much of life and geography. The conversation tires not, for there is something of great interest to tell. Kitchener’s brother (Kitchener himself would not come—he never moves in “society”); General Wood, of the United States Army; Commander Greeley, United States Navy, of North Polar fame; Admiral Scott, of the British Navy, who invented the large gun “dotter” that made the heavy marksmanship possible, and whose 4.7 gun saved Ladysmith; Nathan, the hero governor of the typhoon and Hankow holocaust; the governor of the Philippines at the far stretched-out line of America’s new fame and empire; Kipling himself full of his colored phrases; authors of books on China, many of whom live in Hongkong; German, French and Russian commanders, whose impetuous ambition has made many moves that have nearly started world wars; ordnance and commissariat colonels, who, without a hitch, have provisioned famous international military relief expeditions; prince and pauper explorers who are one in the camaraderie of adventure for science; curio collectors who are raking the world to enrich western museums with enravishing art; Ponting, the photographer who went with the intrepid Commander Scott to the South Pole; seven-year indentured “griffins” who are second sons of noble houses and whose inheritance of style is a millstone around the necks of their impoverished incomes; subalterns who are chafing at the bit to be let make a mark like Kitchener; visiting lieutenants from Manila who would emulate Funston in the Philippines; Japanese doctors who have beat the world in discovering Bacillariaceæ; Parsees who have founded universities and have, therefore, dined with “my friend, the king”; the merchant princes and the missionary apostles of China, whose knowledge would fill books; women of grace, beauty and learning, nibbling at sweet cinnamon, musk and lotus; international spies of both sexes from the notorious Brussels headquarters; all move over the quiet grass, listening to the haunting strains of the bewitching music, which makes the heathen hills unalien under the swinging lanterns and the white-riding moon.
When you lift your glass to say “prosit”, “here’s how”, “à bon santé”, or “here’s to you, old man”, with no national reservations, and a feeling that all traveled men are brothers; and some fraternally wider day possibly you will not shiver when John Celestial, Friend Nippon, and Aryan Bengal are admitted to the delightful company gathered under the whispering bamboos and floating sandal scent of the Peak Club of Hongkong.
It is the same interesting story on ladies’ night at the Bund Club of Canton; the Jockey Club of Shanghai; the Hankau Club; the Tientsin Club; the delightful conversazioni at Sir Francis Aglen’s on Customs Street, Peking, when the National Customs Band plays; the Gouverneur’s “Palais” at Saigon and Hué; the International Club at Harbin; Government House at Wei-Hai-Wei; or the consulate at Chifu. It whets the imagination to be dancing within sight of the stacked rifles at the front, and you reverse Tennyson and say in Locksley Hall: “Better one night in Cathay than a cycle of Park Lane” (or Fifth Avenue)! You recite the thrilling incidents, such as the ball which Wellington attended on the eve before Waterloo, etc.! Certainly the foreigner in recent years has never known when he would be called upon at Hongkong, Canton, Hankau, Shanghai, Tientsin, Amoy, Macao, Fuchau, etc., to rush out, in either his dress or his business suit, or possibly his night pajamas, with his gun, to defend property, some kind of government, and the white man’s rights and habits of trade and international civilization. Not only white men have suffered and borne, but the foreign heroines of diplomacy, missions and trade of Wuchang, Hankau, Canton, Peking, Tientsin, Chingtu, Chungking, Amoy, Fuchau, etc., are numbered in hundreds.
The foreigner in China enters upon his sporting and social enjoyment keenly, because his sufferings from climate, alienation and danger are also keen. Taking his life altogether, he deserves more than he receives as a reward for his work, and he and his wife are unusually interesting people to meet, as I know from three years’ life in their honored midst.
The human beasts of burden—the rickshaw coolies of Hongkong, Shanghai, and the treaty ports—are directed by little of their own language. Only a few of the mercantile men on station learn the language. The foreign tourist generally learns two words, “kwai se” (go) and “man-man” (stop-stop), and the coolies, like beasts, therefore depend for directions as they race along in the heat, on a tap on the left or right shaft to indicate which street the “fare” desires to turn up. Hongkong proposes to have printed on a large bill-board at every chair and rickshaw stand a list of fares. Hongkong and Shanghai have become great tourist centers, whole shiploads landing there from New York and San Francisco, and the tourist’s generosity or lack of local information permits him to pay so large a fare that the expenses of the resident are raised beyond endurance. The example of Hongkong might well be copied at every tourist center over the world. “A fair price, but not a foolish price” is the watchword in these new days of economy and efficiency, because world-waste can be tolerated no longer.
The regiments which from time to time come to garrison Hongkong reveal many interesting traits in their customs and uniform. The Royal Welsh Fusiliers, fresh from the Boer War, wore three silk ribbons down their backs. They are the only British regiment which is permitted thus to mourn the deprivation of the old “pig tail” of the bewigged regiments of the Georges, which custom they were the last regiment to discontinue. The Lincolnshires wear a band of green to show that they are foresters recruited in Robin Hood’s country. The Inneskilling Fusiliers and the Somersets at Tientsin retain their traditional territorial peculiarities. The Cameronians are the only British regiment which is allowed to bear arms into church service, as a reminder of the old strenuous days of surprise when the clans might leap like a wolf from behind even the pulpit. There are so many branches of the historic British service in Hongkong’s, Tientsin’s, etc., garrison life that American tourists are delightfully entertained and instructed in tradition that is far from uninteresting. The British have found that to recruit and fight a man as a number is not a success, as compared with the picturesque traditions in a territorial army of uniform, customs, names, fetish, romance, glory, flags, distinctive rights, etc. In other words, they humor Tommy Atkins as a boy, and he fights for them like a man, every time it is necessary. This was shown when the swagger regiments of the Guards of London, under Generals French, Paget and Roberts hit the Boer lines as hard as the Royal Welsh, who are recruited from sturdy fearless miners. Bret Harte’s “Caucasian showed that he was no more played out” on those occasions than he was when he rushed El Caney and San Juan Hill led by Roosevelt, Lawton, Chaffee and Wheeler. The Chinese of Peking and Tientsin in 1900 had a chance to see the brilliant performance of the American Fourteenth Infantry, Sixth Cavalry, and the marines under Captain McCalla of the cruiser Newark, and recently the fine Fifteenth Infantry, U. S. A., has renewed the very favorable gentlemanly impression at Tientsin and along the railway line to Peking.
When the military weddings take place at St. John’s Cathedral, Hongkong, and the cathedrals at Shanghai and Tientsin, it is customary for the brother officers of the groom to unsheath their swords and make an arch of steel over Mars and Venus as they make their exit from the church. This old custom is not often seen elsewhere than in India and China, and would be a pretty one to adopt for military weddings the world over. The Germans particularly would take to it with zest; in fact, they have just adopted it in their “kirche” at Tsingtau, North China, and the Americans may adopt it in the smart military life of Manila.
Important newspapers published in English are the Times, at Tientsin; the Mail, Telegraph, Press and Post, of Hongkong; the Herald, News, Mercury, Press, Far Eastern Review and Times, of Shanghai; the Post, of Hankau; the Gazette and Times, of Amoy, and the Echo, of Fuchau. The Times and the Cable News, of Manila; the Free Press and Echo, of Singapore; and the Englishman, of Calcutta, may be included, together with the Chronicle, of Japan, because they circulate in China ports, “nothing that is Oriental being alien” to their fascinating news columns. Their editorials are illuminating, and often exhibit in their cultured English positive genius. They are an authoritative source of information on the absorbing theme of golden Cathay, and the interest of the brave Occidental pioneer in her awakening.
Water polo, swimming, launch, golf, cricket, tennis, yacht, dramatic, polo, etc., clubs are established at nearly all the treaty ports, and inter-Hong, inter-service, international and inter-regimental contests are constantly going on to take the edge off ennui in the long day of Oriental exile in a seven-year indenture. For those inclined to literature, science and ethnology, there are notable library and Asiatic associations, and some of them superintend an indispensable press. Royalty visits Hongkong frequently and encourages every phase of life in the premier colony. On the occasion of the Duke of Connaught’s last visit with his family they received the military at the landing pier and the populace at the City Hall; unveiled statues to the late King Edward and King George; lunched with the governor and council; attended a meeting of the Scottish Rite Masons, lunched with the mess of the Indian frontier regiment camped out on the foothills of China; attended a Chinese theater; ate at a Chinese restaurant; attended a daylight try-out of the racing ponies, Indian-breds and Walers at the Wong-Nei-Chong Jockey Club; and went with “Hoi-Polloi” on a week-end trip on the steamer Fat Shan to see Canton’s sights, and “tiffin”, as does the whole world of globe-trotters, on the third veranda of the five-storied pagoda. German royalty is just as active at Tsingtau, French nobility at Saigon and Haiphong, Portugese nobility at lovely Macao, and the cosmopolitan world at the “Paris of the East”, Shanghai. Of Macao, the famous poet, Sir John Bowring, wrote:
“Gem of the Orient earth and open sea,
Macao! that in thy lap and on thy breast
Hast gathered beauties all the loveliest,
Which the sun smiles on in his majesty.
The very clouds that top each mountain crest,
Seem to repose there, lingering lovingly.
How full of grace the green Cathayan tree
Bends to the breeze—and now thy sands are pressed
With gentle waves which ever and anon
Break their awakened furies on thy shore.
Were these the scenes that Camoens looked upon,
Whose lyre, though known to fame, knew misery more?”
In a former book, The Chinese, I have referred to the high cost of living at Hongkong, Shanghai, etc., as far as rent is concerned. This is because a navy and army have to be maintained. It is well known that Hongkong contributes to the British Budget more pro rata than any part of the long red line of British empire. The man who goes to the hot damp East to advance the cause of imperialism, and who reads Kipling and Gilbert Parker, pays high for it in money as well as health, and he deserves more than he receives. Land values are twice what they are in the suburban cities of New York, such as Brooklyn and Jersey City, and twice what they are in the outlying wards of London. Yaumati is a section of Hongkong’s colony on the China mainland, and values there are not so high as on hilly Hongkong Island. Yet a plot of land 150 by 140 feet, recently sold in Yaumati for $8,700 gold. No American or European should be sent to the treaty ports of the Far East to support any cause, diplomatic, military, commercial, scientific, academic, religious, or international customs, who is not given twice the emolument that he would receive at home. Yet the mission leaders in particular generously accept far less than they would receive as workers in America.
The foreigner has a larger list of supplies to pick from than was the case before modern roads were opened and the Chinese were taught to farm for the foreigner’s table. Ice houses, ice machinery, inspected markets, and water tanks for fish all have aided. Not so long ago we in the Far East were benzoate of soda and salicylic acid fiends, the men Doctor Wiley bemoaned; that is to say, our gun was a can-opener, and our game was tinned foods. We could go out into the jungle of Queens Road or the praya, Hongkong; Nanking Road, Shanghai; Kaiser Road, or the Chien Men Fair, Peking; or the bunds at Tientsin, Canton or Hankau, on our way home from office, and with our weapon bring down the foods of Europe, America and Australia, running, of course, not a little risk of ptomaine poisoning, positively ruining our stomachs forever, and becoming a permanent dyspeptic charge upon the nerves of the long-suffering community! Now things are better. Here is a list of fresh foods procurable in the larger ports. In the plague, typhoid or cholera season, some eschew fresh vegetables, and again, when they recall that the farmer is the town scavenger, some eschew fresh vegetables at all seasons! I quote the prices in gold, and give the Chinese word your lordly cook calls out to the obsequious stallsman, so that the stranger may gain an idea that Chinese does not sound unmusical:
- MEAT
- Beef sirloin, Mei Lung Pa, 10 cents a pound.
- Beef steak, Ngan Yuk Pa, 10 cents a pound.
- Mutton chop, Yeung Pai Kwat, 12 cents a pound.
- Pork chops, Chi Pai Kwat, 10 cents a pound.
- Chicken, Chu Yau, 8 cents a pound.
- Duck, Ap, 15 cents a pound.
- Doves, Pan Kau, 7 cents each.
- Geese, Ngoi, 13 cents a pound.
- Turkeys, cock, Phor Kai Kung, 20 cents a pound.
- FISH
- Barbel, Ka Yu, 5 cents a pound.
- Carp, Li Yu, 9 cents a pound.
- Cod, Mun, 7 cents a pound.
- Crabs, Hai, 9 cents a pound.
- Cuttlefish, Muk, 6 cents a pound.
- Eels, Conger, Hai Mann, 7 cents a pound.
- Frogs, Tien Kai, 20 cents a pound.
- Garoupa, Sek Pan, 28 cents a pound.
- Halibut, Cheung Kwan Kup, 12 cents a pound.
- Lobster, Lung Ha, 18 cents a pound.
- Mackerel, Chi, 16 cents a pound.
- Mullet, Chai, 10 cents a pound.
- Parrotfish, Kai Kung, 8 cents a pound.
- Pomfret, white, Pak Chong, 13 cents a pound.
- Salmon, Ma Yau Yu, 16 cents a pound.
- Shrimps, Ha, 12 cents a pound.
- Soles, Tat Sa, 12 cents a pound.
- South China is rich in fish, and I could quote scores more.
- FRUIT
- Almonds, Hung Yan, 9 cents a pound.
- Apples, Chifu, Tin Chun Ping Khor, 7 cents a pound.
- Bananas, fragrant Canton, San Shing Heung Chiu, 1½ cents a pound.
- Carambola, Yeung Tuo, 4 cents a pound.
- Cocoanuts, Yeh Tsz, 5 cents each.
- Lemons, Ning Moong, 4 cents a pound.
- Lichees, Lai Chi, 5 cents a pound (called “Chinese nuts”).
- Lily roots, Lin Ngan, 3 cents a pound.
- Limes from Saigon, Sai Kung Ning Moong, 3 cents a pound.
- Pears, Canton, Sa Li, 4 cents a pound.
- Peanuts, Fa Sang, 5 cents a pound.
- Persimmons, Hung Chie, 10 cents a pound.
- Pineapples, Sheung Poon Ti Pau Lau, 5 cents each.
- Plantains, Tai Chen, 1 cent each.
- Plums, Swatow, Hung Lai, 5 cents a pound.
- Pumelo, Siam, Chim Lo Yau (grapefruit), 5 cents each.
- Walnuts, Hop Tuo, 6 cents a pound.
- Watermelon, Sai Kwa, 1½ cents a pound.
- VEGETABLES
- Beans, sprouted, Ah Choi, 2 cents a pound.
- Beets, Hung Choi, 1 cent each.
- Brinjal, Ching Yuen, 2 cents a pound.
- Cabbage, Kai Choy, 2 cents a pound.
- Carrots, Kam Shun, 3 cents a pound.
- Chilies, Red Hung Fa, 3 cents a pound.
- Cucumbers, Ching Kwa, 1 cent each.
- Garlic, Suen Tau, 3 cents a pound.
- Ginger, young, Sun Tsz Keung, 3 cents a pound.
- Corn, Suk Mai, 2 cents each.
- Lettuce, Yeung San Choi, ½ cent each.
- Onions, Sang Chung, 2 cents a pound.
- Papaw, Tai Man, 5 cents each.
- Potato, sweet, Fan Shu, 1½ cents a pound.
- Spinach, Yin Choi, 2 cents a pound.
- Tomatoes, Kan Ker, 3 cents a pound.
- Vegetable marrow, Chit Kwa, 1 cent a pound.
- Water cress, Sai Yeung Choi, 5 cents a pound.
The table is justly famous at the following, among other hotels and clubs, and the wines are as cheap as in Europe, because no duty is charged at Hongkong, and only five per cent. in China. In Japan, however, and in French China there is a heavy duty on foreign liquor. The Grand Hotel and the club, at Yokohama; the club, Kobe; Wagon Lits and club, Peking; Imperial Hotel and club, Tientsin; Astor House and club, Shanghai; Peak, Grand, Craigieburn, Hongkong and Astor Hotels and club, at Hongkong; Victoria Hotel and club, Canton; Boa Vista, Hing Kee and club, at Macao. When you go there, next time, tourist, ask for broiled samli or Sek Pan at Macao; toasted rice birds or Ap ducks at Shanghai; Mongolian mutton at Peking; roasted imperial pheasant at Tientsin; preserved comquats in ginger syrup, Hungyan almonds, and Sai Kwa watermelons at Canton; Hung Lai plums at Swatow; Tin Chun Khor apples at Chifu; fresh lichees or Phor Kai turkey at Hongkong, and ruby red persimmons at Yokohama. It is not well to be a gourmand always, but it is well to be an epicure on eminent occasions, so as to remember them forever, from fear that, as in Senator Ingalls’ poem, “Opportunity knocks but once.”
XXI
FOREIGN CITIES OF CHINA
At all the great treaty port cities and colonies, such as Hongkong, Shanghai, Canton, Macao, Tientsin, etc., the stranger is accosted by crowds of rickshaw coolies, venders, fortune-tellers, flower sellers, etc., urging his patronage. Efforts are being made to limit this noise, which is at present like the reception that a football hero gets when he wins a game. The Chinese think we like the attention, because so many of us smile, and if one looks cross, a native wit will call out: “Don’t ask Honorable Sad-Face to ride; he has just lost his white mother-in-law, and must demurely walk behind her ghost.”
The first motor-car used in China was brought to Hongkong by an American dentist in 1900. It was a storage electric vehicle, as the authorities prohibited for a while the use of gasoline on account of the fire risk. Gasoline cars and launches are now used throughout the treaty ports, but kerosene engines are preferred in motor-boats. Kerosene can be procured anywhere in China, but gasoline is procurable only within a limited area.
As a foreign steamer enters a port, a fleet of sanpans throw out hooks and grapple with the ship. This picturesque nuisance the authorities are trying to stop, on account of the danger to life which is involved. The hotel runners, gamblers, and venders desire to be over the rail before any passengers leave. The health authorities desire to stop the irrepressible boarders as much as the harbor masters do. The boarders shout out to their countrymen: “You there! Throw over a fastened rope; we want to kotow to you on board, and leave you some of our money in a little game.” Over the rope goes, despite the frantic mate, who is a white man, and like ants, the agile Chinese clamber up the sides of the big trans-Pacific or Suez liner.
Peking, Haukau, Tientsin, Shanghai, Ningpo, Hongkong and other cities of China all have fine race courses, club-houses and stables. In hot Hongkong the racing, gymkana and polo meets occur from September to April. Szechuen and Mongolian ponies, Australian and Indian horses are used, but few American or British, the cost and insurance risk for the latter being too great. Every white man, singly or in clubs, goes in for the “king of sports”, and from a military point of view this interest in racing is very advantageous. The betting is generally on the French method of Paris Mutuels, where those who bet on the winning animal divide the pool, less eight per cent. for club expenses. The Chinese are beginning to understand the horse, and mafoo-jockeys and trainers are being developed. Up and down the China coast the owners ship their champion racers, and the interport rivalries are keen in this, and every other sport. The main ambition is for the owner to ride his horse as a “gentleman-jockey” in the crowning Derby event, and quite a few Hebrew and Parsee owners enter their horses in a widening sporting fraternity, which not long ago was limited to Saxons, and which may yet include Chinese gentry. The stocky Mongolian pony, weighing fifteen hundred pounds, only covers the mile in two minutes and eight seconds, and being hard of mouth and stubborn, he is as likely as not to cover the mile the opposite way to that which has been prescribed by the stewards! Not only has Hongkong two very fine golf courses, but Canton, Macao, Hankau, Shanghai, Peking, Tientsin, and other treaty ports have excellent courses famous for their novel bunkers of tombstones, etc., and club-houses. During most of the year at Hongkong the game is played on the Wong Nei Chong course shortly after daylight, as after eight o’clock the overhead sun is too hot for that exercise which is essential if one expects to keep “fit” in the Orient.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The mountain palaces of Hongkong; clouds almost cover the great peaks. Note gate house, covered chairs; extensive verandas. Hongkong’s architecture dominates the New China; it is a heavy adaptation of the Renaissance, with massive verandas added.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Race meet at the Jockey Club, Wong Nei Chong Valley, Hongkong. The cosmopolitan crowd: Hindus, Portuguese, Britons, Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Parsees, etc. Note the famous mat-shed for the “Hoi Polloi” in the background. These immense structures are erected overnight, with matting and bamboo.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The railway breaking through the wall of Peking. The immense new railway development of China has been put under the direction of the Honorable Sun Yat Sen.
Many have asked what was the organization of the crown colony of Hongkong Island, where 3,000 white troops, a navy, 2,000 Indian troops, and 500 British, Indian and Chinese police guard and rule 3,000 white men and 500,000 Chinese so successfully that after paying her own expenses, Hongkong continues, what she was the first colony to offer, to pay to the British government a large sum for military and naval expenses. The government is organized under the Home Colonial Office, as follows: a governor, the general of British troops in China, a local colonial secretary, an attorney-general, a colonial treasurer, a director of public works, a registrar-general, a superintendent of police, a clerk of councils, four white civilians, and two Chinese civilians, the six latter serving mainly for the honor. The famous Sanitary Board serves as a separate commission. Almost every one will admit that this is a compact, graftless, powerful and very economical organization, and it has more than answered expectations in a worldwide fame, both for Britain and China. The able newspapers of the ports are the Opposition, and keep the government up to efficiency. There is only one flaw, which may soon be remedied. There should be a director of education, for the purpose of honoring education, and not because education is backward in the progressive colony, which has had so many hero governors and cultured heads of department. Their great deeds would fill volumes as yet unwritten, for the many authors who have lived and served at Hongkong have not written of themselves. In modestia magnus! Hongkong has had some famous regiments in its garrison, musical and sporting life. After the South African War the Royal Welsh, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire regiments came. In 1911 the noted Yorkshire Light Infantry were in garrison. Their fine bands, often massed with the Indian regiments’ bands, are the feature in the musical life of the royal colony. The Yorkshires served in garrisoning the foreign settlement on Shameen Island, Canton, when, following the revolution of 1911, the pirate chief Luk seized the forts around Canton. Over at Kowloon, the mainland section of the colony in 1860, was mobilized the army of Sir Hope Grant’s 13,000 British troops and Baron Gros’ 6,000 French troops for the Taku-Peking campaign, and though the existence of their nation was at stake, the southern Chinese did not make a protest against this mobilization on what was then China’s territory.
The municipal organization at Amoy is seven councilmen, two of whom are a clergyman and a physician. They employ a captain-superintendent, and a judge who sits in a “Mixed Court” with a Chinese mandarin. American naval officers were given warm receptions by the Chinese of Amoy when the battleship fleet went round the world in 1908. The island-dotted and hill-surrounded harbor is one of the finest and most beautiful in China, and there is a great future before the port. At one time it was the largest tea port in China. The foreign settlement is on the hilly Kulangsu Island. The streets to see are Likin, Temple, Bootmaker, etc. The native Chamber of Commerce entertained the visiting members of the American Chambers of Commerce in 1910 in the Nan Pu Tu Temple. There are notable clubs and theaters; the Kwan Tai and other temples. The scenery is famous for the Valley of 10,000 Boulders, a sort of “Garden of the Gods”, in which the Deified Rock is worshiped. Many of the boulders are engraved by nature-worshipers. Note should be taken of the dainty architecture of the White Stag Temple and gates. The London Mission at the boat landing has partially adopted the Chinese style of architecture in the up-curling cornices. Forts which have seen hard service are placed on the hills. The foreign race course and jockey club is under the hill where the noted Lampotah Temple stands. Amoy is particularly famous for the best oysters, coolie oranges, pumeloes (grapefruit), fish, game, sugar, ginger and grasscloth in China. At Amoy stone buildings are seen everywhere, and extend southward through Fukien and Kwangtung provinces. The natives, who have a little Arab blood, and who often wear turbans as well as hats, are tall, turbulent, humorous and curious. There is much infanticide, because the small farms are only able to support sons. Amoy is connected by railway with Changchow on the Lung (Dragon) River, and it is planned to have a coast railway connecting all these cities from Shanghai to Canton. There is almost daily steamship connection with Hongkong. Native Amoy City is on a large island. The walls, which climb straight up the hills, are about eight miles around. The city was taken by the republicans on November 12, 1911, and there were many subsequent engagements with pirates when American marines from the Monterey had to be landed. Centuries ago the people of this province offered the most stubborn resistance to the Manchus when that dynasty conquered China. The dialect is the most isolated in China, showing that the northern ruling Chinese influenced the people very slightly. To instance:
| In Fukien | In Mandarin |
| Hokchiu | Fuchau |
| Amoy | Hsia-men |
| Quemoy | Chinmen |
Though the port was formally opened to foreign trade in 1842, the East India Company had hongs here as early as 1661 and up to 1730.
There is much for the antiquarian to trace as he follows the traditions of Arab visits in centuries preceding the Portugese discovery, at Canton. We hear reports that St. Thomas, the disciple, and Mohammed’s uncle journeyed here, taking the route none ever has since, across Persia, India and Burma. The tourist should not fail to visit the noble park of thousands of examination stalls, where the old classical learning held rule from Confucius’ time until recently. There is evidence enough that the state has grasped the new educational conditions recommended by the great Emperor Kwang Hsu, and the Cantonese reformers, in the splendid Kwangtung normal college, which consists of two wings and a tower building in the style of the University of New York. A noble stucco wall, pierced with portholes, surrounds the college. There is also the Canton Christian College, established in the fine Martin Hall. It is supported by Americans. American statesmanship and philanthropy will miss their glorious opportunity if they do not soon erect at Canton the preparatory department of a comprehensive American-Chinese university, the higher classes to be at Peking or Nanking. Trace should also be made of the factory of Milner & Bull, of New York, which sheltered Robert Morrison in 1807, when he was preparing for his immortal translations and dictionary. This was the time when American tradesmen of New York, Philadelphia and Boston showed keen sympathy with statesmanship and learning. Olyphant & Company, of New York and Canton, backed the printing of the priceless Chinese Repository, and brought fifty missionaries free from New York in their famous clipper ships. The Boston merchants who ran regular lines in those days to Canton, and had factories there, were Forbes, Perkins, Cabot, Sturgis, Russell, Cushing and Coolidge.
The morbid will want to see the execution ground in the Thirteen Factories section. It has no rival as the bloodiest spot on this earth. Governor Yeh, of Kwangtung, during the Taiping rebellion in October, 1856, beheaded 100,000 rebels here, and during the pirates’ attack under Luk, at Canton, in March, 1912, executions were part of each day’s work here. The ground is small and insignificant looking, and when not legally in use is used for spreading pottery in the sun. This Thirteen Factories section is in rather bad odor as an entertainer of opium smugglers and counterfeiters. Confucius’ temple near the Examination Park should not be missed, not for its beauty, but for its significance in the national ethics of so many centuries of one uninterrupted idea. The Parade Ground, under the eastern wall of the old city, should be visited, for here the nucleus of China’s new army, which we will some day hear much of, is training. China must learn to marry martial force and productive mechanics to, what through the long ages she has been preeminent in, literature, agriculture and art. In the western suburbs, the looms of the silk weavers, the native hospital, the Temple of Longevity, and the Temple of Five Hundred Genii are of exceeding interest, and if one can go as far as the White Cloud Hills there is the historic spot to see, where Morrison baptized, in 1804, Tsai Ah Ko, the first Protestant convert in China.
Various other places of interest are Tsiang Lan Kiai (Physic Street), which is protected from the sun with matting; Ma An Street, where the shoe shops are; Book Store and Jade Streets, with their tea saloons; the Hall of Green Tea Merchants radiant in porcelain; the Pok Chai native hospital; and the public gardens which were confiscated from the rich salt merchant, Pun Shih Cheng, because he evaded the law by smuggling, etc. China first prophesied that restitutionary besides prohibitive laws will yet be adopted world-wide to straighten out the economic tangle. Many modern improvements have come to Canton, such as a wide modern bund, electric cars and light, water, sanitary buildings, hospitals, etc. The University of Pennsylvania and the American Presbyterian Women have notable medical establishments at Canton, which city is connected with the early life of Doctor Sun Yat Sen, who has become immortal by formulating the republican Chinese rebellion and nation. Canton is already a railroad center, having rails east to Hongkong, south to medieval Macao, and north toward Hankau, and she proposes to link up west by running a railroad to Nanning and Yunnan. There is a vast steamer and launch traffic to Hongkong and up the West (Si) and North (Pe) Rivers, and along the iron-bound coast. Canton is the largest and most representative city of ethnical, republican and commercial China. Its stores and small factories are decidedly the most notable, efficient and varied in the wide land. The foreign settlement on Shameen Island in the Pearl River has every luxury in the way of modern clubs, hotels and residences, and in the native city there are clubs where the foreigner and native gentleman are trying to approach nearer to each other. Canton has two dialects, the Cantonese and the Hakka, and I know of no better authority on them than my old friend, Dyer Ball, the veteran author and linguist of Hongkong, though Canton has had many famous foreign students among her foreign residents in exile. The curious Hakka tribe composes one-third of the inhabitants of Canton. They can be distinguished by vivacity, by the flat hat with valance, worn by the women, and by their love of jewelry. The sanpan, junk, slipper boat and launch people, the most distinctive feature of Canton’s life, are largely Hakka. For further information regarding this tribe, which is also largely in evidence at Hongkong, Amoy and Swatow, I would recommend Dyer Ball’s authoritative books. Dutch Folly Island commemorates an early settlement of trading Hollanders.
The writer in his book, The Chinese, dealt at length with the oldest foreign settlement in China, the Portugese city of Macao, and its famous author, Camoens, who wrote The Lusiads. Authors who have written on quaint medieval Macao are Doctor Eitel, Norton Kyshe, Montalto de Jesus, Kutschera, Ljungstedt, the famous Sir John Bowring and the immortal Camoens himself. The largest library on the subject is to be found in the National Libraries of Lisbon, Coimbra, and other educational centers of old Portugal. The first American consuls lived at Macao, as did also the noted Jesuit explorer Abbé Huc, in 1840, in the seminary here. The British artist, Chinnery, lived and painted at Macao, as did the lovely Chinese colorist, Nam Cheong. Edmund Roberts, the first American ambassador of the United States “to Siam, Cochin and Muscat” died of bubonic plague here on June 12, 1836. In a study of Macao the old volume of the Chinese Repository should not be left unsearched. In a temple at Wang Hiya, beyond the quaint Porto Cerco gate, the first commercial treaty between America and China was signed respectively by Cushing, Daniel Webster’s son Fletcher, and Ki Ying. The remarkable miniature garden at the governor’s summer palace on the Monte Road should be seen, and rather amusing miniature photo statues are to be seen in the cemeteries. The largest cement factory in China (British owned) is on Green Island, which is connected by a causeway with Macao. The silted up harbor is being dredged in an effort to bring the long lost shipping back to old Macao. There is to be railway connection with Canton, and there is palatial steamer connection with Hongkong and Canton. The modern hotels, such as the Boa Vista and the Hing Kee, are excellent, the former occupying an unusually scenic site. The drives and Praya Grande are delightful. Macao is famous for its medieval carnivals and processions. It has an ambitious Chinese population whose leading spirits are the progressive Ho Sui Tin and Fong families. Its gambling houses are possibly notorious, and its opium farm, now somewhat restricted, was once a great thorn in international and hygienic matters.
Off the three-mile limit at Kowhowyang anchorage, the smuggling steamers occasionally lie. The trouble between Japan and China over the “Tatsu Maru” incident, and the subsequent severe trade boycott, which nearly bankrupted a Japanese trans-Pacific steamship and coastal line, will be recalled. The Chinese and Portuguese are constantly at swords’ points over harbor questions and the inclusion of the large islands of Lapa, Joao and Taipa in the beautiful colony, which would have been rushed long ago by the Chinese but for fear of Britain which supports Portugal “for auld acquaintance’ sake” and the memories of Wellington’s peninsular campaign when Portugal assisted Britain in her need. Chinese and Portuguese gunboats are always watching each other in the rather turbulent waters.
Lovely flowery Macao, of fast and festival, is the favorite health resort of Hongkong, because of its sou-west monsoon in the summer months. The wave of the Portuguese republican revolution took a month to reach Indian Goa and Cathayan Macao. The newspapers were read by the soldiers in the two beautiful barracks which stand high over Cape Sao Francisco and beneath Monte Fort. They were then loaned to the sailors on the gunboat Patria which rose and fell on the yellow tide in the offing. On November 29, 1910, the sailors of the Patria landed, marched to the square where the Senato Leal stands on high ground on Rua Central in the center of the closely built city. There three volleys were fired as a signal to the troops who, a mile away, broke into the armories and armed with ball cartridge ready for liberty’s business! The Legionaires Regiment first proceeded to the Santa Clara Convent, drove the nuns to the steamboats lying in the inner harbor, and forced them to sail for Hongkong, forty miles away, the objection to the long intrenched religious orders being that they successfully compete with business by not paying taxes. Then the revolutionists, dragging cannon, marched to the artistic government “Palais” on the picturesque Praya Grande, where the governor and representatives of the Senato Leal were forced at the bayonet’s point to agree to the expulsion of favored religious orders, the establishment of a republic in Portugal and her colonies, the suppression of the oligarchic and religious organ, Vida Nova, and similar reforms obtained by the republicans in Portugal. Most wonderful to relate, as a new sign on the horizon of the twentieth century, the Chinese viceroy of Kwangtung province brought up his Chinese army to stand by and see that order elsewhere was maintained while European revolutionists, European monarchists and reactionary Catholics fought out questions of representative and popular government in a corner of the sacred soil of old China. Correctly speaking then, it was little historic Portugal, and not ancient China, that first established a republic on Chinese soil, and Portugal’s republican influence, multum in parvo, as well as America’s and France’s, has been influential with Chinese reformers.
Fuchau, the capital of turbulent Fukien province, is situated twenty-five miles from the coast on one of the most romantic rivers of China, the Min. “Fu” means happy, and is the most used word in superstitious China, if we except perhaps a “strange oath” or two, and the family name Chang, which almost half of the Chinese carry. This city lies in a river plain surrounded by a glorious amphitheater of hills. With Hongkong, Fuchau joins as the two most scenic ports of China. The wide walls are thirty feet high, ten miles around, and up a mountain on one side, and there are seven fort gates, the most notable being the North Tower, with its curious spirit shrines. The most noted temples are those to the goddess Kwan Yun, the God of War, and Ching Hwang Temple. The seven-storied White Pagoda is famous. It has Romanesque doors and stunted galleries with railings. It is more ponderous than beautiful, and is remarkable for its great antiquity. The city is a noted educational center, missionary and native, It was a reform center even back into the Dowager Empress Tse Hsi’s day in 1897 and 1898, and produced its martyr, young Lin, who fell a victim of that reactionary Jezebel. Six miles south of the city on Ku-Shan, 1,700 feet high, is the noted Bubbling Well Monastery. The chair ride there affords a wonderful view. Fuchau is a health resort, as it has many hot springs. The Pacific Coast Chamber of Commerce was entertained by the city guilds at the Nan Pu Tu Temple in October, 1910. The valley of boulders is notable, as are also the rich pumelo groves. Fuchau used to be a great tea port. The trade declined from 1898 to 1907, but it is picking up again with the increased demand for China teas. Pagoda Island exhibits a severely plain and ancient pagoda and some remarkable Pai Piku (white stern) junks of the olden time. An ancient bridge nine centuries old, with sixty arches, on which are many overhanging shops, propped from the piers, connects one of the islands.
Fuchau went over to the rebel provisional government in October, 1911, but the Manchu city was not captured until a month later. There is a naval arsenal here, a dock, navy school, mint and a foreign settlement on Nan Tai Island. The climate is extremely trying.
Many unique costumes and turbans are to be seen. Fukien province people have some Arab blood in them, though the Mohammedan religion has been lost. They boast that they have never been conquered, and that many of the notorious pirates are Fuchau men. Their women wear a head-dress that looks like the model of an air-ship. There are excellent Methodist and Congregational schools, an American hospital, and a fine London mission which has done what missions should do in architecture. It has adopted to a degree the characteristic and beautiful Chinese style. All the missions and foreign trade buildings should strive to retain this wonderful art instead of daring to bring square ugliness or Greek coldness of column to artistic China, where it does not fit well in so warm a land. Down at the seaside bamboos are placed in the beds so that the oysters may cling to them. There are factories for glass filigree lamps. Trips should be made to the Yuan Fu Monastery, built on props on Wu Hu (Five Tiger) range, and up to which five hundred steps have been cut; the Paeling tea hills, fifteen miles north; the olive and orange groves; and the hot mineral springs. Fuchau is to have railway connection north and south. With Soochow, Fuchau is the center of the lacquer art, and old specimens are highly prized. In 1885 the French fleet under Admiral Courbet sailed into Fuchau and battered at the forts and the city, virtually compelling the Chinese for the time to cede the great province to Tonquin. This is what the Chinese call the “Sacrilege of Fuchau”. The city is also the center of tinfoil workers, their product being used in great quantities in making the gold and silver models which are burned at the graves. Beautiful heavy wall paper is also made. The noted sinologue, Professor Parker, of Manchester University, the witty author of John Chinaman, etc., was once British consul at Fuchau.
Ningpo (Peaceful Wave) in friendly Buddhist Chekiang province, could be called the Azalea City, and is one of the most delightful and picturesque cities of China. It is the second oldest in its relations with Europe, the Portuguese having founded a trading settlement here in 1522. The city is moated, and the walls are broken with six gates. Old Krupp cannons lie about on the parapet. The best wood carvers, masons, and varnish makers of the kingdom work here, and their services are sought for all over China. Its artists also are famous. Ningpo lies twelve miles from the sea at the head of the Tatsieh River. Three streams branch out into the hills, which lie spread around in a most picturesque panorama, including valleys, canals and lakes. It is a great fishing center, and its sailors are venturesome. The fast river slipper boats of Ningpo are noted far and wide. The inhabitants do not disdain the use of such a modern thing as ice, as the many straw-covered, peaked ice houses show. Much tea and silk are produced. Excellent stone carving is done, as witness that gem of architecture, the Fukien men’s Guild Hall, with its carved dragon-entwined columns, comical stone lions, and splendid, up-curving tiled roofs. The screens and bronze urns at the many temples are also a delight in this center of culture, the new rights of women, engineering and commerce. There are successfully run native cotton mills, and the district produces fine matting, rice, oils, varnish, sepia, bamboo, lumber, tea, game, flowers, rape, barley, tallow trees, etc. There is a curious street covered with pailoo arches to widows who would not remarry, to scholars, children, etc. There is a foreign quarter with its splendid bund, race course, house boats, clubs, churches, hill bungalows, etc.
No Chinese city affords more delightful excursions to the hills, waterfalls, rapids like the Wenchow, and the wonderful Buddhist monasteries like the noted Tien Dong and the Shih To. The trips to the Ta Lang and Snowy Valleys are exceedingly beautiful. Outside the city the temple to the sailor’s patron goddess, Ma Tsu Pu, at the east gate, is particularly fine in lines, proportion, dignity and rich detail. It was erected in 1680 by sailors of Fukien, the neighboring province. These precious old temples are the last precious gems of a great age in art. The new times in learning, religion, politics and commerce are bringing in an ugly architecture. Ningpo is strongly influenced in Buddhism by the nearness of Phu Tho Island of the Chusan group. There is a quaint pontoon bridge over one of the streams. It has shops upon it, and is the center of a fair. The women of Ningpo are known for their fine needlework, and the old schools were celebrated for their men of letters among the literati officials. The old Tien Fung pentagonal pagoda is perhaps the oldest in China, dating back 1,200 years. Its gold and white tiles have fallen, and the brick and mortar work of the seven stories is exposed.
Politically, Ningpo is progressive. It went over to the “Han Republic” rebels on November 5, 1911. In the early days of the Portuguese at this port, the Ningpo men rose up, destroyed thirty-five Portuguese ships, and slaughtered eight hundred of the crews, because they claimed the foreigners had gone inland and captured Chinese women on the Sabine plan. The city was captured by the Taiping rebels in 1862. Off Ningpo a fierce engagement between the Chinese and English fleets took place in October, 1841. Nimrod Bay, near Ningpo, is to be the central base for the new Chinese navy. In the turmoil of 1898, when the nations of Europe were striving to partition China, despite the protests of America and Britain, the French, on July 16th, landed marines at Ningpo and tried to take a temple graveyard for a settlement, incidentally adding twenty Chinese to the number to be buried in the graveyard! Ningpo is soon to have a railway connection with the west and south.
Hangchow, the capital of Chekiang province, is famous as the city of the Roaring Tidal Bore. The walls are twelve miles around. The bore is best seen at Haining pagoda, east of the city. The tourist should go at moonlight to see the unforgettable white specter riding in on the wheels of the night. The legend is that the Wu prince, Tse Hsu, committed suicide, and the Chinese go to the bore to see him sweeping by in his fury. The stone-faced river wall has stone cradles built for junks to outride the terrific main bore. The city has railway and canal connection, and launch tows are now much used instead of sail. The Golden King Hill is in the center of the city by the lake side. It is crowned with a Buddhist temple. The lake has a causeway, lake temples and pagodas. The city is famous for its beautiful waterscapes, like the view of Western Lake (Si Hu), and the view from Thundering Peak Tower (Lui Fung Tah). This tower is without the usual ornate galleries, and shows the Arab influence which crept up the coast in the old days, and established itself at Hangchow in mosques, etc. Three separate attempts were made to capture China for Mohammedanism; they were made in Kansu, Yunnan and Chekiang provinces. The Red Imperial Palace at the lake side was once the center of the cultured Sung dynasty, thirteenth century. Marco Polo visited and praised the beautiful ancient city as follows: “Beyond dispute, it is the finest and noblest city in the world.” It is now a center of the silk, wine, fan, lantern, tea, tinfoil, camphor, hardware, book, vegetable oil, etc., trade. The city was captured by the republicans on November 5, 1911, the Tartar city strongly resisting. With Soochow, it is called the most fashionable city, and the home of the best dressed women of China. Doctor Main’s model leper hospital is here. The American Presbyterians have erected on a lovely hillside over the water a number of buildings of the important new Hangchow University. The Tartar walled city is on the northwest. There are a governor’s yamen, many pailoo honorary arches, the massive Great Peace Bridge, canals, famous temples, shops and fine residences, for the Chinese of this section seem to have a civic pride. The rolling suburbs of Hangchow are the most beautiful in China, reminding one perhaps of England’s lake country. The modern parliament buildings of the province of Chekiang are erected at Hangchow. There is also a native university and normal school.
Nanking, the largest walled city of the Ming emperors and Taiping rebels, and the first republican capital and assembly headquarters, is very dear to the hearts of the Chinese race. It is the center of the classic Mandarin pronunciation used by the north and the cultivated of all China. The name translated means southern capital. The great Yangtze River sweeps beneath the walls, and the city has canal and railway connection of the finest. The city, as was discovered when General Chang defended it, is commanded by the peaks of Purple Mountain on the north. There are fortified hills within the city, and great avenues down which run modern electric cars. Ruins of the last pure Chinese dynasty remain: the Ming palace, the picturesque tombs, and an avenue lined with wonderful gigantic camels, lions, elephants, etc., similar to the Ming Avenue at Nankow on the Great Wall above Peking. Emperor Hung Wu’s monument is a stone monolith, erected on a gigantic turtle’s back. The tomb itself is square. In the same manner that the Japanese and Russians unavoidably pounded the Manchu tombs at Mukden with shot, the imperialists and republicans pounded these revered Ming tombs in 1911. Bloody General Chang’s slaughter of the republicans and non-combatants at Nanking in November, 1911, will be hissed at in history forever. Viceroy Chang Jen held the first Chinese exhibition at Nanking in 1910. He established water, electric and gas works, and broad roads, and was in many ways a most enlightened leader. The foreign settlement is in part on Siakwan Island. Across the river on the north at Pukow, a British railway goes to Tientsin and Kiaochou, and south to Shanghai runs the splendid Shanghai-Nanking British railway, the best built road in China. As usual, the city is divided into Tartar and Chinese sections. There are military and naval colleges, a native provincial university and an arsenal. Nanking Union University of the Methodists and Presbyterians is famous, and is discussed in another chapter. The students have adopted athletics and propose to send a team to Olympic games. The city has famous pagodas and temples, like the Pi-Che-Ko, the Buddhist Temple of Ten Thousand Gilded Gods, the White Star Temple, etc. The Taipings burned the famous yellow and white porcelain pagoda which once stood here, and which was the most ornate pagoda in China. Some of the tiles are in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. American firms have established themselves, and consulates, churches, clubs and all that goes with foreign life will now come up to the favorite city of republican China, whose ancient culture hangs like a golden cloud over its memories. There are newspapers, paper mills, silk and satin filatures, fan and cotton factories, shoemakers, tailors, porcelain kilns, etc. The city gave its name to the shiny cotton, “Nankeen”, used throughout China and Europe. Ink, flower, bath, vase, tile, book and jewel makers abound. Its artists are skilled. In the days of the old-style examinations, thousands of candidates used to gather in the great park of brick stalls. Nanking became a viceregal city when it ceased to be the southern capital. Its guilds and boards of trade are famous and progressive; each has its fine hall. Industry, learning, politics, foreign trade and medicine will henceforward take a mighty hold at Nanking, where the first provisional president of China, the world-wanderer, Doctor Sun Yat Sen, bowed to a modern representative assembly on January 1, 1912.
Shanghai is the queen of middle China, the ruler of the Yangtze River, at whose gates she sits. It is often called the “Paris of the Far East”, which remark refers to its social life, for it is not nearly so picturesque as its rival, Hongkong, or that queen of beauty, Fuchau. The fine black sand, once yellow loess, and saturated clay bed under Shanghai is four hundred and fifty feet thick. For the large modern buildings, it is necessary to sink a heavy girder-reinforced concrete raft, and build the structures on that. Even these buildings sink five inches as compared with the foot that ordinary pile and brick buildings sink. Life is in a whirl at Shanghai. The river bund is crowded, and so is the long, winding Bubbling Well Road. The concessions are splendidly managed from a foreign point of view, and vie with each other in public spirit. The Chinese, however, feel greater warmth for Hongkong, which gives them representation on the council. In Shanghai there are mixed courts, consular courts, an American Superior Court, and Chinese courts. The Chinese are planning for the day when they will try all Chinese offenders. There is an imposing cathedral, and a modern Venetian style railway station. Good libraries, magnificent clubs, theaters, hotels of all nations, taxicabs, electric trams and rickshaws are among the conveniences. The separate post-offices of all nations are somewhat confusing. All the sports,—racing, golf, tennis, shooting, house-boating, swimming, etc.,—may be enjoyed, and the military enthusiast has almost the same opportunity that he has at proud brave Hongkong. The Shanghai settlements protect themselves with the Municipal Volunteer Guard, in which a special corps of Europeanized Chinese can be enrolled. Secret societies, both foreign and native, have their temples. Shanghai has been the chief center of the native reform newspapers which agitated from the time of the coup d’état of 1898 to the rebellion of October 10, 1911, and at Shanghai the peace conferences between the south and the north were held in January, 1912. Outside of iron and coal, one can see here almost all of China’s efforts to equal the Occidental in industrial activity in modern mills. The Japanese are in strong evidence at Shanghai in ownership of Chinese cotton manufacturing. In speculating, no city can approach Shanghai. The awful rubber collapse of 1910 mowed down Chinese as well as foreigners. A military band plays in the public gardens and in the hotels. The musical and literary life of the colony is well developed. On North Honan Road is the immense plant of the Commercial Press which translated a million dollars’ worth of text-books last year for China’s schools. Its president is Chang Yuan Chi. The English newspapers of the port are known world wide for their scholarliness, and the Chinese press is making a mark for its patriotism and progress. The Bubbling Well Road cemetery and the Pahsien (Catholic) cemetery contain many melancholy monuments of famous foreign pioneers. In meteorological science, the Sicawei Observatory, under the control of the Jesuits, is facile princeps; indeed in this field this order has led in China and in the Philippines since the eighteenth century. Shanghai shares with Hankau the title of head of the railway system; that is to say one is the New York and the other the Chicago of the land. There is no computing what the future trade will be at Shanghai. The climate is not much improved on the damp sea-level misery which one experiences at Hongkong, Canton, and Amoy, but there are brave hearts in Shanghai, and the noblest of women who will endure any physical torture so long as they know that they are doing their duty in not deserting the advanced firing line of civilization and philanthropy.
The leading educational institution is St. John’s University, managed by the American Episcopalians. Nothing but praise can be accorded to it, and its future will be great. Already great men in China, such as Alfred S. K. Sze, once named as minister to Washington, and Doctor W. W. Yen, once secretary of the Foreign Board, are saying: “I am a St. John’s alumnus.” The university is five miles from the bund landing. Other missionary and native educational and medical institutions, like the Nan Yang University, are of a high order. The intellectual life is advanced, for at Shanghai live most of the Occidentalized Chinese and retired officials.
A great arsenal is located here. There is some abandon in the French quarter, which tolerates perhaps the lowest opium joints in the world, and the Foochow Road exhibits its brothel life the most brazenly of any street in the world. The dives of native Shanghai have been notorious the world over for disappearance of victims.
There are wonderful silk shops on Nanking and Foochow Roads; luxurious tea gardens, fine temples like the Pan Tuck Ih and the Kwang Sang Kee; splendid furniture shops; guild halls like that of the Shansi Bankers; the Yu Yuen gardens, etc. The Hong Ku market should be visited early in the morning, and the wonderful products of a rich district, intensively farmed, will surprise a stranger. The place is famous for its houseboat trips. The boat people are called Tankas, the tribe coming from Kiangsu province. They are related to the old Hongkong Hakka tribe. Wonderful farms can be studied on Tsun Ming Island. Interesting pagodas, like the Ta Kong, are to be seen. It is the theatric custom of the Germans to erect over the earth monuments to their dead who have fallen when in conflict with other races; this explains the “Iltis” monument. Shanghai, soon to be the center of a vast railway development, was the first apostle of railways for China, the noted old Jardine firm building a railway to Woosung, twelve miles away, as far back as the 60’s. The Manchus, who have always been reactionaries at heart, promptly tore it up and stacked it to rust out in distant Formosa Island. The native city is not large, nor are the moated walls substantial, brick instead of stone being used. There are six double gates of iron. Manila was the first city of the Far East to tear down part of its walls and Shanghai will probably be the second. The Taiping rebels of the 60’s captured the city, and the population went over to the revolution in November, 1911, thus depriving the effective Admiral Sah of the Manchu navy of his ammunition, which Shanghai arsenal had furnished up to that time. As Shanghai grows she will probably extend toward her port, Woosung, twelve miles away, and a Conservancy Board must arrange for vast expenditures to prepare for a large steamship tonnage now that the Pacific ocean is narrowing because of faster steamers being put on the route. Imported goods for China are mainly stacked in Shanghai’s godowns, not even subsidiary stocks being held at ports as far away as Newchwang. This practise must change somewhat and Shanghai take particular care of the Yangtze valley, which is a kingdom of 150,000,000 people in itself.
The quaint Kiangsu junks are disappearing, and vast fleets of launches and mere cargo junks have come into use. To see the picturesque old life on the waters, one must now go farther inland. Shanghai is famous for its peony, chrysanthemum and lily gardens. It is a florist’s paradise, because it lies in the valley of the sun. Its dress show on the bund and Bubbling Well Road, Hong Kew Park, Public Gardens and Jockey Club grounds, almost rivals in silk the floral creations of nature. Some of the costumes are amusing. A tall Sikh, “bearded like the pard”, and wearing an immense red turban, comes along the road with never a look to right nor left and never a smile on his eager face. His gown looks like a loose white nightshirt, over which he has forced a small tight vest of bright colors and flashy buttons. The nightshirt is gathered in about his legs, which are bare below the knee. On his feet he wears Punjab slippers, which curve up at the points like a gondola. So he fareth forth into the perpetual comedy of the Shanghai streets and maloos! The London “bobby” looks at him but does not arrest him, because on official occasions this same Sikh is the bobby’s partner on police duty, when, however, he buttons himself within a decent blue tunic and dons long trousers, though the turban is maintained to him for tradition’s sake.
All the foreign banks, the Hongkong bank, and the Chinese National and Shansi banks, have branches here, and it is proposed to have branches of large Chinese-American banks and steamship companies. Fault must be found with the modern native as well as the European architecture of Shanghai, that they are not perpetuating and adapting the extremely beautiful Chinese style in roof, screen, portals, columns, terminal ornaments, panels, pavilions and approaches. We of the Occident are barbarians to intrude in any land and debauch its beautiful architecture in the way we are universally doing. All praise to some of the missionary societies, that as usual they are the first to do right in a beautiful way by building in the Chinese manner in China. A Grecian building like Boone University, at Wuchang; a top-heavy German building like those at Kiaochou; a New York cave building like some at Tientsin; a British barn like some on the praya at Hongkong, even an Italian Renaissance like some on the Shanghai bund, are a trespass unto architectural sacrilege in artistic China. Let us keep to the galleries, the curved lines, the rich roof, the colored panels, the enameled tiles of pagoda and temple as we raise stone on stone in glorious old China, for she is the mother of the arts, and has sat longest at the fountain of beauty, if not at the anvil of arms.
The extension of the American post-office to Shanghai, whereby a letter can be sent from Shanghai to New York for two cents gold is a remarkable achievement, and speaks much for the generosity of the Chinese Revenue Board in permitting this heavy competition. Many of the other nations have post-offices, but the rates are higher. The great international Opium Commission, its chairman the American, Bishop Brent, which did the impossible by disenthralling a hundred million habitués from the pythonic toils of opium in two years, sat in Shanghai in February, 1909, in its most memorable conference. The chief credit is due to America for leadership in the altruistic sentiment, and to China, Britain, India and Hongkong for the immense altruistic sacrifice of revenue. Now that the pipe and the poppy fields have been wiped nearly out, it remains for the nations to stamp out morphia, the hypodermic syringe and the drugged cigarette. And poor China is not the maker of these infernal tools. Shanghai has a modern water, an electric and street making plants, which are being copied through China as fast as funds can be collected by the municipalities.
For a long time it was impossible to escape quickly from the deadly summer climate, but railways and steamships have placed the inland mountain resorts of Kuling, at Kowkiang, 3,000 feet high, and at Mokan Mountain within easy reach. Phutho, the famous Buddhist mountain island, is also near enough for quick steamship service. Every debilitated Shanghai dweller used to go to far Japan at great cost to recuperate, but this expense will be less necessary, as these nearer resorts are opened up by a fast developing transportation service. Kuling Mountain is a missionary resort. Before it was discovered broken-down workers had to be sent to Japan or home on a furlough if they were able to stand the long voyage and the boards were able to stand the expense. The work of missionaries is the hardest under dangerous pioneer conditions, and Kuling Mountain is enabling the missionary quickly to restore herself or himself to efficiency without leaving China. The waters around Shanghai, including Seven Mile Lake, afford excellent facilities for house-boating. The municipality uses tall, red-turbanned Sikh police from India, as well as native Chinese lukongs, all under foreign officers. The docks, ways and engine shops of Shanghai, both foreign and native owned, are equipping the waters of Central China with small steamboats, though there is a strong competition from Hongkong, Japan and Britain, and some competition from Manila. Shanghai can not set out thousands of lanterns on a dozen hills 1,800 feet up in the night skies, as gorgeous Hongkong can, yet her more intimate garden and house illuminations are famous in China. The poet may justly rave and sigh:
“Oh! give me an eve in that fairy Cathay,
When a thousand near moons change the night into day.”
Even the shop signs are lanterns. China is the home of that nonsputtering, cold vegetable tallow that makes the only perfect lantern candles. The silver shops rival those of Hongkong, Nanking and Soochow, but beware of the German and Japanese machine-made imitation. The artist only can put his soul and a luck message for you into what he makes slowly by hand; anything else is not an objet d’art. There are very fine bronze statues in Shanghai, and the pottery stores are a delight. The market stalls are a mine of yellow, red and pink in all shades, for these sub-tropics are a hothouse of fruit: pumeloes, persimmons, mangostines, lichees, oranges, bananas and nuts. The grape and pear country is much farther north, even to Shangtung province.
There have been famous consuls at Shanghai, like Sir Harry Parkes, whose statue is erected on the bund. He became British minister, and did much for British diplomacy and world trade in Chinese wars. The first government of the rebellion of October, 1911, opened in Shanghai, with Wu Ting Fang as foreign minister. Shanghai, like Tientsin and other river ports, has its great conservancy question in the matter of keeping the channel free from loess and sand silt. Dredging is infinitely too expensive, and the wit of man has to be matched against the will of tide and stream. At Shanghai the course seems to be to keep an immense tidal basin above the port, as at Seven Mile Reach, ready to assist the ebb tide with a flushing flow. A Department of Rivers and Harbors will yet be the busiest and have the largest budget in China. At present, Conservancy Boards, assisted by loans and government help, take care of the expensive and difficult work as best they are able. The foreign engineers employed are exceedingly able men.
Suchow, a walled city of ten miles in circumference, the Venice of China, lies on the Grand Canal, northwest of Shanghai. It is the center of a population of several millions. The city is intersected with canals, and has, among its gates, six unique water gates. Hills surround the wide plain, which is picturesquely marked also with canals and camel’s-back bridges. The city has long been famous for its culture, the beauty of its women, the rich designs of its imperial silk looms, its artists, its luxurious gardens and its boat life. Foreign settlements are both within the walls and in the suburbs. The shops on Kwei Tsze, Dragon, Peach and other streets, manufacture paper, wall-paper, lacquer, horn, glass, porcelain, furniture, ivory, cotton, linen, iron, copper, etc. The city has launch connection with the Yangtze ports and railway connection west to Nanking, north to Tientsin, and south to Shanghai and Hangchow. In addition to the wonderful sunken gardens in Shu Park, there are also public gardens, libraries, modern schools, a governor’s palace, a famous monster octagonal pagoda overlooking a picturesque, sinuous, bridged canal, a massive customs bridge, the South Horse bridge, twin Burmese pagodas, and in contrast with their richness, near by, a square Ink pagoda, a provincial university, a Confucian temple, the very artistic South Gate pagoda, statues in Tsang Lang pavilion, Mohammedan and Buddhist cemeteries. Modern architecture is represented by the American Methodist University, which has what the new Chinese particularly appreciate, a fine clock tower. It is a sign of the times in China, for the old Chinese ignored exact time. The American Presbyterians have a most important publishing and translating department in Suchow, which had much to do with germinating the wonderful New China, which in Suchow particularly was ready for the seed. Modern medicine is represented by Blake Hospital. The city was sacked by the Taipings and captured by General Gordon, whose victorious legions thundered through the east gate. So great an authority as the Japanese Marquis Ito declared that the West never should have supported the Manchu against the Taiping revolution; that the reforms of 1911 could have been effected in 1863. I humbly differ with this opinion, as Hung and Yang were very different leaders from Sun Yat Sen and General Li Yuan Heng of the immortal revolution of October 10, 1911.
At Hankau, the first battlefield of the October, 1911, revolution, the finest-developed foreign concession, running along the Yangtze River, is owned by Britain, but many of the lessees of the palatial homes are Russian tea merchants. All nationalities are admitted to the municipal council of these model British settlements. Next to the British comes a Russian settlement, with French, German and Japanese settlements following. The Americans, as usual, club with the British settlement, which is generally called “The Settlement”. These concessions were granted by the treaty of Peking and following treaties. Hankau has railway connection with Peking, and it will be linked up with the other great centers west and south. The river connects it with the east, and a riverine railroad will eventually be run from Nanking, which is already railed up with Shanghai. The burned native city of Hankau is to be reconstructed as the model city of China. Wide parallel avenues are to run north and south and wide boulevards east and west. All blocks and squares are to be geometrical. This is an astonishing departure from the pig-path streets of the other native cities. The three cities at the junction of the Han and Yangtze Rivers, Hankau, Hanyang and Wuchang, are one metropolitan district, as are Brooklyn, New York and Jersey City. At Wuchang, in the barracks of the Eighth Division, the revolution actually broke out in force, as far as the regular army was concerned, on October 10, 1911, before it extended to Hankau. Wuchang was the headquarters of the famous Viceroy Chang Chih Tung, the first of the conservative progressives, and one of the three viceroy props of the Dowager Tse Hsi’s throne for thirty-five years. He was the most honorable old-style mandarin that ever ruled the provinces of China. The city is walled and is divided by Serpent Hill, which will be tunneled. It has long been an educational center, the provincial native university and modern schools being located here. Bishop Roots, of the Ohio Episcopalians, founded the noted Boone University at Wuchang, and the New York Episcopalians have St. Hilda’s Girls’ School. Stokes and Thomas Hall, of Boone University, have Ionic Greek porticoes, which look out of place in ornate warm China. The university draws its pay pupils from the rich merchants and officials of Hankau. There is also the Griffith John College of the London Mission, a normal school of the American Baptists, a Swedish college; and Lord Cecil and Oxford and Cambridge Universities propose to start their great university here. It is a garrison and arsenal city, and is famous for its bronzes and pagodas. On Flower Hill stands the famous three-story pagoda. The German firm of Carlowitz has established an antimony smelter, and there are extensive cotton mills, some of them now owned by Japanese bankers. This red earth province is famous for its minerals, silk, tea, cotton, paper, wax and particularly for the political independence of its inhabitants, as the Eighth Division has immortally recorded in history.
Hanyang, a mile across the river, has the famous steel plant established by Chang Chih Tung. It is becoming one of the most important steel plants in the world, and Japan and Western America will not call upon it in vain, as they are indeed now doing. Dock yards will doubtless be established also. The American Baptists have a large hospital at Hanyang. Hanyang has an arms manufactory, a cannon foundry and a powder mill.
Much of Hankau was burned by those firebrands, the Imperial Third Division, under General Feng, in November, 1911, a deed which the south will never forget, if they ever forgive, as it was entirely unnecessary. Many millions of property were destroyed in a land which economically can not well afford the loss of one cent. The great city, which numbered over a million inhabitants, will be rebuilt on the high banks sixty feet above winter level of the two rivers. The river rises over forty feet in summer. The Anglicans have established the church of St. John the Evangelist, and the American Episcopalians have St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s churches. There are fine clubs, a race and a golf course, a foreign volunteer organization which has seen much active service. There is also an English newspaper, the Central China Post, and many native papers. The Russians are prominent because of their tea trade. The steamship service is steadily growing, Hankau being at the head of steamship navigation. Lighter boats are taken for Ichang. The railway connects with Peking, and soon railways will run south, east and west, and a bridge will cross the Yangtze River on the road to Canton and Singapore. The Deutsche-Asiatische Bank, the Russo-Asiatique Bank, other foreign banks, consulates and foreign traders, are housed palatially. The great walled city is the most famous in China for its trade and provincial guilds. As in old London, the trades have gathered on one street, or in one district. Hankau is and will be the trade and industrial hub, the Chicago of China, and here foreign firms should locate without delay. The pioneer names connected with Hankau are Bishop Ingle, whose splendid tomb can be seen in the foreign cemetery, and Archibald Little, the explorer, author, tea trader, and the first foreigner to run a steamer from Hankau to Chungking through the terrific rapids of the glorious gorges between Ichang and Wan Hsien.
Ichang is the advance post on the Yangtze for the commercial attack on the Chingtu, Chungking and far western trade. It is at the head of navigation, and is sending out its railway to conquer the gorges and rapids. There is a walled riverine city up seventy feet of stairs; a foreign settlement; golf course, to be sure; Episcopal trade schools; clubs; consulates; Established Church of Scotland Mission; interesting temples and pagodas. Ichang has for immemorial years been the headquarters of perhaps the bravest boatmen in the world, the Hupeh trackers and sailors of the gorges. Read a hundred books of travel and you have their story. Here also is the headquarters of China’s red life-boat service, an effective and daring company of men. Hupeh can point with pride to such material in brawn and courage, on which to build a provincial parliament or assembly. There are notable guilds in Ichang.
Chifu, on the gulf of Pechili, is a noted bathing resort for foreigners from all over the Far East. There is a splendid foreign quarter, with a well-appointed club, churches and hotels. The view of the many cone-shaped purple hills, the bluest of seas and yellowest of sands, will not quickly be forgotten. There are islands which invite boating, such as Temple and Lighthouse Islands. The finest fruit in China, such as grapes, pears and apples, is grown at Chifu. The stock was brought from America by Doctor Nevius and other missionaries in the 80’s. There is also a tree-cranberry, the Red Fruit (Hung Kwo). Worms, fed on oak leaves, produce the famous tough Chifu silk, which is as popular in China as abroad. Chifu was known for its blockade runners in the Russian-Japan War of 1904–5. In the famous engagement of August, 1904, several Russian warships from Port Arthur broke through Admiral Togo’s iron-bound investiture, and reached Chifu, but the Japanese broke in, and despite international law, abducted the Russian torpedo boat destroyer Reshitelni. The other Russian vessels they torpedoed in the Chinese harbor. Chifu has a naval college of modern equipment. The district produces straw braid in great quantities for the hats of the fashionable women of the world, and her other products of beans, peanuts and vegetable oils are well known. Gold and coal are found near by, and many vessels call for coaling. Missionary societies are active, and have a wide opportunity, for this is the home province of Confucius and Mencius, and the inhabitants have a literary, political and inquiring turn of mind. The Chinese of Chifu are noted for their height, as compared with the busy little men of the southern provinces, whom we know in America and Britain. Many of them emigrated to South Africa in 1904 for a six years’ indenture, when they were all returned. Chifu is to have railway connection with the German and Chinese roads to the south and west. The city went over to the revolutionists on November 10, 1911, and a republican column, reinforced by the republican navy, operated from here against the imperialists at the capital, Tsinan. Not far from Chifu, at Wei Hai Wei, the British keep a strong garrison on China’s soil.
Tsingtau, in Shangtung province, is a German port, and a colonial experiment which has attracted much attention because of the experiment of Henry George’s “single-tax-on-land” plan, in its effort to attract improvers of land, and spread out, instead of congest cities. In 1898 the Germans forced a lease of it at the same time that Russia occupied Manchuria. The Japanese drove the Russians out of Manchuria, which they have largely occupied themselves, treaties notwithstanding, but no one has driven the Germans out of Shangtung, the most sacred of the provinces of China. It was largely this German seizure that precipitated the “Boxer” massacres in 1900 under the secret instigation of the Empress Tse Hsi. The port and main colony is two hundred square miles in area, but the most remarkable (the only one of its kind except that of the Japanese in southern Manchuria) concession is that of sixty miles wide and two hundred and fifty miles long from the port back inland to Tsinan, the illustrious capital of the province, which dates back to 1100 B. C. Through this land the Germans have built a strategic railway, by which they could cut off communication between the northern and southern provinces. The Chinese have never forgiven and will never forgive this affront. It is therefore one of China’s many unsettled questions. The bay is fifteen miles long by fifteen miles wide, surrounded by hills from 1,500 to 3,000 feet high, on which the Germans have planted forests in fine style. The ocean boulevard is one of the five most scenic roads in the East, the others being Hongkong’s Jubilee Road, Macao’s Cacilhas Bay Boulevard and the Manila Luneta and Baguio Roads in the Philippines. The entrance to the commercial harbor at Ta Pu Tao is two miles wide. Fortifications, docks, godowns, railways with patented iron sleepers, hotels, banks, hospitals, statues, magnificent homes, educational institutions for both Germans and Chinese, have all been set out in characteristic German methods. It was by this railway that the imperial troops were provisioned in November, 1911, when the revolutionists had cut off their ammunition at Shanghai, Hanyang and Nanking arsenals, and the Chinese have not forgotten this, claiming that with all their criticism of the “Yellow Peril” the German foreign office, at the beginning of the revolution, was at heart pro-Manchu. The port was made a free port on the pattern of Hongkong, and while a larger trade has developed, Tientsin (with her port, Taku) holds her place in the competition. Without the railway to Tsinan, Tsingtau could not hold her own as a shipping center.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Spirited photograph of the turning tide, Pearl River, Canton. Speedy slipper boats, sanpans, junks; modern steam launch. These launches are rapidly transforming China’s transportation in the south.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Wider maloos, or roads, are being broken through the cities by tearing down the shops on one side of the way.
Copyright, American Episcopal Church, Foreign Board, N. Y.
A vigorous game of Association football at Boone (American) University, Wuchang, Central China. Note the interested crowds.
The sympathy between the natives and the foreigner which exists at Newchwang, Tientsin, Shanghai and Hongkong, is lacking at stern, military, exotic Tsingtau. Yet the Germans have set a splendid object lesson in the precision and strength of the Tsingtau municipal establishment. The fine German navy is always in evidence, and the finer German army is everywhere. Many German industries have been established, and are run with as grim a determination, being backed by the “syndicates”, when they are losing money as when they are making it. German merchants seem to thrive better, and prefer to keep their stocks at the many international settlements, where trade has followed natural channels. The coal wealth at Poshan and elsewhere, which the German railway has developed, is enormous, but the Chinese are bitter that the profits, on the principle of “all the traffic will bear”, all go to Germany and not to China. It is noticeable, in contrast with the British occupation of Hongkong and other colonies, that the Germans have not kept the Chinese names for the hills and bays. Tsingtau has splendid rail and ship connection north and south. Among the exports to Europe are the famous silk and straw braid of the province, egg products, black pigs, coal, wheat, millet, sorghum, maize, beans in particular, peas, hemp, copper, iron, antimony, asbestos, silver, sulphur, gold, rugs, the famous liu-li vitreous crockery of wonderful colors, castor oil, peanuts, fruit of excellent quality, etc. Years ago the German gunboat Iltis was lost in a typhoon while trying to make this port, where the Germans were later to establish themselves in a rivalry with Russia’s aggression in Manchuria.
Tientsin, the great port of Peking, is another concession city, where the various nations keep their civilizations and military and naval forces bright for the inspection of the Chinese, who live contiguous in a walled city, where Li Hung Chang and his protégé, Yuan Shi Kai, made their names famous as viceroys and intermediaries between Orient and Occident. The city is at the head of the historic Grand Canal. Its river, the Pei Ho, runs up toward Peking. It has splendid railway connection west, south and north. The national railways of North China are managed here under the direction of Jeme Tien, Doctor Wang and Chang Kee, with foreign advisers like Mr. Kinder and Mr. Pope available. Rich coal mines, especially the famous old Kaiping, are near, and there is a vast export of this product, as well as of carpet wool, camel’s hair, camel’s-hair rugs, jujube preserves, etc., for the world. As it is a most important banking center, a great amount of gold is handled. Concessionaires have flocked here, eager for privileges, and the game has opened anew. Foreign troops have grounded their arms here more than at any international port in China.
On account of its flat surroundings, Tientsin is the least picturesque city of China. There is a recreation ground, Victoria Gardens, native gardens, a race course around a graveyard, a jockey club, much society, naval and military life, theatricals, and facilities for the many athletic, swimming, boating and skating clubs. Except in summer the climate is charmingly dry; the wind and sand storms are greatly feared, however. The loess dust is as penetrating as the alkali dust of Arizona. A British military cemetery has many melancholy monuments of the foreigner’s occupation of an alien land, where disease and the casualties of many famous bombardments have mowed down their costly toll. There are electric cars, electric light, gas and water plants, fine clubs, churches, consulates, missions, a Y. M. C. A., the magnificent Gordon Hall, science and military colleges of the best, hospitals, native and foreign schools of all grades, excellent roads like the bund and Tai Ku, fine fur, silk and pottery shops. The English newspapers like the Times and China Critic are important, and many Chinese papers like the Ching Wei Po are very influential in the coming New China. There is much foreign military music, and the natives are learning the delightful art, the viceroy’s band already being clever. Many Chinese have made their names here under foreign tutorship, Yuan Shih Kai and Tang Shao Yi, for instance; and Li Hung Chang held forth here in his yamen on the river bank in his most influential days. The Pei Yang University is the best native modern university in China. The medical school trains with foreign help, what China needs most at the moment, native physicians and nurses. The port, more than any other, has for many years had a restraining influence on the Manchus. Without it, no one knows what the reactionary dynasty would have promulgated in the way of edicts. Tientsin is interesting for its wonderful colored clay images, its excellent rugs, its salt heaps, its fish-pies and hot potato pedlers, who shout their goods along “Eternal Prosperity” and other native streets. There is interesting French life on the Tai Ku Road in the French settlement. The native walled city is a model in Chinese municipal government, as far as activity and order, but not so far as beauty is concerned. Among the many steamship lines, the native China Merchants (a government line) has a branch here. A Conservancy Board has much work cut out for it by the Pei Ho bar which hampers the growing shipping. The National Chinese Posts and Telegraphs have branches. There are native temples, and mosques for the Mohammedan Chinese, who have absorbed the old Honan Jewish Chinese. Tientsin is very hot, and the summer resort for bathing is up the coast of Pechili Gulf at Pei-Tai-Ho, where the Great Wall meets the sea. This is the water resort also for the Pekingese foreigner and foreignized native.
There is much industrial activity, and Tientsin, with its million of inhabitants, will be a great center for the import of machinery for the rich provinces of Pechili and Shansi and the vast territory of Mongolia, as it will also be the port for the mining and agricultural wealth of those rich provinces, including chilled meats, millet, sugar, flour, wheat, beans, fruit, nuts, skins, furs, vegetable oils, ores, etc. In some respects the possible new ports of Chin Wang Tao, Chung How So, and Jinkow, on the Gulf of Pechili, could compete with Tientsin. The Peking (British) Syndicate, of Shansi, and the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, of Pechili, with their immense capitalization of $6,000,000 and $5,000,000, respectively, operate and make loans from Tientsin, and, as in all the ports, there are many land, coal, iron and milling companies, in which Chinese have shares. The tendency is to grant fewer franchises to foreigners, and let the Chinese exploit their own wealth in mines, transportation and public service, buying only from the foreigner the necessary machinery, and paying only to the foreigner a proper interest for loans, instead of the immense bonuses and concessions that have often been obtained. The tendency to water the stock of public service corporations and monopolies so as to hide the immense earnings from an overcharged public is creeping into China, and will be attacked by a courageous and indefatigable government. Tientsin is one of the two places (Peking being the other) from which it is most convenient for tourists to set out to see the Great Wall of China, the world’s grandest monument. The railway takes the tourist about one hundred and twenty miles along the Pechili coast to Shan Hai Kwan, where the wall meets the sea, and turning back climbs the vast mountain ranges, to the speechless wonder of the sightseer. One of the Chinese proverbs on this subject is: “Those who have seen least, stare most!” There are more Jews (not the lost colonies of Chinese Jews absorbed by the Chinese Mohammedans of Honan, Kwangtung and Kansu provinces) in business at Tientsin than at any port in China, not excepting Hongkong. In the warehouse of the American Trading Company, at Tientsin, six hundred men of the Fifteenth United States Infantry were quartered in the stormy days of the first months of 1912.
Peking stands at the end of the great seacoast plain as you go up from Tientsin by railway or by boat. Beyond rise the Hsi Shan (Western Mountains) and the Mongolian plateau and mountains. It is the most expansive city in the republic, because it is more built up than spacious Nanking; a court, a legation, a trading, an art, an educational, a health center in autumn, a military, but not a manufacturing center as yet, though it will be. It is more Mongolian and Manchu, perhaps, than pure Han Chinese. It is splendidly laid out, and with drainage and paved roads will attract fine equipages and even greater wealth than now resorts there. It has a water system, electric light, telephone, telegraph and railway service, wireless connection with the coast, a modern railway station at the famous Chien Men gate. Its fine Gothic Pe-Tang Cathedral, strangely within the purple imperial city, with its spires, looks as though it had been transported from France. Its porcelain temples are centers of wealth, if not of zeal and history. Its monuments, especially the city wall and gates, are the noblest. Its pavilions, like those in the late emperor’s garden, are the most artistic in the land. It is comparatively modern among the cities and capitals of China, going back only to 1150 A. D. as a provincial and national center. Coleridge has sung of the city. Kublai Khan, Marco Polo’s protector, was its first great emperor. The creator of Ming monuments, the artistic Yung Lo, is its next greatest emperor, and it was he who gave the present stamp to Peking. Its most illustrious Manchu emperor was Kang Hi, the potter, to whom Louis XIV. of France, signed himself as “your most dear and good friend, Louis.” The city is laid out on the plan of an immense Mongol camp of the plains, defense line within defense line three times, and not unlike Cæsar’s plans when on the march. The trading section of the city is filled with an immense gathering of camel, mule and pony trains, and the new railways bring coal from east and south. A master hand could turn the great camp into a hive of modern industry. Some day, perhaps soon, that will occur. The Peking market is well supplied by the Mongols of the plateau and the farmers of the Pechili plain, not to speak of what railways, canals and roads bring in from all points. More races and varied costumes are seen at Peking than at any other city, and the teak-barred shops are treasure houses. The Tartar city faces the north and in its center is the Forbidden, or Purple City, of the old Manchu court. Between the wall of the latter and the south wall of the Tartar city are the Wai Wu (Foreign Office), legations, hotels, railway station, banks, churches, missions, universities, hospitals, clubs, newspaper offices, shops, etc., all saying, according to the conservative Hanlin Chinese, in the words of our Belle of New York, “Of course you can never be like me, but be as like me as you’re able to be”. The union of Protestant medical missions at Peking, so as to form a hospital, medical college and nurses’ school of wide scope, has attracted nation-wide and world-wide attention. The beginning of the unifying of Protestants thus takes place effectively in the capital of oldest China, instead of at Geneva, Berlin, London or New York.
How much of the modern and the old, the Oriental and the Occidental, are mixed up in this wonderful city? There are modern steam rollers; donkey and camel trains, blue-turbaned couriers on Mongol ponies; springless, hooded Peking carts, the mule wearing a velvet cloth; bouncing mule litters; camel trains swaying up and down like the billows of the Yellow Sea; modern water tanks borne by steel towers; a modern zoo with a dragon-carved gate; automobiles; victorias drawn by swift Mongol or black Szechuen ponies; Russian droshkes drawn by three ponies going different paces; men tugging single-axle carts by long ropes and harness; coolies with baskets and boxes balanced from the bamboos on their sweating shoulders; wheelbarrow men transporting huge bags of millet or salt; men throwing water on the streets with big wooden spoons; rickshaws, and passenger chairs with ventilators and windows. There is a great military camp outside the walls. In the Portuguese cemetery outside of the west gate lie the famous Jesuits who nearly made the Manchu dynasty Catholic in Kang Hi’s day. In the revered British cemetery lie the bodies of the famous pioneers of our race, who, during the centuries, have fought forward the most advanced line of our civilization. Many of the graves and memorials, the trees and walls were desecrated in the “Boxer” outrages of 1900. There is a cemetery for that notorious tribe of palace eunuchs in the northwest of the Tartar city, and sons had to be bought, or “forged” for them so as to pay the necessary grave worship of Confucianism. There is the new Peking Club, the second in cost in the Far East; the Tsung Hua College, which trains students who are to go to America and England; and where the old examination stalls and the Hanlin College stood under the ancient “literati” system, are the modern parliament buildings (Tzu Cheng Yuan); also National University, and the Wai Wu Pu (Foreign Office) halls, where Yuan Shih Kai had his headquarters in the exciting days of 1911–12. Towering over the Tartar city are the Gothic towers of the French Pe Tang Cathedral, which was successfully defended by Bishop Favier during the 1900 siege. The white marble pailoo arch to the German ambassador, who was assassinated in 1900, is notable, as are also numerous other marble, porcelain and painted arches, and marble bridges, balustrades and statues of lions. The statue to the German was erected under foreign compulsion and is hated. The wonderful street bazaars of Chien Men gate, Lung Fu Temple Street, wide Kaiser Street; the important Methodist and Union Hospitals of Hatamen Street; Legation, Tsung Pu, Tung Tan, Liu Li, Koulan, Butcher, Fan Tan, Lantern, Jadestone, Bamboo, Meridian and other leading streets should be visited. There is a Peking Tiffany; the firm name is Hsing Lung Tien. The city’s kilns and weavers are famous for their porcelain, cloisonné and tapestries. Pedlers, however, bring almost everything, from the cheapest to the costliest, to one’s door. There are many native papers like the influential Chun Kuo Pao.
Some of the legations have been rebuilt since the 1900 siege, the Americans in particular occupying near the Chien Men gate a series of costly, but not architecturally proper buildings for artistic China. The British legation near the Wu Men gate is notable for two reasons: because it occupies Duke Liang’s Chinese palace, and because its compound was the center of the foreigners’ quarters in the Peking siege of 1900. The French legation rented Duke Tsin’s palace. In the sacred urns in the Temple Park in the south of the Chinese city, the bodies of the Sikh soldiers, who died or were killed in the 1900 siege, were cremated. The Art Gallery in the imperial city is of particular interest. The Lama (Tibet Buddhist) Temple, with its ornate pailoo arch, should be seen. The priests wear orthodox yellow robes and hats, and a red cloak with squares, which represent the rags of poverty as realistically as art cares to go. There is an immense statue of Buddha, and some small obscene statues which have been draped by the request of the legations, to the great and joyful surprise of the priests, who have discovered that they are now able to make more money in fees than when the statues were undraped, so perverse is tourist curiosity! A walk on the walls should not be neglected, especially where, between the Chien Men and Hata Men gates the American, British and other foreigners made their long stand in 1900. The ponderous fort-temples on the walls, with their interesting exhibit of columns and galleries, are characteristic. Red is the color of the Chinese, yellow and green the color of the Manchus, and the tiling of the roofs indicates where each predominates.
Peking has its many military memories. In 1900 the Ninth and Fourteenth Infantry, the Sixth Cavalry and the Marines of the cruiser Newark of the Americans fought their way here from the coast in General Gaselee’s union column of relief. The Wei-Hai-Wei Regiment of British Chinese in blue and white, came, too, with quotas from the forces of France, Germany, Russia and Japan. The Sun Wui Club brings leading Chinese and Occidentals together; that is, those Occidentals who have a maximum of good sense and national ambition and a minimum of out-of-date, insular “snobbery”. We once had a similar international club in Canton, which did good work in destroying difference and welding approximation. The Russian Mission in the Pei Kwan section of Peking is almost the only effort of the vast Greek Church to missionize China. Good music is now available, for both the National Customs and native armies, and all the foreign legations have trained bands, and there are some orchestras. The Union Medical College and Hospital on Hatamen Street is most notable, not only because of its effectiveness, but because the various evangelical denominations have first united in far away China. Some writers, like Lord Salisbury’s son, Lord Cecil, think this is the forerunner of union elsewhere. The example has been copied generally in China, as at Nanking, Tsinan, Canton, etc., and before long all medical, hospital and teaching work will be on the union plan in all the large centers. The Chinese are eager to assist, and join in with a whole heart. Reform started in Peking in 1898, when Kang Yu Wei and other Cantonese, trained at Hongkong, got the ear of the Manchu emperor, Kwang Hsu, and induced him to issue the famous reform edicts.
The peony gardens are notable, and the courts and gardens of the many temples, inside and outside of the walls, exhibit many horticultural treasures, but Northern China in general is more notable for wild flowers than hothouse products. There are Manchu tombs, and the Manchu palaces and gardens of Yuan Ming, Wan Shou and Ih Ho to the northwest to visit, and temples in the western hills, where the foreigners resort during the blazing summer of the plains, if they do not care to take the railway down to the bathing resort of Pei Tai Ho, or Chifu. The scenic railway running north takes one to the glorious Nankou pass in the Great Wall and to the Ming tombs. The station is at Liu Tsin outside the walls. To the northwest are the villages where the Manchu pensioners or bannermen were kept in idleness, which was one cause of the 1911 rebellion. As in many of the Chinese cities, there is a clepsydra water clock to be seen. Mints, banks, engraving plants, printing presses, electricity, modern water-works; primary, intermediate, trade and high schools, have all come to the reforming capital. There have been large hoards of bullion in the imperial city. The empress dowager, Tse Hsi, left many millions of silver, which were used to run the government for weeks during the rebellion in 1911–12. This money was collected by the eunuchs, compelling every official to pay for his daylight audience and honors, and crimes were “planted” on officials so as to have the excuse of fining them and thus adding to the Manchus’ imperial reserve. Great granaries exist where the tribute rice from the southern provinces was stored for a million or more subsidized Manchu soldiers and hangers-on. This rice formerly came to Tientsin and Peking by the Grand Canal and Pei Ho River. It was later brought north, through Li Hung Chang’s intervention, by the China Merchants’ Steamship Company, in which the government held the majority of the shares. The history of spying, intriguing, concession-hunting and diplomatic contests swells its largest at Peking, and old Legation Street and the Wai Wu Pu have heard perhaps more secret stories than any other diplomatic quarter of the world. Men of all nations, Manchus and Chinese, eunuchs, women, human parrots, dictographs secretly placed, waste-paper baskets, keys to private codes, the kitchen cabinet, keyhole sentinels, tapped telephone wires, field-glasses masked behind curtains, letter sweaters and those adders in the bosom, society detectives, have all had their part in the old Peking game of intrigue. Foreign trusts have come over the water to battle with local distrusts! Understanding has not always honestly wooed misunderstanding. Evasion has alternately successfully and unsuccessfully battled with invasion. “When is a promise not a promise” has been answered by, “At Peking, on both sides of the ethnological pale”.
Culture, learning, fashion and fools have often mixed in the drawing-rooms which face Legation, Meridian and Great Wall Streets. In dignity, the National Customs Service, managed by foreigners, takes its way somewhat apart on Koulan Street. With the British Legal, it is the best civil service in the Far East, the other legations depending in various degrees upon missionaries for their knowledge of Chinese. The American legation in recent years has equipped its staff with student interpreters. Foreigners learn attachment for the life, as their wits are kept at work. It has been a wonderful capital in exciting life, as it is in physical appearance. Foreign press bureaus have vied with one another in sending out men fitted to obtain privileged information. In summer, the working Pekingese throws away all the clothes that the law will allow; in winter, he puts on so many cotton-wadded coats that he looks like a balloon ready to ascend, if he were not weighted with a charcoal brazier tucked under his coat or up his sleeve. He has a stone or brick kang (stove), but he must lie close to it to get its meager warmth. He, therefore, uses it for a bed, and so does the whole insect race, who make it warm for him, even if the brick stove does not. When the schoolboy wrote his ambiguous essay that “crowded China is too thickly populated to be comfortable”, he may, therefore, have referred to other inhabitants than the men and women. The furs of Peking are famous, and many black chow-dog farms have been started in Mongolia to supply the foreign fur markets. Peking has been so looted by war and by collectors of its ceramic prizes that the shops and potteries of Liu Li Street contain less that is valuable than the museums of America and Europe. For the ordinary traveler who wants something beautiful, even if it is not old, there are thousands of shops and bazaar tables that display their tempting wares. As China reforms, and art is not sweated out of the provinces by grasping officials and courtiers, the traveler will be able to follow his quest back to the many old centers of production in the central and southern provinces; and this will be better for art, and better for the traveler. The whole nation used to tremble when an official, dowager, baby emperor, prince, regent, etc., had a birthday or one of their various anniversaries, because it meant that jade, jewels, costly furniture, tapestries, porcelain, etc., must prove the sincerity of congratulations, and as we fill the papier-mâché rabbit with candies on Easter Day the vase had to be filled with coins of worth. These presents were no sooner received than they were pawned by the indigent Manchus to the shopkeepers of Peking, or they were stolen and sold by the palace eunuchs. The Chinese system of keeping art in drawers instead of in glassed cabinets, in view, aided this thievery, for the rascally eunuchs were not soon found out.
Many wonderful stories are told of the mysterious ceremonies of the Manchu court at night; how soldiers suddenly lined Meridian Street, and no Chinese could leave his house but on pain of death. Then the Wu Men gate of the Forbidden City was thrown open under the smoking torches, and the pale Emperor Kwang Hsu was carried forth, robed in yellow, and his courtiers in red, gold and blue. Down Meridian Street they noiselessly marched southward, the soldiers turning volte-face along the street. The Chien Men gate into the Chinese city was thrown open, and through its Meridian Street the procession continued south for two miles to the temples and the open altar of Heaven, where midnight sacrifices of a black bullock, burned silk, grain and wine were made; a worship as old and as simple as that of the patriarchial days of Abraham. It was the worship of the ancestral Chou clan, which Confucius chronicled and the Manchu adopted so as to keep himself in veneration; and this right of sacrifice he has maintained in his abdication. The Pope Mikado has also retained his right to make similar sacrifices. Surely if the main hold on eastern peoples is to be a superstitious one, it is not so strong a hold as the republicans of China intend to set up in the minds and hearts of the new nation. God’s name was simply called “Tien”; i. e., heaven or sky. Then the procession hurried back long before the non-Manchus were awake. Other mysterious things happened in the night. The Wu Men gate was opened, and all courtiers and ministers then alone had their audience with the screened crown head. During the long regency of the Dowager Empress Tse Hsi and her predecessors, China was a land ruled by midnight decisions, and justice was as dark as the muffled and mysterious hour. Executions of the prominent were held at night on the common Meridian Road, which had been blocked off by soldiers. You never know at Peking when your passenger cart is standing over the altar of a life which was persecuted and sacrificed for opinion’s sake. No wonder that the Chinese, like other long-suffering reformers, are saying under their breath: “We have had enough of ‘plants’ and deeds done in darkness; let there be light.”
This wonderful walled capital of Mongol, Ming and Manchu dynasties, is not so old as the Great Wall of China, for it has been rebuilt several times, the imperial portion being about 1,000 years older than the inferior Chinese section to the south. It was as though the Chinese traders camped before the southern Chien Men gate to supply the Manchu court, and the Emperor Kia Tsing rose up and said: “Let us now take thought, and throw a wide wall around our purveyors’ bazaars also.” There is only one good thing about absolutism; i. e., to say is to do, and it was done. Peking has had many rivals as the capital of China: Nanking, the southern capital of the Mings, in particular; Hangchow, of the Sungs; and Canton, Wuchang, Chingtu and Shanghai have all put in their claims and maintained their flag in the breeze for a regal season. Geographically and strategically, Chingtu would be the proper capital of a united nation, and Wuchang would be almost as central and afford better trading facilities, a London of China, but it would not be so strong a strategic center. From a Chinese republican point of view, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai are foremost in their claims. Peking is weak because it is always within striking distance of Russia’s and Japan’s mighty armies. Almost alone of the world’s capitals, it is not at the water’s edge.
There are temples to nearly everything in Peking, a “Brooklyn of Churches”, but most of the altars this time are heathen: temples to Buddhas, sleeping in Nirvana, recumbent in Cingalese style; a splendid Lama Temple with wonderful carvings in wood and stone; God of War; Confucian; Taoist; Catholic Cathedral; Evangelical of every denomination of the three Protestant nations; Mohammedan mosques; God of Literature; God of Fox; Russian Greek Church; Portuguese Church; shrines over Buddha’s skin, teeth and a score of other things; Ancestral temples; Altars of the Sun, Moon, and Gods of Grain and Rain; temples to Buddha’s mother, and Gods of Success, and “World Peace” (not the recent invention of an armed peace!); Gods of Title Deeds, Dragons, Wind and Water, the North Star; Gods of Dead Elephants and Strong Tigers, etc. When the jolly men of Canton and another southern city heard of all this, glorious humorists that they are, they said they could “go it one better”. They erected with a rush a “Temple to Ten Thousand Gods”, all of whom look alike, even the images named for Marco Polo and “Chinese” Gordon. Chided with all this, a humorous Cantonese retorted: “Well, haven’t you Occidentals an Eden Musée and Madame Tussaud’s wax works; don’t take our idols as seriously as you do the Indian ones.” There are superbly carved marble dagobas in the Lama and Pi-Un-Se Temples. The Peking Lama is second in authority in the Buddhist world, and since General Chao Ehr Feng drove the Dalai Lama out of Tibet into India, the Peking Lama has now probably most power in the Buddhist world. The Pali Chuan pagoda outside the west wall is the most ornate in China. Burmese Buddhists brought their art influence thus far north, and under patronage of the Ming emperors cast it up like a pearl wrecked upon a barren shore; for the Manchu, who succeeded in the dynasty, is not an architect nor an artist. He has had to call in Chinese, Indian, Persian, Mohammedan and Jesuit architects from time to time to adorn his capitals and his graveyards at Mukden and Peking. There are towering, priceless bronze censers; stone and metal tablets; delightful octagonal marble mausoleums with circular second stories, topped with conic fluted roof, which is copied from the perfect act of the incomparable blue Temple of Heaven, and like the second story of the divinely beautiful choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens. In his book, The Chinese, the author has referred to many other similarities between Greek and Chinese art and architecture, which are as wonderful as the dissimilarities. The ponderous gate forts, Manchu Drum and Ming Bell towers, with the largest bells in the world, sixteen feet high and nine inches thick, and the delightful compound or palace gates, are notable. The Buddhists have bell and statue foundries in the Tartar city, and there are potteries for dainty cloisonné. There are said to be some lost Jewish Chinese at Peking, as at Kaifong. They are now butchers, and worship with the Mohammedans, having lost nearly all their religious, if not their phrenological distinction long ago. What proof is stronger that the phylacteries of any conviction should be worn day and night on the forehead, as well as engraven on the heart, “lest we forget”. The trees and lakes of the city and suburbs are conspicuous, because all Chinese buildings, except pagodas, are not over two stories in height, and do not dwarf the lovely landscape.
There is one dead foreign city in China, Cathay’s “Deserted Village”, immortal Port Arthur. Where are now the streets of palatial Renaissance palaces which eight years ago nestled under Golden Hill and lined the bund of the Eastern Port? Where are the massed battalions of Alexeieff’s troops, white-capped, white-tunicated and high-booted, which used to dress ranks on the broad parade ground behind Golden Hill? What stilled forever the music of the ringing glasses, drained of their sweet Roederer by gold-braided arms that lifted them quickly to harsh lips in Saratoff’s gay restaurant on the sunny bund? What hushed the song of the musée and Odessa ballet girls on the small stage in smoky Nicobadza’s Café in the New Town? Over the breakers that lash the Tiger’s Tail Peninsula do the ghosts of Admiral Makharov, the court painter, Verestchagin, and seven hundred and fifty others of the mine-sunk Petropavlovsk battleship still whisper their mournful names like a dirge of St. Andrew, as on that sad gray morning of April 4, 1904? Where are the battleships Sevastopol, Peresviet, Poltava and Nicolai, which used to lie safely under Golden Hill, while terrific war harmlessly hurled fire and shell from Kikwan Hill, Pigeon Bay, where we used to shoot snipe, and Wolf’s Hill? Surely they are not the salvaged and transformed Sagami, Tango, Iki, etc., flying now the rayed, red sun instead of the white, blue and red flag of St. Andrew. On second view, they certainly are; there are the high freeboard of a Baltic-built vessel of the Kronstadt navy-yard.
We search in vain for the newspaper office of Alexeieff’s official organ, the Novo Krai, and we miss from the gay bund the dashing team of the richest Chinese compradore army-purveyor, Chih Fun Tai, Esquire. The naval dockyard across the harbor from Golden Hill is, however, developed better than ever, though you can not get near it because of the watchful Japanese picket, unless you wish to be incarcerated under the international spy act! The fine white hospital buildings to the west of the inner harbor are also improved. The wrecking crews are still working with derricks and drags at the narrow harbor entrance only two hundred yards wide upon the rock-filled hulls which Captain Hirose, the Hobson of Japan, sank there at the cost of his life, under the fire of Golden Hill on a hazy morning in April, 1904, so as to cork up the navy of Russia and allow Togo to scour the seas with his British naval preceptor at his side on the bridge, instead of being held in blockading leash. Around the harbor tower the great forts of strategically essential 203 Metre Hill, stubborn North Hill, Kikwan Hill, Ehr Lung (Two Dragons) Hill, Sun Shu Hill, “H” fort, Palung Hill, and Wan Tai. Not a large tree waves on them, though some stubby firs for masking purposes are being set out stealthily. Everywhere is desolation; choked tunnels and saps underground, filled war galleries above ground, broken gun carriages, burst Krupp and Armstrong guns piled up in titanic wreckage. Heroic Kondrachenko and gallant Stoessel on one side, and Grant-like Nogi on the other, sowed the hundred valleys and hillsides hereabout with rusting bayonets, belt buckles, medals of glory and skulls of death. Thousands and thousands of men, known not by their names but by their number tag, like prisoners, dropped before the ruthless and fame-obliterating fire of range-fixed guns operating behind searchlights. It was the steady mowing of the grim reaper himself, until Nogi determined to reach Kondrachenko, and North and 203 Metre forts, underground instead of by bombardment and assault. Nickel-nosed bullets, soft-nosed spreaders, broken sabers, rusted buttons, bleaching bones, water cans, leather knapsack bottles, slowly rotting walnut rifle stocks, four-inch and eight-inch shells, camp-fire equipments, pots, match-boxes, frames that held sweetheart’s picture next the heart, star orders of the heathen emperor and cross decorations of the Holy Tsar of Peace (!), numbers that were tagged on the neck to take the place of the name of a man, breeches of quick-firing guns, barrels of Gatlings and Nordenfeldts, cartridge cases, porcelain saki bottles, metal clasps of Y. M. C. A. Bibles, all fill up these powder-upheaved furrows of Death, where not a Chinese building stands of the once beautiful Chinese suburbs.
Out of the historical hills and valleys wind the long parallel ribbons of the railway around the horseshoe bend of the Kwang Tung Peninsula, but no commercial traffic is now brought lower down than Dalny. A destroyed city indeed, a precious ice-free port of commerce and a sunny bund of society, deserted by force of arms, a secret base and a masked fort yet being silently strengthened. The fleet that holds the Pacific holds Port Arthur at its will, and the hand that holds Port Arthur can hold all China north of the Yangtze and up to the Amur River in its iron grasp, if there is a will and an exchequer to launch the force. Russia allowed commerce, travel and society to come with war to Port Arthur. Japan only allows war to mark time here. True, the Yamato Hotel is there yet, but it is exclusively for the garrison artillery life of the little brown men who by edict of government have given up sitting on mats that their legs may grow as tall as their minds and ambitions, despite Matthew 6:27. Whether there are Anglo-Japanese, Anglo-American, Sino-American, American-Japanese, Russo-Germanic, Anglo-French, or Four-Nation alliances or entente cordiales, this question will always come up: “Well, what about the deserted, shell-swept city of the Far East, the masked and granite fort, Port Arthur?”
What happened to Port Arthur can happen to any city of China north of Hongkong, unless China is put on her feet and has an army of defense. Under whose tutelage shall that force arise? Not a true man lives who wants to see another Dead City of the East. There this one stands, terrible to-day as eight years ago, the most terrific, oppressively silent, shell-blown, mine-scarred, tunnel-cut, war-cursed, sap-seared, skeleton-grinning, warped, agonized, Luciferian monument of bloody war that the world exhibits. Tuck it away in the toe of the Tiger’s Tail in far-away China, and let busy altruistic mankind, yellow and white, forget it. Forget it! Yes! but I hear the hammering and riveting, the cranking of the siege guns, the piling of the ammunition, the digging and blasting of the deep docks still going on. In the midst of peace and life we are yet in the midst of war and death. Yet the Dead City of the Far East, in dying, won something for progress; it checked the Russianization of China and the obliteration of China’s best son, Japan; it prevented the clash of Britain and Russia, and the eventual clash of America and Russia perhaps in the Philippines and Manchuria. It loosened a little the ruthless hand of the Russian oligarchy upon the neck of Dumas, and the Ochrana detectivization of the people. In dying, it brought some dangers, too, that a not sufficiently representative Japan would take the place of Russia in greed, and bring altruistic America upon her fleet; for the American people, loving freedom for all, and now writing text-books on that subject, are committed by John Hay’s “non-partition of China” policy to seeing that Japan stops her imperialistic expansion with the absorption of Korea, and that China, the Mother of the East, is left to pursue her new glorious destiny in peace, with no more of her sacred territory imperiled, until she can put liberty in free stride from the hot Tonquin border to the Amur’s ice-fringed rapids.
Newchwang, which means “ox depot”, is on the Liao River fifteen miles from the sea, Jinkow being its port. The bar permits of eighteen-foot draught, but could be dredged deeper. The river is icebound from November till April. The exports are beans, bean cake, bean oil, gold, silver, silk, black oxen, mutton, wool, wheat, kaoliang, little millet, pulse, spirits, tobacco, paper, lumber, furs. Coal and iron would be a heavy export if there was not railway discrimination on the part of the Japanese. The imports are flour, machinery, cotton, etc. There is an important foreign settlement, and foreign hongs should move their advance posts here for the attack on Manchurian trade. The city was invested by the Russians in 1898 and 1900, and the Japanese to-day are almost as active, having linked the city by railway with their Dalny line. They have established a Japanese settlement on the water-front, with hotels, hospitals, tea-houses, banks, etc. The Chinese national railways give a direct service north and south via Kinchow. Newchwang’s commerce is fed by the immense fleet of 20,000 junks of the Liao River, which gather cargo even north of Mukden. Perhaps the most celebrated British consul and diplomatist who has been stationed here is the author, A. H. Hosie. In the Japan-China War of 1894 a great battle was fought at Newchwang.
Mukden, the home city of the Manchu race, lies one hundred miles northeast of Newchang on the Shin River, a branch of the Liao River. It has connection with the Japanese and Chinese railway systems, and northward it connects with the Russian system. The stone and brick-walled inner city is one mile across; the outer wall, with eight double gates, is fourteen miles around, and there are important suburbs. It is a smaller Peking in plan. East of Mukden there are walled tombs of the Manchu emperors, and of Shun Chih and Narachu, the founders of the dynasty, which tombs suffered in the Russo-Japan War. A plain mound, with a growing tree upon it, covers the founder’s tomb. Winged griffins guard the southern gateway, which is so stern in architecture as hardly to suggest the Orient. There are the usual pailoo memorial arches, rising on the backs of tortoises, and two unique pillars with lions on top, which design is copied from the Ming emperors, whose throne the Manchus ravaged. The north gate oddly is single, and not triple in Chinese style, and is guarded by a plain, two-roofed pagoda. The court is stone laid. The main avenue of the tomb is guarded by monster statues of lions, camels, horses, elephants and warriors. The ancestral temple contains a tortoise which bears the tablets. Mourning houses, temples, stone screens and vases add to the ensemble.
The old Chung Cheng yellow-tiled palace is at the south gate of the city, and has been tenanted by notable and progressive viceroys, one of whom attempted to reconcile the Eastern and Western religions. The imperial palace, Wen So Ko, has the imperial library of 7,000 cases. Its rich museum of priceless bronzes, vases, tapestries, etc., was largely looted by the Manchu princes, who sold the treasures to the curio collectors who flocked like vultures to Peking in the financial troubles of the revolution. The Fei Lung Ko treasury is on the east side and the Hsiang Feng Ko treasury is on the west side. There is a modern Chinese commercial museum; the Yamato Hotel in the extensive Japanese section; a Japanese railway medical college; an Astor Hotel; a Chinese medical college; and the medical college of the Scotch Presbyterians outside the east gate, with which the noted author, Doctor J. Ross, is connected. Doctor Christie, of Mukden, was another hero of the terrific pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910–11. The usual favorite Fox Temple of the Manchu race is to be seen. There is a Taoist Temple of Hell, with horrible statues. The Temple to the God of Literature is the most beautiful in bare Manchuria, because of the artistic proportion of its walls, galleries, roofs and stairs; but the temple has little independent meaning, because the Manchus have absolutely no original literature, possessing in their perpendicular Syriac-like script only copies of Chinese literature.
Not only the Japanese are conspicuously in evidence; Russian droshkes are pulled at the gallop and trot along the Meridian Street of the Drum Tower. The unique tall shop signs are carved on pole and capital not unlike Alaskan totem poles. Differently from the cities of South China, many ponies and mules are seen on the street, and man is not here, as in Middle and South China, the beast of burden. The best frozen game, pork and mutton, and fish shops of China are in Mukden. Outside each angle of the walls is a Lama monument. Mukden is famous for its black pigs, many of which, frozen, are shipped to Liverpool and London markets. The Japanese have erected fine railway, administration, bank, school, etc., buildings in their settlement. The city has telephone, telegraph, electric light, mail and water service. Wen Hsiang, the most enlightened Manchu prince connected with international dealings with China at Peking in the Victorian age, was a Mukden man, and is buried near the east gate. The foreign settlement has the usual clubs and churches, a brewery, and a large modern concrete factory of the British-American Tobacco Company, for when opium went out the cigarette came in, in disgusted Cathay! The Chinese hotel is the Hai Tien Chun, near the entrance to the west gate. There are horse-tram railways, electric trams, a Chinese provincial mint, and great fur, skin and coal markets. Mukden will yet be a leading center for land, mine, agricultural, machinery, food and clothing interchange of the world, for rich, black-earth Manchuria is destined to be the granary of more soil-impoverished countries of the Pacific than China.
XXII
NATIVE CITIES OF CHINA
Singan or Sian (meaning “Chinese”), the capital of Shensi province, dates back to the twelfth century, B.C. The whole valley is full of the monuments, mounds and relics of kings of many ancient dynasties. As its name appropriately shows, Singan was the original capital of China, when the tribes first united in mutual recognition of kinship, and it is a shrine, therefore, appealing to antiquarians. Out on the plain the Emperor Tsin, builder of the Great Wall, “burned the books” of China, and buried the scholars under mounds of contumely. The most remarkable pyramidal pagoda in China lies beyond the south wall. It has seven stories, surmounted with a turban, and temple buildings with rich screens are attached. To this city the Empress Dowager Tse Hsi retreated from Peking in a springless cart over sunken loess roads before the march of the European allies and the American column in 1900. Its walls and large forts, filled with ports, are the oldest and best preserved of all Chinese cities.
The Bankers’ Guild building is famous for its many-pinnacled roof and ornate tiling. Its monuments relate the intellectual communion of China and India in the seventh century A. D. Very old buildings exhibit a four-leaf clover design in stone screens, and the fish-scale design in wooden and bamboo balustrades. There are wonderful gardens with pavilions and wavy stone bridges. Pailoos, bearing legends, are built over the entrance stairs to temples and guild houses. The square space within the walls is six miles long each way. One reason for its strong fortification is that it is in the Mohammedan section of China, and the Mohammedans are always rebelling. It withstood a Mohammedan siege of two years in 1870–1.
If Russia aimed to cut off eastern from western China, she would strike at Singan, as it is the strategic base which holds Turkestan, Tibet and Szechuen to the empire. Its trade is vast and various. From a religious and antiquarian point of view, hardly any Chinese city equals it in the interest of Occidentals, for here the famous Nestorian Tablet, dated 781 A.D., stands in the park of a heathen temple. This tablet records the communion of the earliest Chinese Christians. A copy of this supremely venerable and artistic stone was placed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1909. The National Library, Paris, has had a replica since 1850. The Pei Lin Park contains a library cut in 1,300 stone tablets; the “Stone Forest”, it is called. The city lies in a plain, and presents a striking appearance from the limestone and loess hills which surround it. In these hills, to the northwest, are cut the cave dwellings, temples and statues of prehistoric and early civilizations. In one cave temple is the sandstone and gilt colossal Ta-Fu-Tsze Buddha, fifty-six feet high, the largest statue in China, showing the tremendous zeal of the Buddhist movement in the brilliant Tang dynasty in the seventh century, when our Europe was in intellectual darkness. Two colossal statues of Buddha’s pupils are also in this temple.
The city presents a brilliant kaleidoscope of nationalities: Mohammedans with red turbans, Tartars wearing red panels; Mongols with blue turbans; high-booted, bewhiskered Russians; booted Tibetans; blue-gowned Chinese; yellow-robed Lamas; now and then a top-knotted aborigine; robed Manchus; and descendants of the original Tsin and Chou tribes of Chinese who came east to China from the cradle of the race, seated in the saddle of pioneer conquerors; and with the Hebrews, these Singan men can probably boast that they bring down the purest blood from the dispersion of Ararat. Descendants of kings and generals of many a dynasty now plough farms on the plain, and they will tell you: “Yes, I am the son of a king.” Near here the builder of the Great Wall, infinitely the greatest mason and military commander of history, the Emperor Tsin, 220 B. C., had his capital at Hsien Yang. His huge pyramidal mound, and other burial mounds, are among the world’s greatest curiosities. On the plain are the two unique marble arches, with four roofs, erected by Governor Lu to the memory of his mother and wife, in the China where some writers say women meet with no honor. A stone bridge of seventy arches over the Pa River, and the hot sulphur springs of Lin Tung, are notable. The round, instead of square stone piers, are unique in China, and show Moslem influence. Not all Chinese cities were without attention from the sanitary engineer. Old culverts and drains constructed by the ancient kings of the north exist in Singan and elsewhere, and some of the southern cities have drainage canals, sewage canals not being considered necessary, as the night-soil is collected for fertilization. China, however, is going to drain her cities so as to carry off expectoration and decaying matter. The smells which the tourist revolts at are not as dangerous as they seem, as opium, peculiar incense, and vegetable cooking oils, such as sesamum, peanut, bean, etc., contribute the most malodorous portion.
Chingtu stands in a wide plain in the heart of the vast empire. The walls are fifteen miles around, and the gates of these walls are never opened at night, except to the “chi” (government messengers). Either Chingtu or the Hankau cities will be the capital of the nation eventually. It is an intellectual center, and there are many publishing shops. Two rivers, the Min and To, border the plain, and are broken up into the widest system of irrigation canals that the world shows. No garden of the earth is so rich as this warm moist Eden. Every tree, herb and plant of the tropics and sub-tropics is raised, and more men are supported here to the acre than anywhere else in the world. It is the earth’s model school of intensive farming, and would delight the professors of the specializing University of Wisconsin! In the sandstone and loess hills are the cliff dwellings of prehistoric man. There are hundreds of bridges and ferries, many temples, arches, cemeteries and villages, the latter often populated by one family clan. The great walled city of a million inhabitants has the widest streets of any native city except Peking. There is a Tartar walled city within the Chinese city. The forts over the gates are of three stories. The loyal General Chao Ehr Feng, the hero of the Tibet campaign in 1910, held Chingtu for many months against the republicans in the fall of 1911.
The Provincial Assembly proclaimed reform in September, 1911, from a wonderful, circular, double-roofed temple in Chingtu. There is a large Mohammedan population, and mosques are therefore conspicuous. Marco Polo was a traveler here. There are wide Tartar parade grounds and rifle butts. The markets and fairs held in the temple grounds (religion and business being partners in China as in that Boston church that uses its basement for stores!) are the best in the empire. It is the splendid capital of the largest and richest province; a center of independent provincials who are crying “China for the Chinese.” It has a modern union university, which teaches English, science and Chinese; trade, military and girls’ schools; musk, silk, brass, salt, horn-lantern, oil, fur, spice, lace, porcelain, cotton and wool shops; a few iron shops; decorated yamen and guild halls. Its traveling kitchens, its porters and wheelbarrow brotherhoods are unique. One temple, erected to the Sheep-god in particular, is remarkable for two reasons: first, that it is a Taoist and not a Buddhist monastery: and second, that it is one of the finest examples of architecture in the empire. It is the beautiful Ching Yang Kung (Temple of the Golden Sheep) monastery outside the south gate. The Chu Ko Liang monastery, with its circular doors, is another chef-d’œuvre.
Many nations and faiths have missions here, and their medical schools and hospitals have won the hearts of the Chinese even ahead of their excellent schools. Chingtu is one of the centers that the Canadian missions have selected for special work. One meets many foreign engineers, and there are also native engineers. The climate is far more endurable for foreigners than that of South China at the seacoast. Many Lolo and Miaotse aborigine mountaineers, with their hair worn in a top-knot, are seen on the busy streets. Rice and wheat mills are being erected, and furniture, florist, book, bronze and picture stores abound. Chingtu will be the center of the commercial attack on rich Southeast Tibet, as the main pass of Ta Chien is not far away. Britain plans to link Chingtu to her Burmese and Indian railways by loaning the Chinese the necessary money. The Chingtu gentry started a railway to Ichang on the Yangtze River, and differences with the Peking authorities over the nationalization of this railway in September precipitated the October, 1911, rebellion at the Hankau cities. There is an arsenal, a mint, a military school and police barracks, the police being uniformed in modern style, with the addition of arms. The French are also in evidence at Chingtu, as they would like to run their railway up from Yunnan City. Railways are planned to run north to Singan, east to Ichang through exceedingly difficult country, south to Chungking, and west to Batang and Burma. Politically the Chingtu people are progressive and fearless like the men of Hupeh province, whence they came, as in 1644 Chang Hsien Chang depopulated Chingtu.
Chungking, the second city of vast Szechuen province, is a riverine port with a great future as a railway, boat, trading and manufacturing center; a future Pittsburgh, perhaps. It is built on a rocky peninsula just like Macao, the Yangtze and Kialing Rivers forming two sides, and a wall the third side of a triangle. From the hills outside the wall, the graves of the ages look down on the busy scene, as the carriers set out on the long stone road toward the capital, Chingtu. Chungking is famous for its water-gates, overhanging buildings propped over the rock with long poles. Some of its streets are exceptionally clean, wide and well paved. It is called the “piled-up” city, like the lower part of rocky Hongkong, the roof of one row of buildings being part of the street of the tier of buildings above. There is a great parade ground, and a military school by the land wall. The city is a center for fitting up expeditions which are bound for the prosperous capital in the north, the rich hilly south, or the wild west. Drugs, vegetable and mineral oils, water-proof paper, salt, coal, furs, iron, tea, lanterns, cement, agricultural products including sugar, bamboo, silk in particular, boat builders’ and chandlers’ supplies, placer and quartz gold, are all specialties of the district. Fine pagodas, with beautiful, up-curling galleries, overlook the river, and there are excellent “Li Pais” or mission compounds, and modern educational institutions. There are fine guilds, as one could expect of the Hupeh and Hunan province merchants, and the Ho Gai Monastery reveals a delightful touch of the old times. Beautiful pailoo arches span the roads. The Guild of Benevolence is famous for its extremely beautiful pavilions and terraces. As at all the riverine ports of the Yangtze, the great flights of wet stone stairs are characteristic. Chungking was once the second worst opium hell in the kingdom, but the people awoke to their danger in a wonderfully surprising way, and in the years from 1908–11 largely threw off the curse.
In Chungking the rebels of 1911 recruited many of their first patriots, and the first attacks were planned from here. The people are an earnest-looking set, yet the place for centuries, like its great winter mists which float down from Tibet, was the center of sorcery, superstition, fortune-telling and folk-lore. It was just the place to raise soothsayers, poets and astrologers. The only man who had a stronger wand like Aaron’s which swallowed up all the rest, was the American or British medical missionary, who by 1910 grew to be heartily beloved, so much so that every foreigner was welcomed by rich and poor, and implored to “come in here, see my art treasures, and (incidentally!) before you go won’t you please heal my child, my beloved and my old parent?” It was enough to make every traveler swear that if he returned home safely he would at once study medicine and come back to China as a physician of the body first, and the soul and economic state afterward. The boat people of the port are famous for their courage and skill, and the mountain coolies are noted for their endurance. Much of the blood of the race is from Hupeh, which means a strong strain of “China for the Chinese”. The city is surrounded with hills and ranges, and there are many mountain health resorts used by natives and foreigners, which are exceedingly welcome in the moist hot summer. There is the Golden Buddha range to the south, with its fine temples and many aborigine dwellers. Ho Ih Shan Mountain is to the north. The Gong Gorge is a scenic spot of great beauty. The British have a palatial consulate at Chungking, with a bungalow adjunct in the hills so as to afford escape from the terrific summer. This is the policy that the Hongkong Bank long ago instituted in China; mess quarters over the bank for winter occupancy, and airy bungalow quarters on Hongkong peak for summer occupancy. There are many Mohammedans in Chungking, and four of the industries which they control are bakeries, butcher shops, inns and common carrying.
Wuhu, on the Yangtze, half-way up to Hankau, is recovering from the blow dealt it by the Taipings in the 60’s. It will take a prominent place in the coming industrial China because of riches in land, mine, silk, tea and bamboo near it. It is one of the new strongholds in education and medicine under American and European auspices. It has a foreign colony in the hills. The Hwangchi River brings grain and produce down to its marts, and the great Yangtze sweeps by its harbor bund. Game, such as pheasant, quail and duck, abounds. There are very fine pagodas, and in particular a Buddhist rock temple with the figures of men, animals and birds cut solidly out of, or in relief on the solid rock, the shrubbery and grass serving for hair and beard in a startling way. Excursions can be made to the Chin Shan and San Shan hills, temples, lily lakes and flowery restaurants. The town is full of the festival spirit, and the beauty of lanterns, arches, flags and matting shelter is often delightfully exhibited. Wuhu early went over to the rebel movement of October, 1911. Wuhu is a great sufferer from floods. They were so deep in August, 1911, that Lion Hill became an island. The Yangtze, instead of mounting willingly up to Nanking, tries at Wuhu to break across country for Shanghai. The result is deplorable flood and resultant famine, involving millions of people.
Tai Yuen is the walled capital of the great coal, iron and loess province of Shansi, which is as large as England. It is the richest in minerals of all the provinces. The famous Ping Ting coal and iron mines are near. The city lies in a great plain 3,000 feet above the sea on the Fen River, and has railway connection with Peking and all the east and south. It is to have connection with the capital of Kansu province, and all the great northwest for thousands of miles. Mills will arise, for stone, clay, iron and coal are available in this province as nowhere else. Though the air of the city is exhilarating and there is little consumption, skin diseases and diseases due to poor water are prevalent. With irrigation in operation, fertilization of this loess province would be unnecessary, so that Tai Yuen will yet be a great wheat and millet center. Her grain, stock and wool merchants will be taking contracts to feed and clothe America and Britain when our fields are impoverished and overrun with people. It will be a financial center, for Shansi’s wealth in China’s new industrial era can not be computed. Even now the Shansi bankers are the best known, their guild houses being in every city of the land. The railway, electric light, post, telegraph and telephone have arrived, and so has the printing press, raying out reform. The railway has brought progress to quaint Tai Yuen. There are match factories, police department, a public band, modern schools of all sorts, an agricultural and military school, modern roads and a street-cleaning department, a modern jail which aims to teach instead of confirming in despair. Confucius fled here to the Wei State, when his own state persecuted him, and this province is the home of the original clan of Chinese, the Chou, who instituted ancestor worship and the rule of princes at the beginning of history. The great Shansi University was established here in 1901 by the British with indemnity funds restored to the Chinese at the request of British missions, which was a singularly Samaritan act; for on July 9, 1900, at the yamen in Tai Yuen, all the missionaries, their wives and children, were put to a brutal death by the infamous “Boxer,” the Luciferian brute, Governor Yu Hsien, whose name is hated by the progressive Chinese as much as we hate it, and the Manchu officials who took their “tip” from the dowager empress, Tse Hsi. Doctor Timothy Richard, promoter of the successful Red Cross in China, was the first president of this institution, and W. E. Soothill was its second president. Both these gentlemen lead in Britain’s educational influence in China. English, of course, is taught. Like all the northern cities, Tai Yuen is cursed in fall with the penetrating loess and sand-storms. The blue-roofed and blue-walled Temple of Heaven is beautiful, with its magnificent eaves, carved terminals, colored frieze, columns, statues, scrolls, paintings and theater. There are also Confucian, Manchu-Fox, Buddhist and Taoist temples and pagodas, and a Mohammedan mosque, for this is the first city, going west, where we meet this last sect, whose sphere extends right on to the far northwest. There is a notable four-storied fort over the Romanesque south gate.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Treeless mountains of South China, Kwangtung province. Modern road broken down from the disintegrated granite; stone houses of farmers; rice cultivation with water-buffalo.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Sport in South China, Kwangtung province. Dragon-boat racing in June. Crews sometimes number a hundred paddlers to a boat. There is frequently great loss of life. This photograph disproves two statements: that the Chinese are phlegmatic and dislike sport.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Pechili province merchants ready for a trip into cold Mongolia. They are the class which is calling for more railways. Woolen clothing is taking the place of the padded cotton garments shown, and leather shoes are rapidly coming into use.
The Manchus have their own Tartar or military city, which will now become the administrative headquarters. Many furs are brought down from the Mohammedan and Mongolian plains in the west and north. There are mission schools and hospitals, a military parade ground, and an arsenal. The twin pagodas of thirteen stories, with narrow galleries, are famous. The pailoo memorial arches are distinct from the open southern type, the Shansi type being a solid top-heavy tower. More ponies are to be seen here than in most of the cities, and the horsemanship of the Mongols is daring, as we should expect from the descendants of Kublai Khan’s hordes, whom Marco Polo praised in that famous memorial that was dictated in a prison of Europe more terrible to him than all the dangers of Far Cathay.
Yunnan, the capital of the great copper and tin province, is five hundred miles from the Gulf of Tonquin, with which a French narrow gage railway, completed at awful cost of men and money, now connects it. The city is in a plain five thousand feet high, at the foot of the Tibetan Mountains. A great lake, the Tanklu, near by, is connected by canal with the city. It is the center of a warmer art than the other provinces, the architecture showing the elaborate Burmese influence, which relies on ornament and color more than line and proportion. Some of the pagodas are square, peculiar to Yunnan, and have nine to thirteen stories, and galleries, as compared with seven to nine stories elsewhere. The gate forts are ornate, though the roofs do not curl up as fantastically and richly as in the east of China. The British and French are fighting it out for chief foreign influence, with the latter ahead as yet, because the railway from Mandalay has not been run through. There are fine French stores where you can purchase madame’s millinery, confection or perfumery, a French hospital and a palatial French consulate; but the Chinese have far greater trust in the Americans and British, for French designs on Chinese territory are feared. Yunnan does not want to follow Tonquin. There are many Mohammedans, and their round mosque towers are in evidence.
Great rebellions and massacres have occurred, as in those bloody years 1857–73 when General Tsen made a name for ruthlessness which still strikes terror throughout China. The city, with a splendid division of the modern army, went over to the rebels on November 3, 1911. Outside the walls are two interesting temples. The Golden Heaven Temple is in the northeastern hills. Part of it is made of gilt copper, and shows Burmese influence. The stairs, terraces, openwork balustrades, tiling, roofs and scrolls are very fine. The Buddhist temple cut in the rock over the lake is a noble work, even extra niches being cut for the statues. It is not likely that this costly work will ever again be done in China, for “the god has lost his grip,” the devotee having found out that he was hollow! The bald monks are scratching their heads and thinking what new thing they can devise to bolster up the system. Many of them have gone in the hotel and teaching business! The flags of the temples have bells attached to them, and bells are hung under the eaves. Every breeze in Yunnan is laden with silver and gold, therefore. There are temples and shrines to the goddess Kwan Yun, who is said to give good luck to travelers. It is proper ritual to roll the prayer paper on your tongue, and in a ball shoot it toward the statue, where, if it sticks, it means fortune for you, as the goddess will certainly be unable to forget you. There are beautiful pavilions at the lake, and Yunnan can now be considered a health resort for Southern and French China. It is a center of engineering, and the headquarters of the inventors of the stone-and-chain suspension bridges which are peculiar to this province of gorges. The piers and pier houses are very artistic, and stand unique in the world’s architecture.
Yunnan has modern schools, colleges, hotels, hospitals; a mint, post-office and telegraph station; splendid modern barracks, a fine parade ground, etc. The university is a modern domed brick building on a hill in the center of the city. Its dormitories are lighted by electricity and the equipment is wonderful compared to what used to be. There is a museum, and English, Japanese, French, science, music, agriculture and sericulture are among the branches taught. The best trade school, however, is the modern jail, which is very popular! When you hire a mechanic in Yunnan you are reasonably sure that you have a former jailbird, just as in Peking, if you have a good clerk you are sure he is a Manchu prince incognito, for pensions have been stopped of late! One sees here the famous Yunnan yellow pigs, and peculiar white and black fowl, whose bones and skin are black, probably on account of iron and copper in what they eat. Boys are driving water buffaloes to the rice and maize fields, which have superseded the poppy plantations. The stores exhibit the famous jade and the Yunnan (Tali) landscape-veined marble which is used in the tops of tables, the seats of chairs and panels of cabinets and screens. Peculiar bamboo and paper toys in which the figures move by the heat of a candle, are made, which is another proof that the Chinese love children more than they are said to do in many books of travel! The city is famous for its copper and bronze work. The copper smelting by charcoal up to 1911 was an imperial government monopoly, the ingots being sent overland to Peking by pack animals, which took the route via Sui-fu and Chungking. At the Peking mint it was used in the heavy “cash” coinage. Yunnan is noted for its cloth dyers, who as yet use the famous indigo of the province, instead of analine dye. The tin, iron, pewter and furniture shops are noted, and foreign models are being copied with success.
The city is noted for its modern prison, with model workshops, the best in China. The police corps, uniformed in knee boots, tight tunics and German caps, and wearing swords, is a model gendarmerie. Yunnan, the farthest removed city of the empire from the capital, Peking, has been the foremost in these startling reforms since the French railway came through from the coast in 1910. Many Hongkong Chinese, who at once visited the place, are largely responsible for this reform leaven, but the chief credit is due to the progressive governor, Li Chin Hsi, who, remote as he was from headquarters, preserved order during the exciting months of 1911–12. In the streets the chair coolies rush along, with the right of way, shouting “Pei Ha” (We’ll poke you in the back). It was once the king town of opium, where a whole city walked for years in a sleep, but the government has largely stamped out both poppy field and opium joint. On the parade ground on a fall day of 1909, with military honors, the governor amusingly burned in public hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of opium and ivory pipes. On account of magnesian limestone and minerals in the water, awful-looking victims of goitre are constantly met. The poppy fields are now being used by a wide-awake people for the cultivation of mustard, rice, maize, sugar, banana, orange, pomegranates, bamboo, walnuts, etc.
Many peculiar races and varied costumes are to be seen in this Museum of Languages: Shans with high black head-dress and a red band across their foreheads; Mohammedans with green turbans; Lolos without queues and hair piled on the head like men who have a perpetual nightmare; Tibetan women driving their pack trains to their mountain home, the “Roof of the World,” and driving their husbands, too! Burmese with combs in their hair, though they are not women! Kilted Kachins, carrying their long, two-handed dha-swords on their shoulders, and their women wearing bamboo sticks through their ears and chains of river shells and colored stones on their necks; Annamese in gorgeous gold silk, embroidered as though they were on their way to claim a throne; daring, dirty Bhamo muleteers, who dare to be full of polyglot oaths, for they wear nothing worth throwing mud at; women riding ponies, donkeys and mules, and trying to evade the thrust of one another’s pin-filled hair as though they were on tourney; aboriginal Miaos and Lolos with figured yellow cloaks like circus clowns, and wide hats whose rims are stayed down to their shoulders with strings; French surveyors in white duck and kettle helmets, and exhausting themselves with the vivacious volubility that you listen to on Marseilles’ Cannabiere; British in khaki, Calcutta topey-helmets and putties, and as “cool as cucumbers” both in tongue and temperature, men who “get there”; yellow-gowned bonzes wondering where their religion has flown of late; black-gowned Roman priests and flat-hatted frères of the Missions d’Etrangeres, wearing Chinese soutanes; gray-gowned Taoists who are satisfied with their incomes, because while religion has flown in China, superstition still sticks; blue-gowned Chinese; flame-robed Tibetan lamas; pink-gowned Buddhists, who are thinking of opening hotels instead of temples, in which latter there has been a “slump”; and occasionally an American in a Sabutan hat and a Shangtung silk suit, ready for anything, and showing the mood in his eyes and laughter.
The district is gorgeous with flowers, camellias, mustard, poppies, magnolia, indigo, olive, jasmine, and every kind of fern, bush and vine. Yunnan is rich in animals, including the tiger and black panther, and fine skins, and some ivory are to be obtained. Beautiful cranes and duck are to be seen on the lake. It is also rich in valuable lumber, and therefore its furniture stores are notable. Coal, iron, zinc, copper and salt are produced in abundance, and there is much gold, silver, nickel and quicksilver. The tin mines of Kuo Chia produce 13,000,000 pounds of tin a year. There are also beds of precious stones, rubies, garnets, sapphires, amethysts, etc. No district of the empire has so many varied metals as Yunnan. The many races keep the province more disjointed than any other. An authority on these aboriginal races is the British consul at Tongyueh, Yunnan, whose exhaustive articles have appeared in the London Geographical Magazine. In natural scenery Yunnan presents the most sublime panorama in the world.
Tsinan, the capital of Shangtung province, goes back to 1100 B. C., and ethnologically is very interesting, as these are the people of Confucius and Mencius, the descendants of the Tsi State of original China. The city, which is walled and moated, is quite beautiful with trees, springs, mosques, theaters and temples. There are hills all about, and inside the walls on the north a lake dotted with islands, on which memorial arches and temples have been erected. Communication with the sea is had by the famous Yellow River (“China’s Sorrow” of flood), and the Grand Canal is also in touch. The German railway gives connection with the east, and national railways are to run north, south and west. Fine glass and the famous colored vitreous crockery, called liu-li, are made here. The guild halls and jewelry shops on Kuan Ti and Fu Run Boulevards are very interesting. The mineral springs will doubtless gather sanatorium hotels. There is a girls’ school, a military school, an arsenal, and a modern native university in the suburbs, where English preferably and German are used in scientific studies, and peculiarly music is also studied. The markets are well supplied by a province rich in agriculture. Missions, colleges and medical schools, like those of the Baptists and Presbyterians, have a strategic center at Tsinan, as millions of Confucian and Mencian pilgrims come here on their way to the shrine of Taishan Mountain, and the birthplaces at Kufow (Yenchow), and Tsou, respectively.
It is to be hoped that the Duke Kung and other members of the Kung family will take their places in China’s government, intellectual and religious life. They are the oldest family on earth, older than the Mikado’s ancestry, and China could with genuine and lasting pride gather around real leaders of the Kung family for noble causes. A plan has been drawn up by which, if the Chinese republic is a failure, an experiment will be made to enthrone one of the Kungs (Confucius), who happens to be a Christian He would be in somewhat of a quandary, as his appeal to the Chinese would have to be that he was born a Confucian, and his appeal to the five nations would be that he was a Christian. Still a little thing as that might not bother a Chinese diplomat! It never did in the Manchu days of twist and turn, volte-face, and come back again, smiling ever! The proposed Union University of all the American and British denominations in Shangtung will be brought from Wai Hsien and other cities to Tsinan, and this move will be fraught with great success, for “in union is strength.” Tsinan, with the province of Shangtung, under the rebel governor, Sun Hao Chi, went over to the revolution on November 13, 1911.
XXIII
RELIGIOUS AND MISSIONARY CHINA
Buddhism, the religion of China which owns most of the finer pagodas and temples, celebrated in 1912 the 2500th anniversary of Buddha. They do not celebrate Buddha’s birth in the body, but rather birth in the mind or soul, the celebration being called “the anniversary of Buddha’s enlightenment.” Despite the troubles that Buddhism has encountered at the instigation of the government’s amban in Tibet, the celebration occurred there with avidity, as it did also in Mongolia, at Kuren, etc. Throughout the rest of the land, despite the prominence of Confucianism, Taoism and Christianity, the Buddhists made their anniversary well known. Every one was interested in those who once taught that man should be clean, and sincere in good works, and should love his fellow man disinterestedly. The thousand little rules for purchasing a specific pardon in the next world have, however, confused the Chinese mind, and many of those who looked on called the ritual now merely a mass of superstition. No one can deny that this is the world’s most picturesque religion which the Chinese imported from India so long ago, and of which they are now the leading exponents. There are temples in San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and London also. If Buddhism were purified from its accretion of rites, and took up again vigorous sermons on the virtues, responsibility and self-sacrifice, as in the days when Asoka’s preachers started out to convert the world to doctrines of service, it would not be a long step from Buddhism to Christianity.
Architecturally, the world enthuses over Buddhism, and now that travel to China is increasing, a cry is going up over the artistic world: “Save the incomparable pagodas and temples for art’s sake, for they can never be repeated, the spirit having departed.” Many of the temples are dropping to pieces, as in the break-up of old faiths the bonzes have been unable to collect the money which is necessary for upkeep. The government is maintaining some of the temples, but it uses them as schools, and the monks themselves have turned some of the temples into inns. The nation, rich merchants and interested foreigners might take part in preserving these beautiful monuments, and Christianity, which is spreading in China, is wide enough in its charity to appreciate and wish to preserve the beautiful architecture of Buddhism. Let experiments be tried; let the government, with its supreme authority, buy out some beautiful Buddhist temples and pagodas and turn them over as headquarters to Christian schools or medical missions. The Buddhist monks are a forlorn-looking set, their parishioners contributing too little for their support. This parsimony has induced the monks to invent the system of superstitious credit indulgences and absolutions, which, by working on their fears regarding the future life, they compel the Chinese—particularly the women—to buy.
As a rule the statues of Buddha are solemn or gentle-faced, as in the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii at Canton. But there is one hilarious exception, the laughing gilded Buddha of the Ming Hong Temple, near Shanghai. The god’s eyebrows, nose, eyes, mouth and chin all curve into great bows of mirth, like the irresistible Coquelin’s face in a full-blooded comedy, or DeWolf Hopper’s face in Wang! The Buddhist priests who run inns keep a guests’ literary book, in which one will find sentiments written by many of the world’s noted travelers. The priests wear a yellow gown. Over the left shoulder hangs an over-gown, made of square red patches, sewed together, typifying the vow and rags of poverty. On the walls of the famous Lung Chang Buddhist Monastery, near Chingtu, in Szechuen province, hangs a celebrated text reconciling Buddhist and Christian teachings on the doctrine of peace. The Chinese hang a popular text on the walls, which corresponds with “God bless our home.” It is “Tien Kun Kong Fuk” (May Heaven send happiness).
Disfiguring by branding, just as the Romanists used to flagellate themselves, has not died out in China, for some of the Buddhist and Taoist monks of Soochow and elsewhere bear regular scars on their shaven heads and on their limbs, placed there to show penance during fasts, and to gain a reputation for holiness, or to use the Chinese phrase, “attain virtue.” The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi liked to assume the character of the Buddhist goddess Kwan Yun, and have herself painted with bare feet riding on a lotus leaf; in her hand a rosary; and wearing a blue veil, gray robes, a gold, garnet and pearl crown, earrings and necklaces. The eunuchs and friends of the empress always referred to her as the “Old Buddha,” which was the nickname that she liked the best. It is worthy of note that the Taiping rebels in the 60’s destroyed Buddhist temples and slew the bonzes, largely because the Buddhists of that time were opposed to progress and oppressed the poor with their “privileged orders.” On account of his not marrying, the Chinese call a bonze a “Chek Ke” (forsake family). They are, therefore, despised by Chinese men, but have a stronger hold on the women, with their picturesque religion, and good omens whenever they are paid for them.
On the first and fifteenth of each month, a musical service is held before dawn in the two thousand Confucian temples scattered throughout China. These temples all contribute a little toward the support of Confucius’s seventy-seventh direct descendant, Prince Kung Fut Tsze (which Latinized is Confucius), of Shangtung, though some of the Kungs are Christians. The Confucian temples contain red and gold tablets of Confucius and his disciples instead of the statues appearing in the Buddhist, Taoist and War temples of the land. When Kwang Hsu, the reform emperor, issued an edict in 1898 that modern schools should be formed, he ordered that some of the Confucian temples should be impressed. Confucius did not institute ancestor worship in 550 B. C. He found that it existed in his own state of Lu (present Shangtung province) and in the adjoining states of Tsi on the north and Wei and Sung on the west, all of whom had taken it, with the sacred tripods, from the parent Chou clan, which brought them from misty prehistoric days thousands of years back. To Confucius, credit should be given for adopting ancestor worship as an indispensable rite in the organization of the growing Tsu clan and of the future conqueror and federator of China, the Tsin clan, which latter eventually ended feudalism, which was then, however, adopted by Japan and carried forward to our own day. Let us quote here the stern Carlyle’s sympathetic tribute to the ancestor worship of the Chinese: “The emperor and his millions visit yearly the tombs of their fathers; each man the tomb of his father and his mother; alone there, in silence, with what of worship or of other thought there may be, pauses solemnly each man; the divine skies all silent over, the divine graves—and this divinest grave—all silent under him; the pulsings of his own soul alone audible. Truly it may be a kind of worship. Truly if a man can not get some glimpse into the Eternities, looking through this portal, through what other need he try it?” Attempts have been, and doubtless will continue to be made to revivify or modernize Confucianism. The most notable of the viceroys, Chang Chih Tung, of Wuchang, wrote a book called China’s Only Hope with this in view. Confucius was averse to liquor. One of the odes of the Book of Odes, written 1100 B. C., and edited by Confucius, rails against drunkenness. The ode realistically describes a riotous banquet which might have taken place in hilarious Vladivostok in 1904, previous to the war, when sweet Roederer ran like water.
The Pope of Taoism dwells on Lung Hu Mountain, in Kiangsi province. Taoism’s book, the Tao Teh King, written in 604 B. C. by Lao Tsz, speaks of the Triune God of reason, nature and virtue. The sect is now one of astrologers and nature worshipers, and is strong in the southern and eastern provinces. It builds temples and teaches the nature superstition of Feng Shui (Wind and Water), which until recently held the land in thrall against mining, industry and railways. The Taoists have been bitterly anti-foreign. Bows and arrows are sometimes hung up in the green Taoist temples as votive or thank offerings, the sentiment being that they are to kill one’s unpropitious influence or adverse Feng-shui. Taoist priests sometimes wear gorgeous gowns completely covered with embroidery of flowers, insects, birds, animals and the exorcised devil himself. They make a pretty penny by publishing or interpreting an almanac, the day selected possibly reading as follows:
June 10th
LUCKY:
To set sail to-day.
To begin a land journey to-day.
To begin a suit to-day.UNLUCKY:
To bury your father to-day.
To begin a new well to-day.
To bargain for a wife for your son to-day.
To buy oil to-day.
To sweep your shop to-day.
To hire a cook to-day.
The traveler who has everything ready at Ichang to start on the long journey through the glorious Yangtze gorges and rapids often wonders why his men can not be induced to start. The reason is that they are wading through the Luck Book, thus wasting an unnecessary week. Oil is needed, but it can not be bought on June 5th. Fish are needed, but can not be bought on June 6th. Rope can not be bought on June 7th, and when June 9th comes along it is unlucky to sail on that day. The Taoist priest makes his money by selling your laota (captain) an indulgence to sail on June 9th, for which you have to pay handsomely about ten cents, and the kinshan incense and firecrackers extra! The tiger and the dragon represent the early gods of the terrified aboriginal Chinese, and predate the ancestor worship of the first Chou clan of the north. These emblems have been adopted by the Taoist priests. The grotesque shrines are found among the mountains, a dominating view being necessary for the casting of the “influence.”
Among the aboriginal Lolo tribes of Yunnan an animal represents each day of the month. Accordingly the body of a caravaner is kept for burial until the lucky day of the horse arrives. A coin is put between the lips to pay the way, which shows that the rites are Taoist, and quite similar to old Grecian and Egyptian rites. When the revolutionists were fortifying Hanyang, in October, 1911, they did not hesitate to use a Taoist monastery as a fort in the hills. This marks a step forward against old superstitions, which were once insurmountable. The Chinese declare that a positive omen of a coming conflagration is the crowing of a cock during the night. Of course, all the cooks of Hankau recited this to their masters on the day when the imperialists burned the native city. Statues are many in the temples, monasteries, guild halls, pagodas and road shrines. Although Confucius is generally represented by a tablet merely, there are some temples which have statues of him and his disciples. Buddha is represented by three statues of the Past, Present and Future Buddha. Emperors of popular dynasties have statues erected to them in the temples. Then the Taoists have innumerable gods, including the famous gods of the War Temples. The guilds of the three hundred trades and twenty-one provinces all have patron gods, and it is orthodox to rub your finger on the god’s body in the place that corresponds with your sore spot, if you feel ill! You touch his back if you have lumbago (and find out that he is hollow!); his nose if you have asthma, and so on.
There are household gods; a god “Tsan” of the kitchen; pictures of gods to paste on the gates of the compound, and the God of Literature, who is very popular and has many temples. All over the north the Manchus have erected temples to the Fox, their wily patron god. This dependence on idols is not so dense as in India. The Chinese do it more as a good luck omen, just as we wear an opal or a turquoise, and not always as an essential religious rite. They have too much humor really to be as foolish as they may look when in the god’s presence. A god who doesn’t do his business well is as quickly dragged out by a rope and burned in times of stress as a human being would be treated with contumely whose prophecies always failed. In the south, religious edifices are being occupied for educational and civic purposes. When in 1908 the new learning broke over China like the full burst of a tropical day, the schools at first had to be housed in temples and monasteries. Recently, at Canton, the Wah Lum Monastery was used to entertain a public-spirited Chinese of Singapore, Chang U. Him, who brought both new learning and new wealth. “All interested in industries, self-government, charities and new education” were invited by circular to come up and see him “at the temple!”
Some of their religious proverbs, often touched with humor, are:
“If you must thrash a priest, wait until he has finished praying for you.”
“Man’s myriad schemes are not equal to a thought of God.”
“God gives birth and death to every man, but honors only to the few who deserve them.”
“The deeper your cave, the smaller is your heaven.”
“Man’s blow hits everything but heaven.”
“Do no wrong by light, and you’ll see no devil at night.”
“Penitence is good, but it should be proved by pennies.”
“Though the face is paler, the sin isn’t any whiter.”
“When things go well, we are so hungry that we eat all the meal; when trouble comes, we are glad to give it all to the idol.”
“Forget the priest on a fair day, but hug his idol on a foul.”
“A maker of idols never goes to a temple.”
“Fire for gold and trial for the soul.”
“Sorrow for the saint, and chisel for the statue.”
“Sorrow ends where sin begins.”
“Speak of the devil and he drops in.”
“Kind words outlive much frost.”
“Heaven calls the good soon, but doesn’t want the bad till the last.”
“The devil disguises himself less than his followers do.”
“When you forgive your enemy, the wrong pains less.”
“The silver whisper is loudest in the idol’s ear.”
“The whole earth is a coffin; only for the living the lid is not yet hammered down.”
“A lie is like burying the dead in the snow; the secrecy doesn’t last long.”
“The brows of the saints prop the pillars of heaven.”
Says a northern pessimist: “Oh! the hypocrisy of religion; sacrifice a bullock once a year, and steal bullocks all the rest of the year.”
The supercilious man threw this sarcastic shaft at his accoster: “I pick my company.” The mission school man heaped coals of fire on his head with this bland reply: “And your company is proud to pick you.”
The Chinese love to contrast life and death, as is shown in their paintings of pear trees in bloom and willows in bud, while snow lies on mountain peak and hillside.
The Americans at home have established a beautiful custom of casting wreaths into the sea on Decoration Day in commemoration of the dead who were buried or lost at sea, and there is a similar custom at Venice and elsewhere. The Chinese, too, have a Decoration or All Souls’ Day, which is observed by the adherents of the three religions in the first week of September. Red boats and lanterns are set afloat, and the priests burn paper clothing, money and food, and set off firecrackers. Where the ceremony takes place on land, it is customary to throw copper money to the street gamins. The festival is also observed at the magisterial yamens and temples, and Wing Lok Street, Hongkong, is noted for the characteristic observance of the ceremony. The rise of republicanism is going to strike a hard blow at one of the main teachings of Confucianism, “serving the prince,” because there will be no prince to serve and also at “li,” the rule of blind obedience to those in power; following the trade of the parent; destroying children; self-disfigurement; concubinage; expensive funerals and priest-craft; abuse of women; blind worship of the past; suicide of purchased wives; exaggeration of man and minimizing of God; neglect of organized charities and of science and comparative history. This change will make the introduction of Christianity more hopeful. It is to be expected that the worship of ancestors will also weaken, and with it will weaken the custom of early marriages. The Chinese have too many children to educate properly, as the Americans and French have probably too few. A somewhat smaller China would mean a richer and better China.
Catholic missions began in China when by caravan Corvina visited Kublai Khan, at Peking, in 1292 A. D. Ricci arrived at Canton in 1582 and worked in many of the provincial capitals and at Macao and Peking. Schaal worked from 1622 to 1664 and had influence with the greatest and most artistic Manchu emperor, Kang Hi. Abbé Huc covered the country from Peking and Tibet to Macao from 1844 onward. The chief educational centers of the Romanists are at Peking, Tientsin, Canton, Macao, Saigon and Hongkong. The large press and college of the Missiones d’Etrangeres is at Hongkong (Aberdeen side of the island). At Peking is their extensive Pei Tang press. They have large, two-spired Gothic cathedrals at Canton, Peking, etc. The square towered cathedral on Caine Road, Hongkong, is the architectural crown of the lovely colony. The Catholics number 1,500,000, their work being strong in orphanages, among women, etc., and in comparison with Protestant missions very weak in higher education and the distributed Bible itself. They consider it expedient to train the child rather than to make the expensive experiment of reasoning with and educating the man. Therefore most of the modernized Chinese officials are Protestants. Naturally the Catholic method brings more converts than does the Protestant.
The American missions almost dominate in the expensive higher education of the land, and it now seems certain that American educational methods, thoroughly tried in China, will be adopted over the world because of their efficiency and altruism. The Protestant missions of Europe, working in China, are as follows: The Scandinavians work in Hupeh and the northern provinces, and while not rich, they have developed effective fearless men of great resource. The German Lutherans are active at Kiaochou, and in the north and the Yangtze valley. The English Baptists, dating back to 1792, have many missions, notably in Shangtung province. The London Missionary Society (mainly Congregational), dating back to 1795, operates largely along the coast, in the south, and at Peking. The Church of Scotland (both Free and Established), which is strong in medical missions, operates notably in Manchuria. The Presbyterian and Methodist Churches of England have many missions throughout the land. The Anglican Church operates chiefly in the great ports; is now strong in higher education, and has erected many fine cathedrals. It has taken under its wing the foreigner in China, who, Kipling charged, did many reckless things “east of Suez!” Even the Friends’ Society of England has missions in China. The China Inland Mission, founded by the noted Doctor Hudson Taylor in 1862, has eight hundred missionaries who altruistically accept the smallest salaries paid in China. Many of them live on the land, in the “faith” method. The method of the organization is by personal contact rather than by expensive, highly organized education. For years this was the most dramatic and heroic mission in the darker provinces of the land. The Salvation Army has also come to China through the world-binding love of that extraordinary man, “General” Booth. American missions dominate in Protestant China, British and Colonial missions being one-half as strong, which means an equal zeal when the population of the two countries is considered.
American missions are stronger in educational, political and medical activities; the British make a specialty of preaching, charities and personal work. The Americans develop more native preachers and translators than any of the other missions, and their confidence in the Chinese is producing wonderful results in reaching toward the establishment of a self-sustaining church some day. No work, except the medical missions, has, however, ever surpassed the aim of the British and Foreign and American Bible Societies to put a translated Bible in the hands of every Chinese. China, foremost of all lands, ranks learning above everything else. By its attitude in specializing in education, the American church has attracted the sympathy of the leaders of the nation. No nation has a monopoly of mission heroes, but the wisdom of the American decision has been at once apparent.
The Roman missions work largely on the medieval plan of: “Give me the child till he is thirteen and I don’t care who gets it after that.” The American Protestants and some of the British say: “Give him to me from thirteen to twenty-three, so that he can understand.” One proselytizes possibly by prejudice and association. The other, imparting all the knowledge possible, trusts to the mind and sense of cultivated justice in the pupil. The Roman orphanages in China outnumber the Protestants five to one. The high-grade schools and colleges of the Americans are almost alone in the field, though the British propose now to follow vigorously. The difference is in attitude. There is no difference between Romanist and Protestant missionary in China in braving death from the hands of pirates, persecution from “Boxers” and others, misery, disease and alienation. The heroes are numberless; their lives are thrilling; their aims are the most altruistic the world has known, and the orchard is in such a flower of fruitage now as to dazzle the altruist’s eye.
It was a matter of great interest to foreigners when the October, 1911, revolution opened, that the chief leader and organizer of the movement, Doctor Sun Yat Sen (Sunyacius) was a Christian, the son of a Cantonese (Fatshan) evangelist. It will be remembered that Siu Tsuen, the leader of the 1848 Taiping rebellion, which marched from Canton to Nanking via the Mei Ling pass, was also a Cantonese Christian, but infinitely inferior to Doctor Sun in education and experience, as well as in character. Eventually Siu fell away from the faith, under the influence of bad advisers, into savagery. The missions were all given advance information previous to the October, 1911, revolution, showing that the Chinese esteem missionaries ahead of diplomats. This is a very precious compliment, and marks the vast advance of Christianity in the hearts of the Chinese “Hoi Polloi.” Even before the October, 1911, rebellion, officials of the old class were throwing away their prejudices against missionaries and welcoming them as angels of light in a way that would have delighted Paul and Barnabas. General Tsen Chun Hsuan, a bloody enough loyalist leader in war, when viceroy of Szechuen province, made this address: “My hope is that the missionary teachers and medical missionaries of America and Britain will spread their gospel more widely than ever, and that the influence of the gospel may bring boundless happiness for our people of China. I shall not be the only one to thank you for your good work. Long live your Gospel.”
The literal name by which the Roman church goes in China is “Tien Chu” (Heaven Lord church), and the Protestants are generally called by the Catholics and by the Chinese “Jesus church,” or “Shangti” (Supreme Ruler church). The American Episcopalians and the British Anglicans in April, 1912, decided to call themselves the “Holy Public church” (Sheng Kung Hwei). The Roman missionaries had much to do with the annexation of vast Tonquin (population twenty-two millions) by France, and their activity is similarly ambitious in Yunnan province, lower Szechuen, and in Kwangsi and Kweichou provinces. As long ago as 1844, so brave a traveler and learned a priest as Abbé Huc insisted on wearing the yellow robe of the privileged mandarin class. Not only at one station or in one province did he do this, but on his journey of 1849 through Tibet, Szechuen, Hupeh, Kiangsi and Kwangtung provinces, he wore the robe and demanded the reception of a mandarin, the thinly veiled implication being that if he was interfered with, there were French guns that could pound the Taku and Bogue forts on the way to Tientsin and Canton, respectively, which they really did ten years later. As late as 1899, when China was torn by dissensions between the reformers and the reactionaries, and while the wounds of her defeat by Japan were still open, the Roman church, with the diplomatic aid of France, forced from the then Tsung Li Yamen (Foreign Board) an imperial rescript granting Roman priests the rank and insignia of a Chinese perfect (mandarin), and Roman bishops the astoundingly high title and insignia of a viceroy, which honors affected eleven hundred priests and forty-six bishops. It was not until 1909 that China resolved to throw off this incubus. The rescript was rescinded by the new Wai Wu Pu (Foreign Board) and Li Pu (Board of Rites). Enlightened Romanists in America of course do not uphold such militant Romanism, which smacks rather much of the bizarre days of Cortez. Let it be said too that the French Romanist abroad is more medieval than the French Romanist in France. While sailing in the Red Sea, talking with French clerics from Tajoora, which faces the hot Gulf of Aden, and while walking along the red banks of the Saigon River in Indo-China, I have heard bitter criticisms from French priests which would have been deemed lèse majesté in the home republic itself.
A traveler can not pass through China without being mobbed by the sick to be cured. “You are a foreigner, you must be a doctor; cure me and mine; I have heard that the foreigners can cure any ill; cure me, man of Jesus.” It is agonizing. I knew a man who only carried a caustic stick and two drugs (quinine and salts). Wherever he was mobbed with appeals he administered these drugs to those whom he thought they would benefit. Almost better if he had not done so. The cured who leaped about with new life were enough proof that he was “lying” when he said that he could not heal the wounded, the seriously ill, the leprous and the ulcered. He was almost torn apart. Were I a billionaire, I am a thousand times sure that I would send a thousand medical missionaries to China for five years, each man to hire a Chinese understudy, and carry a full surgical and medical chest, and the Bible and medical text books only. Then I would leave the Chinese pupils to carry on the work; they would be stationed as radiating centers at proper distances apart throughout the land. I would then spend the rest of my life listening to the marvelous stories which my five thousand friends had to tell of what they had seen and done. No man who ever lived—not even Paul when he wrote the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians; not even the beloved John when he saw the Heavenly City in seraphic dreams—would have experienced such real and wide happiness as I. No man could pass away with more ecstatic memories, such a delirium of too much joy.
I want to write a word of commendation of the missionary, for detraction by some in high places, and by some authors who write as they fly and flit at the ports, is not uncommon. The attacks upon missions in Henry Norman’s Peoples and Politics of the Far East, and in Pumpelly’s Across America and Asia, are well known, and have been repeated by others. One may be a cynic at home, and with reason sometimes criticize some pulpits because they fear the magnate at the end of some pews, and color their sermons accordingly. One may in a supercilious way sneer at the seeming lack of personality in the missionary candidate, who in a gentle faith stands up in her or his church to answer the call: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” But follow the worker into the China field, and see what that call and the altruistic opportunity has done by its very immensity. The gentle missionary has soon become many things: a brave pioneer in exile; a scholar and linguist; an organizer of great power and tact; a local foreign minister of great ability in adapting the West to the East; a scientist, housekeeper, traveler, physician, explorer, ethnologist, nurse, orator; the only host of explorers; the most generous of mankind; an ideal example of what the West should be; the most inspired of human beings in self-sacrifice and wonderful accomplishment under difficulties. Their expenses are many; their resources few. Many have to live on the slimmest of contributions from home, such as the missionaries of the China Inland Mission, the Scandinavian Mission, and the Scottish Missions, which are not rich.
Many, like the American and English missionaries, receive fair help from home, but spend on their equipment, and educational and hospital buildings the money that was due to themselves and their families as salaries. The highly cultured, brave president of the Nanking University accepts only $1,500 as salary, whereas if he were in America, on a purely business basis he would be expected to demand $15,000 for the same services and expenses of his high position. The writer does not mean to select one board as doing better than another. All have done marvelously, and China can never forget. In the Yangtze valley at Shanghai and Wuchang, along the whole front of the rebellion of 1911, the American Episcopalians have universities and training schools, which were especially noted by the republicans. The missionary does not always desire money. Such a simple thing as a magazine, or a new book of travel, or a standard work of fiction, or a weekly newspaper from some metropolis, is a god-send to the missionaries at the outposts, under the idol’s hills, who like to feel that though they are thousands of miles from a treaty port, they are yet in touch with civilization. Any one can get from the Mission Boards the names of missionaries who are off the beaten track from Yunnan province up to the Amur River in China, and send them now and then at trifling cost this cheering literature, which will shine upon them like the beloved sun of the far-away home land. Treat them as American and British men and women, and not only in the high light of missionaries, for they are the ambassadors from the West to the East, and there is no form of our civilization in which they are not active, efficient and heroic.
England and America contribute the same sum to missions, but as England is the smaller, the statistics reveal that America is doing only half what she should do in the China mission field. Of the denominations, the American Methodists easily lead the world, followed in order by the Anglican Church of England, the Presbyterian Church of America, the Baptist Church of America, and the old Congregational Church of America with many heroes on its old roster, which dates back to 1812. If you ask what the Chinese think of missionaries I will quote the following prayer spoken by the Confucian viceroy, Hsi Liang, in the Scotch chapel at Mukden for the hero physician, Doctor Jackson, who died as a voluntary martyr in the pneumonic plague in 1910, and you can answer whether you do not think it eloquently pathetic: “Doctor Jackson, with the heart of your Christ, who died to save the world, came to our aid when we besought him to help our country in its hour of distress. Daily, where the plague lay thickest, amidst the groans of the dying, he struggled to help the stricken to find medicine. Worn out by his efforts the pest seized and took him long before his time. Our sorrow is beyond all measure; our grief too deep for words. Oh! Spirit of Doctor Jackson, we pray you to intercede for the twenty million people in Manchuria, and ask the Lord of Heaven to take away this plague so that we may once more lay our heads in peace upon our pillows. In life you were brave; you, therefore, now are a spirit. Noble Spirit, who gave up your life for us, help us still, look down with sympathy upon us all.”
Y. M. C. A’s. are being built in the treaty ports, largely through American endeavor. The Japanese sphere, Tientsin, etc., are provided for, and the Chicago Y. M. C. A. raised a large sum of money for a Y. M. C. A. in Hongkong. The sailors in Hongkong contribute the third largest amount to their missions (being exceeded only by Wellington and Liverpool) of any port in the world. I am not referring to amounts collected from passengers on steamers, but the support given by the sailors themselves. This shows that Jack Tar and John Celestial recognize the manly and godly worth of the “sky pilot”, even if they pivot many of their jokes on his solemn patience.
Since Morrison’s translation, there have been quite a number of translations into the official Mandarin, and even into Romanized letters expressing the dialects of the southern provinces. This latter Bible can only be understood by mission school pupils. In 1890 the missionary bodies met at Peking and determined to translate the whole Bible into approved characters which idiomatized better certain words which had been improperly understood in former translations. The committee meets once a year at different cities in China. By 1910 the New Testament and the Psalms had been completed, and the whole Bible will probably be completed by 1918. The head translator is the American Presbyterian educator, Doctor Mateer, the founder of Shangtung Union University at Wei Hsien and Tsinan, and the noted Doctor W. A. P. Martin, the author and educator of Peking, is another translator.
Shintoism (the Japanese adaptation of Confucianism) has been found lacking in Japan, as it raises no positive God-fearing sentiment in the masses, no national morality, no individual conscientiousness which can be relied on when the letter of the law fails. This is the rock strength which Christianity has given the West, and the Chinese republicans see what they have missed in not adopting Christianity. On February 9, 1912, the Japanese home minister called a conference of the Buddhist, Confucian (Shinto), and Christian religions, to see what could be done to strengthen Japan’s creeds, so that the state would benefit in that moral and God-fearing power which Christianity has given to the western masses. Christianity makes but one answer to China, and that is to take Christianity and the Bible as a religion and a revelation, and reduce Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism to the ethical and literary place which Socrates, Plato, Homer, Virgil, etc., occupy in western thought and practise. President Sun Yat Sen, of the Nanking Confederated Assemblies of South China, appreciates this, and has promised the Chinese Christians that he will do all he can in time to form a Chinese Christian church; not a Roman or Greek or American or British church, but a free Chinese Christian church. When China takes the Bible nearest of all books to her heart, and has her own head bishop in each denomination absolutely free, she will then have achieved greatness and glory, and found joy and truth.
The troublesome temperance question of the military canteen has been solved, I think, under severest tropical conditions at Hongkong, where there is a large garrison, and despite well meaning W. C. T. U’s. at home under different conditions, the canteen, where “vice is regulated”, has, I believe, come to stay for a while. At one time the soldier drifted into the slums. He sighed for company as only an alien among the heathen can sigh. He drank bad liquor and was robbed when drugged thereby. That he will drink liquor must be accepted, as he is the rougher sort of man, although worthy for all that. He committed offenses before the tender eye of the public, brought the service into ill repute, and cost the municipality money for trials and police. He endangered international peace, for in his “cups” he was always seeing differences instead of amenities when he met a soldier of another nation. He made himself unfit for real war. The Army and Navy Canteen, or Club, was adopted, I think, largely on Lord Roberts’ suggestion (and who will question “Bob’s” wisdom). The soldier was put on his honor and he rose fully to his opportunity. The sergeants on guard permitted sufficient indulgence, but regulated rows. Most of the men drank less, because they felt that they were drinking in “their own home”, but if they over-drank, their fellows were on hand to see that they were taken to barracks without being dragged through the public streets. Good liquor was supplied. Disease decreased, as the men were contented in barracks. Authority was respected, for it comes as second nature for even a drunken soldier to obey a soldier. The soldier is now never robbed; his life is safe; he saves money, and he drinks less because he drinks “as a gentleman what ’as ’is Club wi’ the best on ’em.” The W. C. T. U. is a necessary theory; the Soldiers’ Canteen of Hongkong, Manila, and Delhi, is a brilliant compromise which should be accepted as a solution until the world is so good that the brave and perhaps rough soldier is needed no more. Candy is sold to the soldiers, as it is found that the absorption of carbohydrates greatly decreases the appetite for alcohol. The Officers’ Army and Navy Cooperative Stores sell goods to men and their families at cost, and the American army is to adopt this method to reduce the cost of living at foreign army posts.
XXIV
LEGAL PRACTISE AND CRIME IN CHINA
Books and articles that have thrown light on this dark question include those of Wu Ting Fang, once minister to America; Mr. Jernigan’s China in Law; Sir G. T. Staunton’s Penal Code; Sir C. Alabaster’s Chinese Criminal and Property Law; Parker’s Chinese Family Law; Mayer’s Chinese Government; lengthy notes in the Middle Kingdom, by the learned American, S. Wells Williams; Dyer Ball’s Things Chinese; Professor Giles’ Historic China; Sir Henry Maine’s commentaries; and the old Chinese Repository. The Hebrew penal code, Leviticus, is antedated by the Chinese penal code of Shun’s reign nearly a thousand years. It can not compare, of course, in extent or in lofty principle with the Levitican code. Brutal punishments, such as branding, amputation of members, linchee, bambooing and torture made these early reigns so peaceful that it is said “money lost on the road would be left there until the owner returned to find it”. The truth probably is that this referred to the prince’s money, and that if injustice was done the common man, the inferior serf or slave, by the prince or the powerful, the weaker had to whistle for his judgment as long then as he has had to do in subsequent periods of history. Each change of dynasty brought in a revision of the code, not that it was made more humane, but that there were necessary items of lèse majesté to add. For instance, the Manchus required that when the emperor passed at night, every onlooker (all except the soldiers were kept indoors) was required to turn volte-face on pain of death. There was no procedure for revoking a statute. The judge could unexpectedly spring on the victim some precedent or law that was followed in the “year one”, and the prisoner could plead in vain that another law of the “year two” gave him a better chance. In other words, the mandarin practically said with one of Louis Fourteenth’s judges, to litigants: “La loi, c’est moi”, and he interpreted the code as he wished! United protest to the Peking censors, mobbing and refusal to pay taxes were in reality the only reprisals that the people could exert against the exactions of an unjust judge. Confucius, in rendering service as a ruler in two states, interpreted codes. One of the states, the Tsin (B. C. 246), shortly after Confucius, put in effect the Li Kwai code in six books. Codes of the following important dynasties exist: Han, Tsin, Tang, Sung, Yuan, Ming and Tsing (Manchu).
The Grecian Thebes, of which Sophocles wrote, was notorious for its torture of suspected criminals, and Herodotus relates that the ancient Medes exercised similar practises. The “third degree” is outrageously developed in China as in no other country, the law requiring confessions in every case before penalty is inflicted. “More Sinico”, the pepper is rubbed in the eyes, and the confession is forced out of whomsoever is made the victim. Crimes are often “planted”, and blackmail of the weaker by the stronger runs riot. The laws themselves have been noted for their conciseness and simplicity, the number of volumes signifying little as the Chinese ideograph-text is expansive. “It is prohibited to murder”; “It is prohibited to trespass”, etc. There is imperfect codification of precedents and decisions, so that the prisoner must rely on himself (or on money!) to explain that the homicide was in self-defense; the trespass to escape from a mad dog. The spirit is always above the letter; it alone makes perfect law possible. Where there is a will to do right, right generally prevails, and it may be said that many of the Chinese judges try to do right, get at the truth, and give a common-sense judgment, for they are not iron-bound as the Occident is under appeal, precedent, quibble and evasion; the letter above the spirit. If the case is an action within a clan, the “hsiang lao” (old man of the village) generally assists the judge in getting at the truth. If the action is between two clans of two villages, or between competing guilds, God help the judges in sifting the truth from the lies! Such situations arouse the sympathy of disinterested foreigners for Chinese judges. Sometimes the native is not at fault, as the Chinese viceroys and Foreign Boards have often complained that some of the Romanists and one legation have interfered to a greater or lesser degree when a nominal Christian, who had a suit at law, was trying to evade justice by enrolling himself as a “rice Christian”.
The frequent edicts of the throne, published in the Peking Gazette, at once became laws, such as: “It is prohibited to smoke opium;” “It is prohibited to bind feet,” etc. Law will now be enunciated as in America, by the central and provincial legislatures of the new republic. A sort of martial law now prevails, and the provinces, after a quick drum-head trial, are shooting or lopping off the heads of pirates and mutinous soldiers in great numbers. Decapitation, flogging, torture, strangling, stocks, cangue, etc., will all probably be retained, as the Chinese are stolid when it comes to bearing pain, and the criminal classes must be treated with severity. Linchee, or Ling Chih (cutting into a thousand pieces) may be discontinued and shooting substituted. If, however, Confucianism remains as the leading religion, decapitation will be continued. The Confucians loathe the severing of the head, and this punishment is a powerful deterrent of crime. Imprisonment in a modern jail is no punishment for a hard-working Chinese, and something else must be substituted, such as the state impressing the convict’s free labor, to offset the convict’s family becoming a charge on the clan or state. It has been found in Yunnan City, Kweilin City and elsewhere that a modern jail, with good food and sanitary conditions, induces the poor wretches to commit crimes so as to achieve permanent incarceration as quickly as possible! As in the French system, the old-style Chinese judge is also often the prosecutor, and witnesses and accused are made to fight it out in the hearing of the judge, so that as the frequent “lie” is passed, the truth may jump from the tossed bag! (Confronter les témoins à l’accusé.) The twenty-eight volumes of the Manchu code cover general, civil, finance, military, criminal and public works law.
The following, taken from the Shanghai Shen Pao, of August 29 and 30, 1911, the oldest and most reliable native paper of China, will illustrate the “third degree” methods used by the old literati judges of the Manchus, and incidentally the astonishing endurance of the Chinese, who from time immemorial have lived outdoor lives and whose hearts have incredible powers of recovery. “The murderer, Hsu, was brought before the assistant magistrate Chung on August 27th for a final trial. The magistrate ordered the clerk to read the confession of the murderer (procured by torture in the native walled city of Shanghai), who said it was incorrect in one statement. The assistant magistrate consented to the correction. When City Magistrate Tien learned of this, he ordered Hsu to be whipped. Up to three hundred strokes no groan escaped from Hsu. At this Tien was angered and called to the torturers to strike heavily. Hsu was now whipped so cruelly that his flesh was cut from his back, and some muffled groans were heard. When five hundred strokes had been administered, he was again asked to confess or suffer pain. As he was still obstinate the magistrate ordered him to receive eight hundred strokes of the bamboo. He was now subjected to the most inhuman kind of torture, that in which the prisoner kneels on an iron chain, while two yamen runners stand upon a wooden beam laid across the back of his legs. As Hsu stood even this torture, he was strung up by his fingers and queue on a scaffold. Hsu cried out that he would not be kicked by the runners. The magistrate was now very angry. He ordered Hsu to be stretched upon the weighing machine (which gradually pulls the victim apart). The man fainted, but when he recovered he would not confess. The scaffold was again requisitioned, and he was strung up again by fingers and queue. He struggled and his queue of hair parted from his head. Next day, he was made to kneel on the iron chain under two men for two hours. When he was about to faint, the two runners picked him up and ran him about to restore his heart action. Alternately they put him upon the chain and restored his circulation. He then cried out: ‘Why should I sign two confessions; I have but to die.’ He was ordered to receive four hundred strokes of the bamboo. The magistrate Tien threatened to persecute the victim’s wife and son. Hsu now relapsed into a fever which has been running two days.”
The Chinese when in a rage (chih) is not a knife-user as are the southern races of Europe, but a hair or queue-puller. Now that the queue is being severed in China, he will probably take to kicking or boxing, in the French and Anglo-Saxon methods, in expressing his temper.
The social adjuster, or peace-talker, is a well-known institution, more generally employed within the hsiang (village) and guild, than the law. “To go to law is to put one’s estate in the ditch and one’s soul in hell,” is one of their sayings. Therefore, the importance of first engaging the services of the adjuster, or second, to meet the second of the offender, rather than to enter suit, and get into the hands of lawyers, court runners, grasping judges, etc. This heathen adjuster answers to the work that the lay deacon may have done in the early Christian church, in settling cases out of court. It is an institution that might well be copied from China in these days of criticism of the bench and bar by such authorities as Ex-presidents Roosevelt and Taft, and Mr. Bryan. The Chinese adjuster puts the case before, and settles it in accord with, public opinion, without any idea of fee; and certainly public opinion is a better judge than the law whose justice is built too much on fees, appeals and the maintenance of a large set of pettifoggers who live on the woes and ill temper of the unfortunate. In the revision of the Chinese code by Wu Ting Fang, Wang Chung Wei (educated at Yale), etc., long life to the social adjuster, the village Solon, whose ways are ways of peace, but whose path is not one of pleasantness! We have said that authorities have castigated the bar in China and America. Here is what Cicero said of Rome (the mother of laws) in the “Murena” oration: “For though many things have been settled excellently by the laws, yet most of them have been depraved and corrupted by the talkatively litigious genius of lawyers.”
The method of “planting” forged evidence is met with in China where a powerful enemy wishes to ruin some victim. The Yuen Fung Yuen Bank, of Bonham Strand, is one of the largest native banks in Hongkong, in which colony it is illegal to import opium except through the Farm, which pays the government a large royalty. This valuable drug passes almost at bullion value. Anonymous information was sent to the Farm contractor that at 8:00 P. M. the bank would receive illicit opium. Detectives were put in ambuscade. At the hour mentioned a coolie bearing a basket rapped at the bank’s door and shouted: “A letter for you.” Then he ran, but was caught. An examination revealed a tin of opium at the bottom of a basket of eggs. Investigation disclosed the whole thing as a “plant” prepared by an old enemy of the Yuen Fung Bank. In the same way bodies of the dead and murdered are often secretly placed at the doors of innocent victims, and as much motive as possible is prepared so as to get them in trouble with law and popular indignation. In years now happily passed missionaries have been bothered in this way by “Boxer” conspirators.
The Chinese code provides that all deeds shall bear the stipulation that “the land was first offered to the seller’s kinsmen, who refused to buy.” When a deed is lost, the Mandarin can issue a duplicate deed on presentation of the last tax receipt and tax receipts themselves are transferred in place of lost deeds.
In 313 B. C. the state of Tsi (present Shangtung Province) broke up its half of a wooden tablet containing part of the agreement with the state of Tsu (present Hupeh Province). These halves fitted into each other, and beyond any possibility of substitution proved the genuineness of the record. An old book called the Si Yuen (washing the pit), used in connection with the criminal code, prescribes the method of ascertaining whether death was caused by blows or was natural. A clay pit is heated white, the ashes are dug out, and wine is poured in. The body is then placed on a cradle in the pit, and a roof of tiles is placed over the pit’s mouth. If the fumes of the rice alcohol bring out the marks, even on a partly decayed body, the murderer is searched for. Other books relate that if a body is thrown into the water after death, it will not show distended stomach, hair stuck to head, or foam in mouth; the hands and feet will not be stiff, or the soles of the feet white. Their criminologists also write that if a body is thrown into a fire after death, there will be no burning or ashes in the throat and nostrils. The Chinese of the old time were rather clever investigators of crime.
This scene was presented outside the west gate of Tientsin one October day in 1870 after the massacre at the French convent. The French compelled Li Hung Chang to give them satisfaction. Li held the execution at dawn so that a mob might not gather. The criminals were flattered as martyrs. None of them was bound. New silk clothes, fine shoes and the ornaments of females were put upon them. Arriving at the execution ground, they were given opium. They shouted to the crowd, “Are we showing a shamed face?” And the answer came back: “No.” “Call us brave lads for being given to the foreigners as a sacrifice,” they cried again. A shout of approval came back. Then they sang a war song, and while their relatives cried, they knelt and stretched out their own necks before the blow of the heavy, short, mercury-loaded Taifo sword of the executioner. The shedding of a cock’s blood, even in the British courts of Hongkong, when an oath is taken, is a survival of the ancient Chinese custom, practised in Confucius’ day (550 B. C.), when the ministers of the various states of Lu, Wu, Tsin, etc., had a criminal killed, and wetting their lips with his blood, took oath to keep the treaty, which was inscribed on wood, each party taking a broken portion. The following incident will throw a flashlight on a section of Chinese legal practise, just previous to the revolution of 1911. It is well known that Wu Ting Fang, two and a half years before the revolution, had revised and modernized the Chinese code, but it was not even in part put in practise before the revolution. In Tungkadoo, a town of Kiangsu province, a bonze (priest) murdered a fellow-bonze and confessed under third-degree torture. The native authorities brought him to Shanghai to be strangled, but the chief bonze, with headquarters at Chingkiang, requested that the criminal should be turned over to him to be burned to death according to the code of the Order. Cremation of dead bodies was more common in China when Marco Polo visited the land than it is now, though it is practised in the Honan Island section of Canton.
It is probable that not for some years will the punishments of flogging, neck cangue and stocks be removed from the revised Chinese code. These punishments, involving public “loss of face,” are abhorred by the Chinese, and while they are somewhat barbaric, they are effective deterrents of crime in China. They were both revived by the British government of Hongkong in dealing with native offenders during the turbulent times of the 1911–12 revolution, when it was found that hard labor, jail sentences and fines were laughed at by the immense Chinese population of the island colony. Greece, as long ago as 330 B. C., had borrowed the cangue from China, and Demosthenes, in the Oration On the Crown, can think of no way so effective to damage his accuser, Aeschines, than to mention that the latter’s father had to wear a zulon (cangue) as a punishment for thievery. Chien Shao Cheng, of the Justice Department, Peking, has visited American prisons and studied foreign penal methods.
An “Investigating and Arresting Department” is the name by which one of the Manchu courts at Canton went. It employed detectives, and the taotai (mayor) did not disguise the fact that the court resorted to “third degree” tortures. This was one of the many things which made followers for the reformers. Banishment cases are constantly coming up. The prisoner who will not or can not depart to another country or province is put in the stocks for four hours a day for a year, and the remainder of the day he spends at hard labor. Strangling in cages was in vogue at Canton in the last days of the Manchu reign, orders having come from Peking in September, 1911, that the coolie who attempted to assassinate Admiral Li should be suspended by the neck in a bottomless cage. In the yamen at Chingtu City stands a stone tablet bearing the word Sha (kill), erected by the Shansi marauder, Chang Hien Chung, who massacred the Szechuenese, who supported the native Ming emperors. The stone remained as a threat to be used by the Manchu mandarins on behalf of the Ta Ching dynasty. The Ministry of Justice under the Manchu régime ordered the viceroys and governors to prohibit foreigners from unnecessarily being present in court.
On account of the scarcity of foreign population, the Hongkong jury consists of seven and the Shanghai jury of five. There is constant argument between the Chinese press and the English press of the treaty ports in China on the subject of “mixed” courts in which foreigners sit. China is writing a reformed code in which Wu Ting Fang had a hand, and in which the new minister, Wong Chun Hui, is interested, and is pressing forward to the day when at least she will try all Chinese, including those who have injured foreigners in settlements. The newspaper argument will do good instead of harm. In 1899 Japan ceased to allow her citizens to be tried under foreign law, and even began to try foreigners under Japanese law. On the subject of trusts and directorial responsibility, I have seen in the Tientsin Ching Wei Pao a plea that employés be not fined and imprisoned for corporate faults, but that those who make the money (directors and shareholders) bear the responsibility. China is, and has always been, a frank sociological thinker.
A police system on the French gendarmerie plan has been put in vogue at Peking, and photographs are being generally used for identification. The Chinese have been very averse to photographs. The custom was broken down by Hongkong insisting for twenty years that emigrants should be photographed in duplicate so that their certificates might be identified. This gradually got the Chinese used to the custom, the returned emigrants spreading word that there was no ill-luck in the operation. The old-fashioned policeman who went his rounds beating a gong is becoming obsolete, and the new policeman, like our own, is supposed to bait himself with silence and skill, so as to be sugar in leading the burglar to the trap. Not long ago, however, I heard the old-fashioned Chinese Lukong beating his wooden drum as he went his rounds in the Portuguese colony of Macao, China. When the police recover lost goods, half only is returned to the owner, and half often goes to public charity which is organized in a guild. This is an old regulation in many parts of China. One of their wits said that the difference between a lower and a higher court is that one has the first and the other has the last “guess” at a case! The Chinese point out the delays in the execution of murderers as a most serious defect in justice, and the sentimentalism expressed by part of our press and pulpit as a most serious defect in our mentality. They show headings in our newspapers reading as follows: “Ministers Strive with Murderer Blank”; “Four Pastors Prepare Murderer Blank for Death,” etc. The laconic Chinese ask: “How long a time did the murderer give his victim to prepare for death.” The Chinese say that our levity in this terrific matter has run the average of murders in America up to the highest point in any nation, and that their average, with England’s, is the lowest because of swift and sure justice in those two countries.
In our month of August occurs the festival of the goddess of needlework. It is customary for the women to exhibit the wealth and ornaments of the family during this festival. In 1911, at Fatshan, near Canton, where Sunyacius was born, robbers disguised as women arrived in closed chairs before the yamen (compound) of the Li family, and pretending to be relatives, they broke past the doormen. When inside the home, they drew weapons, and with the inmates intimidated, ransacked the house of jewels and valuables, escaping to the river, where the pirate boats took them on board and made off for the reaches and canals. Owing to the paucity of maritime police, because of a limited revenue, piracy has swept over China’s waters since her Captain Kidd, Koxinga, operated from Amoy in 1657. The West River of Kwangtung province has been notorious in recent years, and in my former book, The Chinese, I have related the attacks upon Europeans in the steamers Sainam and Shui On.
The most startling attack in many years was upon the well-known Pacific Mail steamer Asia, in April, 1911. Known previously as the Coptic, this steamer sailed from San Francisco for twenty years in the trans-Pacific service, and she was therefore well known to many thousands of Americans. She was a graceful Belfast-built boat of low freeboard, and easily boarded. In a fog on April 23rd she ran against the precipitous Finger Rock Island, which rises off the coast of Chekiang province. Wireless was immediately sent out, and the Chinese Merchants’ S. S. Company’s vessel Shoa Shing started for the rescue. Before she could arrive and after her departure with the sixty rescued passengers, Chekiang pirates, in swift snake boats and sanpans, put off to the attack, and despite revolver defense, boarded the Asia and her boats. They even demanded under duress that passengers should sign “chits,” promising to pay sums of money for rescue. When the steamer was temporarily abandoned, they boarded and stripped her of almost everything except the smokestack paint. Fisherman and pirate are about as synonymous on some waters of China as Cornishman and farmer, Panamanian and placer miner are in some of our romantic novels! Thrilling engagements with pirates not infrequently occur almost under the windows of the fashionable Boa Vista and Hing Kee Hotels on romantic Macao’s Praya Granda.
On July 13, 1910, a party of Chinese students, women and children were kidnapped in Macao, by pirates led by the second of the swashbuckler Leungs, and by the leader Luk, and taken to Ko-Ho (Colowan) Island, where they were chained to the walls of caves and of a Portuguese fort, after the latter had been stormed, and the blue and white flag of the castles hauled down to be succeeded by the triangular red flag of the pirates. The governor of Macao sent the Portuguese gunboats Patria and Macao, and an expedition of artillery and infantry of the “Legionaries Coloniale.” The possession of this island by the Portuguese has long been disputed by China, and the Chinese gunboats, which now drew up only watched the engagement. Two thousand pirates fought with modern weapons and smokeless powder, which had been smuggled from Japan. The Portuguese bombarded with four-inch guns, and dropped so many shells into so many compartments of two pirate junks, as with skull and sail they made for rocky Wung Kum Island, that they sank with all on board. In an armistice, Commander Wu, of the Chinese navy, a brave commander of whom we shall hear more, disguised as a coolie, courageously spied on the pirates’ stronghold and ascertained where most of the women were imprisoned, so as to save these retreats from being bombarded. The pirates were smoked out of these caves with sulphur and the women resuscitated.
Not only South China, but North China also has experienced piratical attacks in recent times. In September, 1910, a large band of Hung-Hutz pirates, disguised as bean merchants, sailed down the Liao River to Newchwang and captured for ransom fifteen wealthy Chinese merchants under the walls of the foreign settlements. They safely made retreat with captured arms to their mountain stronghold, one hundred miles up the river, near Liaoyang, and settled down for a siege. The Chinese desire to build more railways through this section, but the Japanese and Russians have opposed American backing of another road and have hoodwinked Britain and Europe into a disinterested attitude, which is the status quo, but not the permanent settlement of the question.
The Chinese have a saying regarding courts, retainers and the animals outside, as follows: “When the mandarin swears, the dogs bark, and when the mandarin laughs the dogs grin, and the terrible tsai ren (yamen court runners, corresponding to our detectives) stroke their rough fingers.” Some of their legal proverbs are:
“When two rascals differ, the truth is near; when they agree, the truth is hid.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions in evidence, for a grain of sand is not the seashore, nor a tree a forest.”
“It is hard to rise, but easy to fall.”
“No one would believe a blind man who tried to tell a ghost story.”
“It’s easier to twist the road than the mountain.”
XXV
CHINESE DAILY LIFE
The happy Leigh Hunt, who was half American by blood, in one of his incomparable Addisonian essays, Tea Drinking, wrote as follows of the daily life and surroundings of the Chinese: “The very word tea, so petty, so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of something inexpressibly minute and satisfied with a little (tee!) resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mistaken one) of that extraordinary people of whom Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors, have a language consisting of only a few hundred words, gave us chinaware and the strange pictures on our teacups, made a certain progress in civilization long before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no further, and if numbers and the customs of venerable ancestors are to carry the day, are at once the most populous and the most respectable nation on the face of the earth. As a population they certainly are a most enormous and wonderful body, but as individuals, their ceremonies, their trifling edicts, their jealousy of foreigners, and their teacup representations of themselves impress us irresistibly with a fancy that they are a people all toddling, little-eyed, little-footed, little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overweening, pig-tailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and temples with bells at every corner and story, and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over nine-inch bridges, with little mysteries of bell-hung whips in their hands,—a boat or a house or a tree, made of a pattern, being over their heads or underneath them, and a bird as large as the boat, always having a circular white space to fly in! Such are the Chinese of the teacups and the grocers’ windows, and partly of their own novels, too, in which everything seems as little as their eyes, little odes, little wine parties and a series of little satisfactions. However, it must be owned that from these novels one gradually acquires a notion that there is a great deal more good sense and even good poetry among them than one had fancied from the accounts of embassies and the autobiographical paintings on the chinaware, and this is the most probable supposition. An ancient and great nation as civilized as they is not likely to be so much behind hand with us in the art of living as our self-complacency leads us to imagine. If their contempt of us amounts to the barbarous, perhaps there is a greater share of barbarism than we suspect in our scorn of them.”
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Buddhist temples, now used as schools. Fine type of architecture; ornamented ridge, curving eaves; unique medallions.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Actors, in characters of general, emperor and prime minister. Note use of modern scenery. The old stage did not use scenery.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The new woman in the New China, borne to market on a wheelbarrow along a modern tree-lined road; modern umbrellas in background used as a protection from the sun. A beggar crouches at the roadside.
In August the Chinese resort to the graveyards and burn paper money and tin- and gold-foil models at the graves of their ancestors. It is a pretty sight at night to see thousands of these little fires lighting up the vast fields of the dead like a plain of stars through which the living spirits move. The ceremonies sometimes include the Greek custom of pouring out a libation of wine, and as this is the custom especially in the western provinces, it may indicate a former communion with old Greece. Long before the Christian era Greece had possibly acquired veneration for graves from older China. Demosthenes cried out to the Athenians in B. C. 354 as a climax to his arguments: “Will ye sacrifice your sepulchres to the Persian?” A mortuary custom in the southwest provinces, also similar to the Greek, is to place a coin in the mouth, to pay for ferriage of the spirit. The round coin, made of jade, and sometimes banded with pure gold, is an exact copy of the copper cash, with a square hole in the center. These tomb jades acquire a stained appearance as compared with the delightful glisten of jades kept in the light.
Foreigners with cinematograph lanterns are now going into the interior of China with interpreters to manage part of their shows, and are doing well, as the Chinese delight in the moving pictures. It is necessary to apply to the provincial governor for a passport, and to register at the consulate at the nearest treaty port. Both French and American films are used.
The purpose of the long nails, dwarfed feet and heavy hairdressing is the snobbish one of showing that such a person does not need to work, but can afford to keep servants. These devotees of fashion, rapidly becoming fewer, suffer so much torture that their conceit can be forgiven them. “Don’t say a word, you Westerners; remember your suffocating waists and your high-heeled compressed shoes,” retort some of the Chinese! At Ningpo boys wear boots made of human hair. Over these they draw straw sandals. For waterproof material an oiled cotton is used. The very poor classes use a picturesque cape and kilt made of rush leaves, and one sees sights on the mountain roads of Hongkong that remind one of Robinson Crusoe and Friday. The Chinese are great bird fanciers. Crows, magpies, hawks, larks, ducks, finches, etc., are exposed for sale in the fairs. The singing birds are taught to sing in competition, and also to catch seeds thrown into the air. Fortune-tellers take up their location at the street corner in Hongkong, Canton, and other ports, with their trained Kwangtung sparrows. When you pay your coin, the owner places a package of cards in envelopes before the door of the cage. The bird selects one and is rewarded with a grain of rice. You identify the card by the picture that it bears. The owner puts the card, together with a tiny slip of sandalwood, back in the envelope, shuffles the envelopes and calls the bird out again. The bird will select the same envelope, which proves that Kwangtung sparrows at least have a fine sense of smell! On another corner stands a bird trainer with a grossbeak-weaver perched upon his finger. He throws coins into the air, toward which the bird darts, catching the coins in its bill and returning to the finger of the master.
On the narrow streets, in constant danger of being jostled into, the letter-writer sits at a table, painting the beautiful characters for whomsoever wishes to buy a letter. His customers are many,—fruiterers, laborers, fishermen, cooks, gunny-lifters, hotel-runners, lantern sellers, rice bird hawkers, etc. The Buddhist or Taoist priest, too, is not averse to writing a letter for a wife buyer for an added fee after his customer has bought a written prayer to Buddha or his own dead father, which prayer the priest burns in presenting it to the spirit.
There are many Mohammedan Chinese in the western and southwestern provinces, and scattered throughout the empire are Mohammedan companies. They are generally butchers and bakers by occupation. Among these Mohammedans are doubtless the lost colonies of Chinese Jews.
It is found that the Miao aborigines of Szechuen and Yunnan are a more impulsive, vivacious, and by turns a more sulky race than the staid, trim, mannerly Chinese. Missionaries, therefore, report that when they Christianize the aborigines they find them delightfully frank and vivacious companions, who grow to be liked heartily, as the cultured Chinese is in comparison deeply respected. The Miaos (Now Su tribe) show Burmese influence, too, for they burn their dead, a custom which is abhorred by the Chinese masses, though some Buddhist priests do it. The Miaos often worship a hill, and far to the east, even at Hongkong, I have seen members of the aboriginal Hakka tribes worshiping a hill, or a rock, or the seashore. On the hillsides of Hongkong jars will be found on stones among the woods. These contain the bones of Hongkong Chinese who have died in America and whose bones lie out in the woods, waiting till the Taoist calendar reports that it is a lucky day for burial. If you make the fee large enough the priest can grant you absolution any day and you may bury with full assurance of good luck. It then becomes a struggle between the priest’s determination and the mourner’s stubbornness in the matter of securing possession of the coins of the dead one! The body lies in an American graveyard until the large bones only remain. These are manifested across the Pacific as “fish bones” and are received at Hongkong by the Tung Wah Hospital for the guild of which deceased was a member. The hospital turns the bones over to the chief mourner, who places them in a jar, as already related. While the Chinese abhor sickness, and will sometimes desert a fever patient after loading his blanket with stones so that he can not leave the bed, they have no abhorrence of coffins or bones. For long periods they keep the coffin in the best room of the house, or the jar of bones in the garden.
In selling goods by auction at the pawnshops, or inns, the auctioneer does not permit audible bidding. The goods are passed through an opening for inspection. Then the bidders walk to the window, and by whisper, card, or squeeze of the hand, indicate the bid. This encourages high instead of low bidding at the beginning, for it is known that the first bidder who offers a fair price secures the article.
The Chinese, on account of their localization, and lack of experience, while usually placid, can be worked up into uncontrollable excitement. This explains the murders of missionaries by mobs in the long years up to 1901. Many suicides among officials and widows and daughters of soldiers followed the excitement and distress of the October, 1911, revolution. The camaraderie of American clubs which has evolved the greeting, “old fellow,” equal to the “old chap” of British clubs, was copied from China, where you must call every one “old man” (lao jen). It is the highest term of respect, is in diplomatic use, and even bonzes and teachers are addressed in that way. A captain of a sanpan is called the “great old one” (lao ta). The mayor is called “old man of the village” (hsiang lao). The following incident will illustrate how the clan dominates Chinese life. San Wui is a city lying near Canton. The Kwan family is one of the largest and wealthiest clans living there. It maintained near the district burial ground a fine, large ancestral hall filled with family tablets and effigies. Against the votes of the clan, in the middle of August, 1911, Kwan Ta, one of the most powerful members, rented the building to the police, who used it as headquarters in collecting unpopular taxes and pressing the people to accept the nationalization of railways scheme. The people led by the Kwan clan, burned the ancestral temple. The members of the clan then rebuilt the hall and ordered the sculptors to make an image of the unpopular Kwan Ta, who had died in the meantime. The granite image represents the man with his hands behind his back in a kneeling posture. On his back is carved the history of his defection. As each member of the Kwan clan comes into the temple on the great days to worship the ancestral tablets which have been restored, it is obligatory that he shall give Kwan Ta’s image three strokes of the bamboo!
The method of carrying water in India and China is conspicuously different. In India the drawers go from the well with the jar of water balanced on their heads. In China the water is put into two large buckets, which are slung from the two ends of a bamboo, which is balanced on the shoulder. Chinese markets in the villages and smaller cities are managed on the fair system, as in Russia. You can not buy barrow wheels at the bridge fair every day in the week, because the wheelwright only comes to your village fair every second Friday, his tour taking him through ten villages perhaps. You can not buy feather dusters or shoes every day, as the pedler is off on a tour of six villages, and only visits your fair, held at the temple, every Saturday. But food and coins you can buy every morning at your two village fairs, and the hucksters there will tell you just what days the barber, the druggist, the potter, the copper hammerer, etc., will be around again, unless thieves waylay them, or gamblers entice them, or Taoist astrologers, looking for a bribe, deceive them into belief that it is their unlucky day by their birth star on the almanac!
That the Chinese civilization in general had little communication with Egypt or Babylonia, after once being separated, may be inferred partly from the fact that the early Chinese forgot the secret of embalming the body. The Bamboo Books, tenth century B. C. recite how the Emperor Muh, whose concubine died while traveling with him in the Tartary desert, had to bury her there at once, and other records recite that when tombs were opened they stank so badly that dogs had first to be sent in to ascertain when human beings could safely enter. It was not until long centuries after this that the Chinese learned to use lime to destroy the flesh.
Conjuring has been popular from the earliest times. The famous Bamboo Books recite that the Emperor Muh, on his travels into Tartary in the tenth century B. C., was infatuated by an unusually clever conjurer there. Lieh Tsz, a patriotic chronicler of the fifth century B. C., complains that the emperor of disintegrating China had more time to study the tricks of a conjurer than for state affairs.
An interesting means of transportation over the mountains of the north is the pony-litter, which is swung between two animals in tandem. The trip is exciting enough, especially when one of the animals falls to its knees. Chinese gang laborers do all their pulling, pushing and lifting, accompanied by a chantey song. The famous trackers of the Yangtze gorges and the Grand Canal; the gunny lifters of Hongkong; the wood sawers and teak pilers; the coal passers of Hankau, all sing at the top of their splendid voices as they work.
When a native moves he is supposed to carry fire from his old kitchen to the new one, so as not to rekindle the misfortunes of the last lessee. He desires to burn up his old predecessor’s past, which may have been all bad (or he would not have moved), and to continue his own fortune, which is all good, or ought to be! When moving into a new house, the tenant replaces a threshold, lintel or rafter so that he may not inherit the bad fortune of the former tenant. He starts all things anew, as the new piece of lumber or stone typifies. The old-fashioned Chinese hotel buildings in the northern provinces are not unlike those in Palestine, low buildings with few windows in the walls being built around a court. In the court are troughs for the donkeys, mules, Mongolian ponies and especially camels of the pack trains. The roofs of the buildings, with their up-curling eaves and pagoda pinnacles, are the most beautiful in the world. It seems uncanny to see a crowd passing your house on a holiday without a sound, because the Chinese shoe is all felt. In contrast with this, compare the noisy shuffling of the wooden shoes of Japan, where one man makes more noise than a thousand Chinese, or a dozen Occidentals.
The happiness of a Chinese home is measured by the degree in which one’s neighbors leave one alone, not by the degree one is bothered with the repeated visits of neighbors, as is the fashion in the more intrusive Occident. The Chinese illustrate this characteristic by building a high wall around the clustered buildings of the home-compound. As a rule, the Chinese rent not; they move not. They build a time-bronzed, indestructible home, even if it be as simple as one rough rock laid across two age-silvered boulders. Generations, down the ages, flow and follow there, as wave follows wave down the steps of the waterfall. What is the result? A personal fame, heroism of faith, a love, a depth, a beauty, in none of which our Western life can offer an equal joy or strength. The Oriental, never having dropped the extinguished lamp of memory from his hand, is able to follow the path of history with intensity, satisfaction and certainty, while we of the West, having no similar assurance, wander the fields of the earth, unsatisfied still, where our individual name may be carved with permanence. What hate pursues us? What fate awaits us? It is the saddest sign in our psychological organization. If we intend to remain great, we must end this renting of scooped holes in cave apartments, scatter our big cities into smaller ones, spread out on the land and give every man a home of his own, and a strong enough one to leave through the ages to his great-grandson. This is the Chinese way; it is the only true way, as witness their six thousand years of certain history, while they take care to-day of four times our population. The custom of sheltering the families of sons and grandsons within one patriarchal compound is truly Asian. It is described by Homer in the sixth book of The Iliad as obtaining in the home of Priam, King of Troy, B. C. 2500. At New-year time, in Fukien province, all the family join hands around a brazier which is smoking on a table, to signify the unity of the family around a common hearth.
The Chinese make a stew of chicken, ginger, lettuce and cucumbers, or vegetable marrow, and it is very good. Beans are soaked in water and allowed to sprout before being pickled, or boiled in sugar. Salutes at feasts are sometimes made in the German fashion by raising the wine (samshu) cup to the eyes before drinking. The Chinese mix rice, nuts, flour, fruit and seed in their candies, and their cakes are highly colored and made very sweet. Where the Germans use vinegar and salt as a preservative, the Chinese use sugar, and the results, while surprising, are often delightful. Partly as revealing the sumptuous table which it is now possible to set at Hongkong or Shanghai, or Tientsin, and partly to show to what gastronomic heights the treaty port Chinese rise, I quote the menu of the Wah On Kwong Association, or Guild, served at one of the Hongkong hotels by Chinese stewards:
Queen olives Caviare on toast
Bird’s Nest soup Chicken soup Fungus soup
Garoupa, shrimp sauce Boiled shark steak
Fillet of beef (Champignon sauce)
Chicken compote Stewed sharks’ fins
Pigeon gelatine Pâté de foie gras en Aspic
Beche de Mer Fried frogs’ legs
Roast saddle of Queensland mutton with jelly
Roast ribs of sirloin of Queensland beef
Roast Kwangtung turkey Boiled fowl
Singapore pine apple Hankau ham Potatoes
Peas Vegetable marrow Salad
Asparagus, olive oil sauce
Victoria pudding Chartreuse jelly
Cakes Mango ice cream
Preserved ginger Small oranges Chinese nuts
Coffee European wines
Lucien Rozet Cliquot Heidsieck Chateau Larose
Medoc Manzanilla Marsala
The iron pans that come from Shansi province are made as thin as possible so as to economize fuel; indeed, as light fuel as grass and stalks is used. The kitchen god is Chang Kung, and he was given this office because “nine generations peacefully inhabited the same compound when he lived on earth.” As pigs, ducks and geese are driven long distances to market, little straw sandals are woven for their feet. This one sometimes sees in Southern France when the frugal peasant is competing with local railway rates!
An official asked a mannerly subordinate which way he was walking home, and the latter replied: “Your way, sir.” The same official, discussing a subject said to the subordinate: “Say what you think.” The subordinate, who was a good party politician even in China, replied: “I think what you say.” Some of their proverbs on daily life are:
“Wine will not drown sorrow.”
“The flattering tongue wants to fill its pocket.”
“The pot is as strong as its thinnest spot; the chain is as strong as its weakest ring.”
“Don’t ask your thirsty visitor if he will have tea, because if he is mannerly he will say, ‘Don’t trouble yourself’; just draw the tea for him.”
“It’s always the good climber that falls from the top of the tree.”
“Those best find to-day who plan each to-morrow.”
“To-morrow’s always harder before you get to it.”
“A word is fleeter than a gale.”
“The widest field has some one listening at the edge.”
“A grape well chewed is better than a sweet potato swallowed whole.”
“Room in the heart makes room in the house.”
“Because you feel merry, there’s no need to dance when you are on a horse’s back or in a small boat.”
“Sacrifice one sheep to capture the tiger and save the other sheep.”
“Even honey is not sweet at the end of the meal.”
“A fat cat never got all his food at home.”
“Tightening your drumhead is as good as enlarging your stick.”
“A blind fox catches only a dead fowl.”
XXVI
CLIMATE, DISEASE AND HYGIENE
In the last two years China has surprised the world by carrying out her agreement to extirpate quickly opium smoking and poppy growing. It is the most spectacular abatement of a gigantic nuisance that the world has known. Among the heroes of the reform was Lin Ping Chang, a grandson of the famous Commissioner Lin who destroyed the chests of opium at Canton and brought on the war with Britain in 1840. Heredity obtains in China! It would have taken England and America possibly fifty years to bring about an equal reform in personal habits, but the Chinese have for 3,500 years been the most obedient people to government in the world, “Filial Piety” being the eminent principle of the religious, social and political life. The good work is going on apace, and Hongkong and India, thanks to the noble altruism of Lord Morley, Sir E. Grey, Mr. Asquith and Lloyd George, are with good grace swallowing the bitter pill of loss of revenue from this lucrative trade. It was a great victory for religion over commerce, and the latter died hard, for unregulated commerce is anything but a moralist at heart. The humanitarian sentiment in Britain, America and China won over money. Britain in her parliament Blue Books used to say: “Opium is a legitimate article of trade and a vested right that China is unable to attack.” To-day John Morley speaks of Britain’s “humanitarian duty.” Persian opium, which is much denser in morphia than is the Indian, still comes to Hongkong for Formosa. This is the opium of which Herodotus in 430 B. C. amusingly wrote as follows, his imagination supplying his facts: “Though it comes from a most stinking place, it is itself most fragrant. It is found sticking like gum to the beards of he-goats, which collect it from the woods.”
Now Japan should obey the humanitarian sentiment of the world, and stamp out opium in her Formosan colony. The opium conferences at Shanghai in 1909 and the Hague in 1911, called by America and presided over by the American, Bishop Brent, have produced wonderful results. It now remains for the western nations to emulate China’s example and stamp out morphia. China could well come back at America and say: “What are you going to do about morphine and hypodermic syringes? You import yearly 500,000 pounds of opium, and you use only 70,000 pounds in medicine. As far as morphine goes you are more ‘doped’ than all the nations combined. You import 200,000 ounces of cocaine each year, of which only 15,000 ounces are used in medicine.” The exportation of India opium will cease in 1918, and China will have ceased to grow the poppy this year. In the heat of the debates in England, Eric Lewis, a Welsh supporter of Lloyd George’s, proposed that England should buy all the opium in India, like the famous Chinese Commissioner Lin of Canton, dump it in the sea, and indemnify by a loan of $40,000,000 the poppy growers of Bengal. Now let us cease to criticize Britain, for if she grossly sinned, she has repented and made amends, as could now be expected of a Britain which has recently established national pensions for her aged, and brought her educational extension, employers’ liability and land taxation up to the mark set by America.
So thoroughly successful was the Chinese government in restricting the planting of the poppy even in distant Yunnan province, that in 1911 the passenger earnings of the new French railway from Haiphong to Yunnan were greater, because men fed on maize, instead of diseased by opium, are both strong and wealthy enough to travel. Maize succeeded the poppy. When China was attacking the use of opium in the mandarinate, one official wrote to the Board of Constitutional Reform: “His Majesty can send me the silver cord (for suicide by strangulation) but I can not give up opium.” They did give it up, for an opium smoker was denied his right to plead in court, and his office was taken from him. At plowing time, revenue officers were sent into Yunnan, Szechuen and other poppy provinces, to see that poppy seed was not sown. The opium cure, which is either swallowed or administered hypodermically, is given the patient at the same time the drug is, and if his stomach only was concerned, he is so nauseated that in five days he will give up the indulgence. The cure contains fifteen per cent. tincture belladona, fluid extract of prickly ash (xanthoxylum), and fluid extract of hyoscyamus. Another cure includes iron, coffee, quinine, strychnine, gentian and capsicum, with temporary injections of morphine in cases of collapse. In a former book, The Chinese, I affirmed that China and India could soon economically recover from the prohibition of opium planting if the same attention were directed to other fields. I shall instance Yunnan alone. In the first year of the prohibition the province suffered. In 1910 and 1911 the increase in silver, copper and tin mining, and maize cultivation had alone reimbursed Yunnan for all her loss of opium revenues, and a sobered people realized that they were even then only beginning to find their energies for legitimate enrichment. The burning of pipes continues in China. In The Chinese I related some dramatic occurrences in Shanghai. In September, 1911, Chinese gathered on the athletic field of the Tientsin Y. M. C. A. and burned 100,000 opium pipes, and at Yunnan City, under the auspices of Governor Li Chin Hsi, a great burning was held on the parade ground of the arsenal; the new military, the police and bands attending to add éclat to the function.
Doctor Buchanan, of India, has discovered that cats are immune to China’s curse, bubonic plague, and that they can safely destroy the rats which carry the germs. But cats and dogs indulge in fleas, and the flea is as busy in transporting the plague germ as are the rats. Poison and traps are the things to use against rats, and cats and dogs should be asked to retire, too, until China cleans herself up a bit, when she can probably safely indulge in bench shows of her famous chow and Pekingese dogs! Even the fur marmot has been asked to go, since the pneumonic plague epidemic in Manchuria in the winter of 1910. That awful epidemic revealed a new scourge, even worse than bubonic, to the startled world. Bubonic thrives in dampness in the south in summer time. Pneumonic thrives in indoor winter conditions. America was represented on the field by Doctor R. P. Strong, of Manila, Doctors Aspland and Stenhouse, and the medical missionaries Sinclair, Gibb and Mary Ogden; Japan by Doctor Kitasato, who discovered the bubonic bacillus at Hongkong in 1894; Russia by Doctor Haffkine and Doctor Zabolothy; China by Doctor Wu Lien Teh; England by Doctor A. F. Jackson, who fell a martyr, to the great grief of all China; Scotland by Doctor Ross, of Mukden. Though no victim recovers, the germ can not live outside in dry air. The doctors and sanitary corps, inoculated with Yersin serum, or Haffkine’s or Kitasato’s prophylactic lymph, at once equipped themselves with masks and surtouts, and the scene was one which Manzoni might have novelized. Often dying men were seen to struggle up to the pile of bodies among which were their fathers, bow low in filial, Confucian ancestor worship, even to pour out libations and present sacrifice, and then join the heap in a delirious death agony. Such a tragic attitude could be possible only in a land of ancestor worship.
Kingslake, in Eothen, describes the quarantined city of Cairo in 1835, when a thousand deaths a day occurred until the terrorized population hated the name death, and called it with bated breath “another accident”. I have been through similar nerve-racking experiences in the plague centers of China, the mentioning of death and cemeteries being tabooed from polite conversation, though hundreds were falling. Kingslake’s description is graphic. He went to the only European physician in the city, and found him wrapped up, suffering from the plague. The heroic man prescribed for Kingslake. Later, thinking that he might have recovered, Kingslake sent his servant to ask the physician to call. “Did you meet him?” The servant replied: “Yes, I met him coming out of his house,—on his bier!” In the tenth chapter of Eothen, Kingslake recites how the plague in 1835 ruthlessly struck down the brave brothers of the Franciscan monastery in holy Jerusalem. One quarantined member went on his priestly duty to the stricken city. On his return to the pest-house, he rang a bell as a signal that he still lived, and was carrying on the martyr’s work over the paths that Christ himself trod. When the bell ceased ringing, a new brother went forth to bury the martyr, and take up his duties which could only also lead to death.
In 1720, Belsunce, the hero Bishop of Marseilles, seemed alone to breathe pure air and handle pure food as he moved among the infected who to the number of 50,000 dropped at his feet. Infection comes from indoor breathing, direct, or from sputum. Banish dirt, darkness and foul air, and both bubonics at once commit suicide or die of starvation. The pneumonic, it will be recalled, swept from Harbin to Newchwang, and held Europe in terror that it would take the Siberian goods train westward for St. Petersburg and Berlin. Thirty European doctors and nurses were martyrs, most of them Russians. The Chinese permitted what they have never permitted before, the cremation of the dead, and the segregation of suspects in detention camps. At Harbin alone there were 1,200 deaths, the dead being cremated in the brick kilns. If heroic members of any legation staff should be given honors for the Peking campaign against plague in 1911, there are 20,000 veterans of Hongkong and South China who should be clothed in a coat of medals for plague dangers they never thought of talking about, except to say with their guest Kipling that “it was all in the day’s work”. I have seen the foreign police, soldiers, sanitary corps and volunteers of Hongkong and Canton tackle multitudinous dangers in epidemics with all the éclat of a football game, and the men of Bombay regularly do the same thing. Because of the legations and press bureaus, the foreigner in North China, God bless him, is much better advertised than is the foreigner of South China and India. India had one Kipling; South China is looking for hers!
In a former volume I have instanced some surprising appearances of bubonic plague in Europe. In September, 1910, a girl, her father, mother and nurse, died successively under mysterious conditions at Preston, Suffolk, England. It was later noticed that the rats in the neighborhood were dying. Examination showed that the black plague was the cause, and the supposition is that the disease was imported in grain received from Odessa, Russia, and that the germs developed under conditions of damp, dirt and darkness. In 1902, Odessa, Russia, reported a plague case in the house of a baker. In August, 1910, plague was recrudescent there in the very same house, showing that the bubonic plague germs had lived eight years. The ineffective measures of the authorities to destroy the rats caused the spread of the last-mentioned epidemic. World campaigns against rats will doubtless now occur from time to time, as insurance companies have taken up the study of the subject.
Abattoir and market laws calling for foreign supervision and veterinary inspection were first instituted by Hongkong, and Singapore, Shanghai, Tientsin, Saigon, Manila, and Tsingtau followed in about the order named. Partial inspection is exercised at Canton, Hankau, Newchwang, Peking and other cities. It is one of the things China must and will soon take hold of, for Sun Yat Sen (Sunyacius) who has done so much for Chinese reform, is himself a modern physician and has always lived in foreign or treaty ports. In connection with this, China will improve her cattle, which are of the wild, buffalo-humped variety, with an excess of bone. Her Hankau and Manchurian black, as well as the Kwangtung white, pigs are now going to Liverpool, London, Glasgow and Bremen. It is wonderful that populous China can be an exporter of meat to Europe. It shows two things: that living in America and Europe is too high, and that return freights are too low. China centuries ago instituted pure food laws, preceding Germany, Britain and America. They did not go far of course, but they showed the germinative idea. The guild or manufacturer was glad to stamp biscuit or ink-stick, and the food purveyor placed a red stamp on his dried duck, fish, or vermicelli package, the stamp standing for purity or inferiority according to the reputation of the packer.
Every reader has sympathized with the heroic General Roberts who in his book, Forty-One Years in India, tells of a sunstroke which he suffered in the heat of the tropics. The great heat and humidity are likely to produce, certainly in those who use stimulants, drugs or much meat, anaemia or acidulation of the blood, with persistent auto-intoxication, and the resulting torture of constantly reeling under the heat can be imagined. The Chinese are up at daylight, and most active in the cooler part of the day. The Chinese skull, because of the lifelong habit of shaving the head under the Manchu régime, grows thicker than the European’s skull, and the former, therefore, are better able to resist the equatorial sun. Herodotus pointed out that the ancient Egyptians, for the same reason, resisted the sun better than the Persians, who accustomed themselves to head-coverings from childhood. The Chinese emperor and the mandarins gave their audiences at dawn. It will be recalled that Cicero, when governor of Asiatic Cicilia, admitted the crowds of complainants to his popular court at daylight, so as to use the hot midday for retirement from the heat. At Hongkong, where, hot as it is, exercise is imperative, we used to rise at daylight and rush to the golf, tennis and riding courses for an hour’s play, and this unusual sight would induce you to say that it was not so luxurious a colony as the sumptuous club life of the later day would possibly make it appear to be.
The bar in an Oriental club is eloquent of the fact that you are in the malarial East, for among the popular bottles is the one containing quinine-sulphate powder, and the veterans seem able to judge what is a proper dose to take out with a spoon to mix with their sherry as they salute and say: “Here’s how,” or “The king.”
South China is kind to the man who suffers from heat. Knowing that he is coolest who can throw away his flesh and move in his bare bones, she provides a damp hot climate that reduces men to the appearance of trained thoroughbreds! There they walk, the thinnest foreigners of the Far East, the Hongkong, Manila, Saigon, Shanghai and Canton men! They have been boiled down almost to their backbones and skulls from March until November, and there being no tissue to feed, the blood can all go to building up the gray matter! Although black focuses the actinic rays of the overhead equatorial sun, and a body feels twenty degrees more of heat than when covered with white, the British courts of Hongkong insist on the formal garb of Lincoln’s Inn, a black coat and gown. Pity the barristers and judges of Hongkong who delve into the law and weigh out justice in the stifling atmosphere of the magnificent courts of the illustrious Crown colony. The almost naked, or duck-covered criminal, bracing up for his sentence, shows fewer beads on his perspiring brow than do his learned accusers! “Inflexible” is not a more famous name in the British navy than in the British legal and colonial service.
The Americans in Manila, the French in Saigon, and the republican Chinese, however, are listening to the dictates of hygiene rather than to the long sonorous trump of tradition. In the American cavalry in the tropics it is found that the imported white animals are immune to the heat, whereas the darker breeds soon die. Southern Tibet is coming nearer to the railhead with its wonderful climate for the enervated of the whole East. India, Tonquin and China are sending on their construction gangs, and the day is not so far off when the veil at the 8,000 feet passes, which has hid the last withheld land, will be rent in twain. The two men who have done the most to break down the forts of exclusion are Sir Francis, Colonel Younghusband, for the Indian government, and the Chinese general, Chao Ehr Feng, who in 1910 also broke up the Buddhist superstitious system by driving the Dalai Lama (their pope) for the first time into unholy foreign soil at Darjeeling. Twenty miles south of Chungking, in the sublime valley of Wen Tang, is a famous hot sulphur bath cut in the rock. The flow is generous, and the Buddhist priests have divided the bath so that men and women may use it. They make no charge for the use of the water, but they charge for inn service. Before many years many foreigners will resort here, as the bathing is beautifully clean.
A remarkable thing about China is the comparative absence of flies, because manure and refuse is so important as a fertilizer that it is immediately carried to the intensively farmed fields, which are expected to produce two to three harvests a year. Therefore typhoid and other diseases are not as prevalent as they otherwise would be. However, a whisper in your ear, reader: if China lacks in flies, she abounds in “bunkies,” which is the polite name for fleas! Nature abhors a vacuum and always provides for the deficiency in one field from the surplus in another! To have real safety in a Chinese inn, one needs to go to bed in a Peary suit, furnished with a diver’s helmet. This is never done, however, because of the heat. Cold weather only increases the torture, for the pauper “bunkie,” small as he is, successfully races to the heated kang faster than the paying guest! As the Chinese masses use no liquor, tobacco or drugs, and live an outdoor life on vegetable food mainly, their hearts are in splendid condition, and all the hospital surgeons report remarkable recoveries when an accident has made operations necessary. The race seems to have that old aboriginal fortitude of not fearing the knife or wincing under pain. They have no idea of the danger of infection by contact, the rich being as ill-informed as the poor. Wet towels, wrung out in the same hot water, are for refreshment rubbed over the hands, face and neck of every one at a feast. A governor’s pipe is first lighted and puffed for him by a miserable attendant, the governor merely wiping the mouthpiece dry with his hand or long sleeve, the custom being to cut out a soiled sleeve and substitute a new sleeve so as to save the splendid garment.
The Chinese are proving themselves to be adept in dental surgery. Many Chinese have graduated from the University of Pennsylvania dental school, and they have set up in business throughout the Chinese treaty ports. Others have graduated from Hongkong’s school, and still others, entering as apprentices under Chinese dentists, trained abroad, soon start out for themselves and pass the good work along. When customers are slow in coming, the Chinese dentist adds another shingle to his door. “Dentist and Photographer”; “Dentist and Printer”; “Dentist and Manufacturers’ Agent,” are common signs. A good many stories are printed that the old-fashioned Oriental dentist trained himself for tooth pulling by practising with his fingers on pulling pegs from soft and afterward from hardwood logs, but this is true only as far as loosened teeth are concerned. They always used forceps of some kind. Generals Roberts and Kitchener could not, by taking thought, add one cubit unto the stature of the British soldier, but they decreed that he must have as good teeth as he had a rifle when on foreign service, and so the dentists of Hongkong and other garrison ports flourish. The British call themselves “dental surgeons.” The Chinese put out a sign that they repair or extract molars “by best American methods.” The Philadelphia dentist, here as over the world, leads in his calling. One owns a leading newspaper of Hongkong. The prices of the American dentist are high, as the tourist and five-year indentured clerk discover. Apprentices are brought out under contract covering service, and it is rumored that some contracts prohibit independent practise in the same port at the end of the term; but common law has long ago exploded the legality of a man signing away his rights to make a living.
It is strongly hoped that a cure has now been found for incipient tubercular leprosy, hitherto supposed to be incurable. South China has more lepers than any country, and the necessary segregation is incomplete. Doctor J. T. Wayson, city physician of Honolulu, has used the “beauty pencil” (stick of carbon dioxide ice), which gives a temperature of one hundred degrees below zero, on the nodule sores, breaking down the affected tissues time after time, until no “bacilli leprae” are found in the tests of the cuttings from the surrounding parts. He has found that affected children of lepers seem to have been cured. The trial of this method will be made in the missionary and University of Pennsylvania hospitals at Canton, which is the center of the largest leprous district in the world, though it has had no Robert Louis Stevenson or Father Damien eloquently to make its wants known, as was done for the Molokai colony in Hawaii. If there is some unknown microbic diathesis or nervous tendency to it, this remedy, like quinine, strychnine, phosphate of iron, chaulmoogra oil, etc., may not be a permanent success. Long years of observation only can tell. I have gone through the leper camps and the leper boat colonies of the Heungshan Peninsula between Canton and Macao. The colonies do not seem to move up or down in numbers. There seems to be no danger of infection if the visitor does not eat or handle things among them.
As I have related in The Chinese, the scenes are piteous beyond words, and illustrate China’s old Spartan methods, that the sooner incompetents pass away the better for all. It is said that a fish diet encourages the diathesis, and certainly Heungshan is a remarkable fish center. Doctor G. A. Hansen, of Bergen, a Norwegian bacteriologist, and Doctors Brinckerhoff, Cumy and Hallman, of Honolulu, all discovered the leprosy bacillus, and Doctor Hansen broke down the belief that the disease was hereditary. By segregation, he reduced Norway’s cases from three thousand to four hundred. The American bacteriologists are experimenting on toxins. In 1902 an American named Conrardy established and lived in a model endowed lazaretto with five hundred lepers near Canton. He, of course, contracted the disease, which made slow headway because of his vitality, which was stronger than that of the vegetable-fed Chinese. He expected to live for fifteen years, but at the end of eight years he was slowly sinking. On beautiful Joao Island, which is in view from your hotel window at Macao, South China, Portugal long ago established a leper asylum.
A careful study of the newspapers for many years must lead one to the deduction that as the Chinese adopt foreign life in the treaty ports, suicides are increasing among married women and business men. Probably both religion and nerves are at fault, for they go somewhat together. As is well known, Chinese cities and dwelling-compounds are surrounded by walls. Unusual rains or quickly melting snows often undermine the walls of compounds, filling the street with débris. In August, 1911, at Mukden, Manchuria, particularly, the streets looked as though the Russians and Japanese had again just got through with bombarding the town! How differently everything is done in China and the Occident! The New Jersey cities are spending some $10,000,000 to take liquid sewage from their rivers and conduct it in a trunk sewer to New York Bay. In China so little sewage remains after the farmer is through with its manuring properties that British analysts concluded to take the water supply for the three cities of Hankau, Hanyang and Wuchang, in the center of populous China, directly from the Han River near the cities. The extensive plant consists of a deep intake protected from the heavy loess siltage; an air lift, which showers the water in rain into filter beds; reservoirs of five million gallons; three Worthington pumps of 300,000 gallons an hour and an electric plant to supply the cities. The company is Chinese, and Chinese did all the contracting by the favorite method of piecework. As the provincial parliament was not established when the company was chartered, the viceroy granted the franchise. American boilers were used.
Water gathering is easy in Hongkong, though it has no river. Many mountains of the island have been reserved and trenched at the bottom. The torrential rains strike these peaks, and a thousand trenches carry the water to dammed valleys at Taitam, Pokfulum and Wong Nei Chong, high enough up in the hills to give gravity pressure for the mains. The beautiful aqueducts on Bowen Road, far up on the mountain side, facing the famous harbor, are a sight no tourist approaching on his steamer will forget. When pianos are made for the humid south, loose keys and felt, fastened without gum, must be provided for, and even at that lamps are kept burning under the instrument to dry the atmosphere. A case of the Korean “earth disease,” or “tochil,” is rare in America, owing to the vigilance of our Marine Hospital Service, but one case got into Seattle from the Orient in September, 1910. The disease is incurable and infectious, and is much dreaded. Other races may have forgotten, but the Orient never forgets, and always can bring up something wonderful from the dispersion of Babel, and every camp gathering since, along the valley of the Tarim!
An account of the quarantine practise at Hongkong and other Oriental tropical ports may be of interest. Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Shanghai or Nagasaki may hear or believe that there is plague or cholera at Hongkong, and they quarantine vessels from the latter port. There is always certain feeling between the port doctors, and Hongkong retaliates. A vessel loaded with steerage and cabin passengers arrives at Hongkong from one of these other ports. The yellow flag is hoisted on the main topmast and no one is allowed to board the ship, which lies in the stream, until the port doctor and his assistants come off in a launch, which flies a yellow flag, and allows the ship’s yellow flag to be hauled down. Quartermasters man the gangway and rail until the doctor frees the vessel. He holds a conference with the ship’s doctor, and woe betide the latter’s vessel, or its future calls up and down the coast, if untruths are told or concealments made. The cabin passengers are carefully watched as they march by the cabin table, and the temperature of suspicious cases is taken. Any one who shows over ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit is examined further for corroborative symptoms. The temperature of every one of the steerage is taken and the glass thermometer is not always cleaned as it is passed from mouth to mouth here in these crowded regions! A suspicious case is stripped of clothes then and there in the line. Despite satisfactory examinations, vessels are sometimes held up forty-eight hours, and every one in the steerage, as well as his baggage and quarters, is sulphur-smoked, steamed and washed. A fumigation hulk is used for this purpose, and it is the most hated vessel anchored in the harbor. I have known a ship’s white officers, afflicted with plague, cholera, etc., to be taken off to the plague hulk Hygeia, and their vessels to be detained fourteen days for observation and cleansing before being released by the British and American doctors of the port. The detention anchorage ranges on the northwest of the usual fairway, and though a beautiful spot under the heathen hills of old China, it is naturally considered by many as a most melancholy one.
There is always a smouldering fire of conflict burning in the hearts of ships’ agents, port doctors and United States Marine hospital surgeons on duty abroad. The agents are inclined to imperfect care and quicker despatch of vessels. The United States doctors who, abroad, splendidly and incorruptibly guard the health of America, are likely to injure competitive business for the sake of making safety doubly sure. The proper course is “in medio tutissimus ibis.” I have known these doctors to examine the earth around lily roots and prohibit their export to America during many months of the year. Ships’ captains, doctors and agents, ever pressed by the management for increased earnings, take every bit of risk they can, even in the case of west-bound Chinese suffering from phthisis, and the check of the United States Marine Hospital Service is salutary, and will continue to be necessary. When a vessel is homeward bound the United States Marine doctor at Hongkong will not give a clean bill of health for America until all steerage passengers and their effects have been washed and steamed in disinfecting waters. Often the emigrants are stripped and America thus saved from loathsome hidden diseases being imported. The scene is sometimes enough to make the doctors as sagacious as Solomon, or as compassionate as Florence Nightingale.
What a work is opening up in China for the labors of the medical missionary, first with the touch and then with the voice of the Angel of Salvation. The rigid medical examination of returning Chinese at Hongkong and San Francisco is disliked by Chinese consuls, firms and the steerage passengers themselves, but the best friend of China, if he is enlightened as to the unsanitary conditions yet obtaining there, could not ask America to lighten her severity, which is no more onerous than Japan’s, until China cleans up her land, sanitizes her houses, and supplies herself with a modern medical system. The inspection at San Francisco sometimes calls for lancing of the ear at night to see if the patient is suffering from filariasis, and at Hongkong and sometimes at San Francisco the immigrant is required to disrobe, bathe and have his effects fumigated. The Hongkong inspection can not obviate the wisdom of a new inspection at San Francisco to ward against hookworm, elephantiasis, plague, cholera and the unmentionable disease.
Hongkong is ever increasing its hospital equipment, which is now the most extensive in the Far East. Some of the buildings erected on the mountain peaks are palatial. On the western slope of Victoria Mount there is the worldwide known Tung Wah Hospital, managed by Chinese educated in the medical schools of Britain, America and Hongkong. At this hospital Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the first president of China, was a student some years ago. Over Bowen Road, above the clouds of Mount Wanchai, is the sumptuous Military Hospital, and at the foot of the mountain is the no less splendid Naval Hospital. On Mount Kellett is Sharp’s Hospital, and on Victoria Peak is the Peak Hospital. There is the Civil Hospital, the Nethersole Hospital, hospitals over on the mainland at Kowloon, and there will be a railroad hospital at Kowloon. Canton has copied from Hongkong. The Chinese there are modernizing their ancient guild hospitals which lie outside of the eastern wall. Philanthropy in only the smallest of the Hongkong hospitals has been depended upon, most of them being municipal or service hospitals. At Canton is the immense Doctor Peter Parker Hospital, founded in 1835, for which the American Presbyterian women of Philadelphia furnish the medical missionaries. There are 300 beds, and 25,000 patients are treated annually. The Chinese do their part, having presented a building for a medical college. The Gregg Hospitals for Women at Canton is presided over by Doctors Mary Fulton and Mary Niles, and the Chinese have given $3,500 for a children’s ward. At Kowkiang, on the Yangtze, there is the model Danforth Memorial Hospital, erected with American money and presided over by a noted Chinese lady physician who has taken the name of Miss Mary Stone, and who graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School.
In remote large Hainan Island, in Suchow, at Paoting, Chingtu, Peking, etc., there are American Presbyterian hospitals. Where there are now hundreds there will soon be thousands of medical missionaries and more medical colleges to fit the Chinese to help themselves. It is the most important work in China,—more important even than foreign loans for railways and industrials, and far more important than loans for armies and navies. Doctor F. C. Yen, of Yale Medical College, Changsha, is a fine example of a native medical man, trained in the best that the West knows. Several American universities have opened medical schools in China, the University of Pennsylvania at Canton, Yale at Changsha in stern conservative Hunan province; and now Harvard proposes to open a medical school possibly at Shanghai, to be staffed by the Harvard Medical School, and the diseases which they will attack are China’s curses, the dangers of the world,—the skin diseases, tumors, the two plagues, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, malaria and consumption. One-third of the money for the Scotch Presbyterian Hospital and medical college at Mukden was contributed by the Chinese, who now warmly appreciate Western medicine.
The day is not distant when the Chinese, placed on their feet in finance, will pay half the expense of medical missions. The Chinese give liquorice to men and animals as a cure for wasting diseases. From the skin of a venomous toad their doctors derive a preparation which they call Sen-so. It is a far more powerful stimulus to heart action than our drug digitalis. It is well known that deer’s horns are ground to powder by the old-fashioned Chinese doctors. In the valley of the Wei River, just north of the Peling range in far western Kansu province, stags are raised in enclosures for this purpose. The soft prongs of the horn are cut off in summer time. The old-fashioned doctors of China never dissected, as abuse of the body is contrary to Confucianism. They knew nothing of circulation, and little of anatomy, physiology or chemistry. “Then Confucianism must go,” say the new Chinese scientists. Two of their medical proverbs are:
“A physician may cure every disease except the disease of Fate.”
“Send for the diagnostician before the druggist, for the cure must fit the disease.”
Four great tropical medicine colleges have been opened outside of the Orient. The first was the University of Liverpool School. Then followed the London School of Tropical Medicine, and the Hamburg School of the Germans. Now the New York Tropical Medical School has been opened at Twentieth Street and Second Avenue. The work will include the translation of text-books, and America will be able to do much for Southern China in the clinic on ships which the school will have as soon as the Panama Canal is open. Serums have yet to be found for the paralyzing dengue which every foreigner in China has suffered from at one time or another: typhus, anæmia, dum-dum, tze-tze, sleeping sickness, amoebic dysentery, malaria and pneumonic plague, though the indefatigable Doctor Kitasato found a temporary serum for the last named.
The medical works translated into Chinese by medical missionaries include the following: Doctor J. G. Kerr’s (first teacher of Doctor Sunyacius) translation of Bartholow’s Practise of Medicine, Doctor S. A. Hunter’s translation of a Materia Medica and Pharmacopœia, Doctor Dudgeon’s translation of Gray’s Anatomy, Doctor Porter’s translation of a physiology, Doctor Mary Fulton’s Diseases of Children; Nursing in Surgery, and Gynecology, etc.
When I think of the trials of the Orient in its heated, humid, equatorial region, where I lived for three years; and the hardships, dangers and life-remembered punishment of its unavoidable, various diseases, I am inclined to suggest in this book the formation of an “Equator Club,” eligibility for membership in which shall be at least two years’ uninterrupted residence between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Such an experience was certainly a unique and trying one, a tremendous test of physique, as a growing number, who have endured it, will confess, and a perpetuated remembrance of those days, and an interest in the successors who have followed one to take up the white man’s growing burdens in those realms of the imperious sun, would certainly do good.
XXVII
CHINESE WOMANHOOD
On the last of our August the women of China celebrate the festival of the goddess of needlework. The interesting legend told to the daughters of the house is as follows: This goddess, because of her wonderful skill, was given by the great god Tien to a worthy farmer. After this life she incurred the wrath of the god and was removed from her husband’s star. Once a year, when her star comes round again, magpies conduct her back to her husband’s star home, across the carpet of the Milky Way, where she is welcome for a while, because she is as good a needleworker as he is a farmer and provider. The festival includes the exhibition on a table of the needlework of the women and the toy work of the girls. Wonderful toys of gummed sesame seeds, wax and paper are made, and toys worked by clockwork or heat, which exhibit all kinds of rural life,—some of it humorous. From behind screens the women listen to what the men callers have to say to the head of the family in praise of their handiwork. It is, however, principally a women’s festival and encourages the production of the gorgeous embroidery of the Chinese. A Chinese wit was asked the difference in the position of Chinese and Anglo-Saxon women, and she replied: “An Oriental man beats his wife in public to show that he is indeed the ruler, but he pets her in private, whereas a Western man pets his wife in public and beats her in private.” I do not know what the remote Tibet men do with their powerful women in private, but I do know that the women of Tibet who come down into Szechuen and Yunnan provinces with the trading trains are on an equal with man. They join him in work, play, in meeting strangers and in holding the “cash,” and therefore are the most independent of the Chinese women. They do not bind their feet, as they have too much work to do. They come next to the Tonquinoise as perhaps the best-looking of the Chinese. The best dressed women in China live in Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces. The dress of Korean women is not so gorgeous as the Chinese dress, the former wearing green or white, and hiding their heads in immense basket hats, “to keep them from flirting” the wits say! The Korean woman at home, instead of modestly screening her face with a fan, does so by lifting up her wide sleeve. Muffs and gloves are not worn in the cold north. Instead, the wide long sleeve is gathered round the hand.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Lighting China’s sea-ways by the National Customs Department. This is the Guia Light. Note the winding rock path, cut to the summit; Kwangtung province.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Modern buildings of brick. Nearly all have large verandas. Canton water-front, Pearl River.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The Chinese type of girlhood, as contrasted with the Japanese type shown in another photograph. In the New China the compressing of feet is taboo.
The campaign of the Tien Tsu Hui (As-Heaven-Made-It Foot Society) against foot-binding is meeting with much success. Chinese women are rejoicing that they are not withheld from physical freedom and an education, by being longer crippled. The idea that a bound foot is the surest sign of a lady, and the best recommendation for marriage, is dying out. As prices increase with the material development of China, men will not be able to hire servants to carry and wait on these crippled women. Therefore economy will advance the reform also. The famous viceroy of Wuchang, Chang Chih Tung, who died in 1909, was the first prominent Chinese official to become converted to the reform. The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi joined the movement. It is a pity that more Chinese girls from the Yangtze and southern provinces do not come to American and European schools, as their work, on returning to China, would do most for this reform. The snobbish idea, of course, was that a girl who never needed to work, and had never worked, made a very select wife, just as in America and Britain the “snobs” think that a girl who has never worked, and can not work, makes a finer wife than a woman who has been or is in business. The French have thought otherwise for a long time. One of the pioneer foreign women, outside of the missionaries, who worked and lectured in China for the unbinding of feet, was Mrs. Archibald Little, author of The Land of the Blue Gown, and wife of the intrepid Yangtze explorer and author.
The following love tale is the one oftenest painted on your teacup and saucer, and other Chinese pottery, and on fans, etc. Kung She is the sweet and lovely daughter of a rich man. She falls in love with her father’s bright and brave young secretary, who has more in rosy prospect and dreams than in lined pocket. The father proposes that the daughter shall, against her will, marry a rich old suitor. The lovers in desperation elope over a bamboo bridge to an island pavilion of willow wood, with beautiful up-curving eaves. The wrathful suitor follows and burns the pavilion and the bridge. The souls of the lovers take refuge in the bodies of two doves which are seen cooing from the branches of a banyan that grows above the pavilion. Thus we sit down to eat, and we fan ourselves each day over a beautiful love tale of romantic old China.
The queue is now going out as man’s head-dress in republican China. The general custom with Chinese women is to dress the hair out behind, sticking in large-headed gold pins; and the Manchu’s dress it over the ear, with the help of wide pins, and broad ribbons and flowers. The aboriginal tribes of Lolos in Szechuen province, and Miao Tszes in Kweichau province, dress the hair on top of the head over rats, in true Western cone-style. The Chinese women oil their hair and brush it out smooth on forms. The only departure from this is a straight bang allowed to girls. They wonder if we have brushes or combs in the West, and point to our curls (called “rough dog”) as a proof of our tonsorial carelessness.
Some of the proverbs of the women are:
“You can not tell a good husband that his wife has a defect.”
“Ugly and beautiful daughters all have one face to a true mother.”
“A man weds a wife for her goodness, but a concubine for her face.”
“Mother’s love is even in beasts, for the hungriest tiger will not eat its whelps.”
“Deeds are better than admiration.”
“A virtuous wife is like a loyal statesman; she knows only one king, her husband.”
“Mother and father first and wealth after.”
“She is dead indeed who walks around with a dead heart.”
“If you listen to every one’s advice, the picture will never be straight on the wall.”
“Let thy purse and not thine eyes tell thee what to buy.”
“You can’t expect the looking glass to reveal more than you put into it.”
Because of the worship of men ancestors, Confucianism has been called a man’s religion. Yet it recognizes woman’s work. A bronze brazier stands before the open white marble altar at Peking, in which once a year at the ancient Chou sacrifices to the God of Heaven, the emperor-pope burns silk. The Manchu emperor, in abdicating the throne, retained his sacerdotal offices, though strictly speaking, they should have fallen to the Ducal Kung Fut Tszes, of Shangtung province, who are the seventy-seventh in direct line from Confucius. A number of the Kungs, however, are Christians, and they exerted little insistence on their Confucian privileges. The care of the worms and the weaving of silk is distinctly woman’s work in China. This sacrifice is repeated by the governor at every capital, and heads of families sometimes, in their own office of patriarch priest, make the silk sacrifice. This is quite distinct from hiring a Taoist bonze to burn silvered and gilded imitations of money to appease a devil or “ying” spirit. A patriarch would have no influence there, the operation requiring a specialist more familiar with witches and demons! The Chinese women always sit on chairs and lounges (kangs); the Koreans and Japanese sit on the floor. This does not mean that the Koreans, whom the Japanese have conquered, are in sympathy with the latter, for they thoroughly hate each other. The Chinese never wear a feather, except to denote literary rank in men. Therefore the bucolic natives who see the fashion of western women, remark: “Only your women are educated, and very talented at that, some having a dozen literary degrees.” Millinery is for men, not for women in China, as only men wear a feathered cap. The gorgeous tail feathers of the Machi species of pheasant are particularly popular. Preserves of these birds are kept in the Wei valley, north of the Peling range of mountains in far western Kansu province, to provide the men milliners with supplies!
A well-known custom at Chinese weddings is the effort of the bride to sit upon part of the groom’s gown when they are drinking the betrothal tea together. The cups are tied with a red string, and the groom must not break the string in his effort to release his gown. If the bride succeeds it means that she will be his ruler. A partially similar custom prevails among the Miaotse aboriginal tribes of Yunnan province. The friends of the groom endeavor to prevent the bride’s brothers from throwing her veil on the roof of the house. If the latter are successful in the rush, the omen is that the bride will rule the groom, saying in any argument: “Remember that on June 15th my veil went on your roof!” The midwife is a well-filled calling, but she does not go by that name. She is called the “life-catcher” throughout the land. The “mother-in-law” joke does not obtain in China. Its place is taken by the son-in-law joke. It is the aim of the son-in-law and his wife to “go and live on mother” as long as possible. Mother resents it with the usual complaint: “Here comes my son-in-law, with his wife and six children, to live on us again for a month; dearie me,” etc.! When a family marries off a daughter, generally to save the expense of supporting her, they hope to see the last of her as far as that expense goes. Family courtesy, the Confucian “li” code, prescribes yearly entertainment, however, of the son-in-law’s family, which is not reciprocated, and hence the standing of the son-in-law joke as a mirth-provoker among those who perceive the code’s requirements obeyed, with exactness but not with cheerfulness!
Although the race has for centuries shaved the heads of the men almost to baldness, they have a great abhorrence of baldness in women, and this is frequently pleaded as a cause for divorce or breaking of an engagement (marriage contract). The women in general have luxuriant hair, though it is coarse, and its color and luster remain till late in life, owing to the use of oils, the absence of hats, and the out-of-door habits. If the lion-like chow dog (yellow or black) is the pet of the men, the Pekingese toy spaniel is the pet of the Manchu woman. She calls it her “sleeve dog.” The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi enumerated its points as follows: “It shall learn to bite a stranger; its toy body shall be maned and fixed with the fierce eyes of the great lion seeking its prey. Its ears shall be set like the sails of a war junk; its nose shall be stubby like the monkey god of the Hindus; its forelegs shall be bowed so that it can walk over the foot of its mistress, but shall not be able to stray far from the yamen; its feet shall be tufted so that its step shall be as on turf; and its color shall suit every change of gown. It shall be fed on the breasts of quails, livers of curlews and sharks’ fins. Its drink shall be Hankau, first-budded tea and antelope’s milk. If ill, it shall be anointed with the fat of leopards, and drink a thrush-egg full of the juice of the custard apple and dissolved rhinoceros’ horn. If very ill, piebald leeches shall be applied to it.” Despite all this poetry which aptly goes with this fashionable dog, it thrives very well on Spratt’s dog biscuit in the salons of West End, London, and Fifth Avenue, New York. A number of ladies are mixing up Chinese and Japanese names for the pets at the bench shows (Peking Yen, for instance), but the dog answers very well to the names Jip, Tip, etc., which we used to call those old favorite toy dogs, the black-and-tans. The dog looks like a cross between a Pomeranian and a King Charles spaniel. The face is decidedly lion-like; the bushy tail sweeps well over the back as does that of his big brother, the Chinese chow dog. The legs are short and bowed, and the manner is very alert.
Possibly overmuch has been written that the Chinese despise female children and worship male children. In the economic and religious structure of old China boys have been more valuable, but the human heart of the race has responded to love for its girls. Poverty, more than hardness of heart, has induced the race in instances to sell its girls; for China has been very poor because of flood and famine, resulting from inefficiency of government and the non-development of mines and manufacturing. The two greatest teachers of old China have for twenty-five centuries taught love of children in the following among other maxims. Confucius said: “Treat the young tenderly,” and Mencius wrote: “The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart.” Where the parents can afford it, the Chinese dress their boys and girls expensively and gorgeously, and fondle them as lovingly as do the Hebrews, who are supposed to set the standard in love for children, as compared with us colder northern races. One of the first things that the new government will attempt to suppress will be the sale of girl slaves and concubinage. The population of China will fall or remain stationary, which will be a good thing for China. There is, therefore, no “Yellow Peril” for the West, as the Emperor William enunciated in 1898. The poorer a man, the more children he desires in China, so that sons may take care of him in old age, but he forgets that he is raising uneducated sons and neglected girls, who are often sold into slavery. Better a family of four well-cared-for children in the new hygienic Cathay than a family of ten in the old China. China’s population will fall under the new régime, but her efficiency, education and comfort will advance, and those who will benefit the most, as compared with their former condition, will be her women.
At the time of the revolution, October, 1911, to February, 1912, there were 400,000 starving girls and women in the Yangtze and Hwei River valleys alone who offered to sell themselves for food; China’s courts will no more defend the legality of such contracts under duress, as we in the West must revise our “freedom of contract” and “confession” laws where an uninformed or a restrained individual signs away rights. Every Chinese boy has till now married early in life, Shanghai being an exception in having a large demi-monde colony. The Kuo Kuang Pao, a native paper of Peking, complained in a late issue of courtesans (with modesty they call it rather the “custom of Shanghai”) coming to Peking, and soliciting students brazenly in the streets. Shanghai has a “slave refuge” for the protection of abandoned and abused girls. Intense poverty on account of famine is at the base of this curse. It is not as common in Hongkong and Canton as in the valleys of the Hoang, Han, Yangtze and Hwei Rivers.
The position of the Chinese woman, taken by the white man, who is mean enough to do it, as a common law wife, and of their Eurasian children, who are often not acknowledged, or are deserted, is a pathetic one in Hongkong, Shanghai and many treaty ports. It was more common in the old days than it is now, and men of high position often fell, when the Oriental ports were designated over an ill-informed world as the “white man’s grave,” to which no white woman would come. There are Eurasian schools and orphanages in Hongkong, Shanghai, Macao, etc., and the colonies of deserted Eurasians have a population of thousands. They are far from unintelligent. The best billiard player in Hongkong was of this mixed race. They have dark eyes and hair and dress in both foreign and Chinese style. They are taller and have larger heads than the pure Chinese. In the second and third generations the hair turns fairer. Naturally they partake of the characteristics of each race. A Eurasian is more sprightly than the Chinese, and he is inclined to the sporting and spendthrift proclivities of the foreigner. They are the clerks and second men of the ports. Few rise high, though many now attend colleges. They are the best penmen and linguists of the Far Fast, though not earnest enough to become scholars, or persistent enough to become the successful merchants which the men of their mother’s race are. Feeling sometimes acutely the opprobrium which is visited upon them by both races, they often claim a dark foreign nationality, generally Portuguese of Macao colony.
I want to relate the remarkable history of one Eurasian and his mother. I shall say no more of his father than that in blood and ability he was one of the noblest names that came for a long sojourn in the Far East. His position was such that the father could not own the son, especially as in time the former married a white woman. The boy, who from the beginning bore a Chinese name, was the picture of his father, and his dressing in Chinese clothes and wearing a queue shocked all of us who knew the history, for the boy was taller than the Chinese and had the face of a foreigner. Some laughed, for the youth seemed to be a foreigner on perpetual masquerade. He came into our hong as clerk, was easily the best penman and figurer in the office. His manners were those of fashionable West End, London, or genteel Upper Fifth Avenue; you felt when you heard him speak that you were talking to your superior. He often had business dealings with his father, yet he did not seem conscious of the relationship. The son, being even the abler man, the painful dramatic situation was pitiful. The tall Eurasian youth married a Chinese woman in time, and reverted to his mother’s race, and his deserted Chinese mother returned to her blood, married a Chinese, had many pure blood children, and publicly disowned her Eurasian boy. Privately, however, the boy and mother sometimes met, and the scene matched in dramatic pathos the meetings with the father. The youth seemed to be cheerful despite all these trials. I never saw him reveal pride or resentment; only in this way, when in later years for a time, he came into a position of power in a Chinese company which entered into international trade, he was merciless when the white competitor withstood him. I have often felt his mighty blows and been outwitted by his commercial strategy. He smiled in a complacent way as though to say: “Why might I not circumvent you; you know something, perhaps, about one race, but nothing about the other. I, being a Eurasian, know much about the two races.” He deserved all his conquests. He had something to avenge, and he did right in casting his life with China and not Europe. The remarkably dramatic setting of this boy’s, his mother’s and father’s life would have given Shakespeare material for a tragedy, and the foreigner concerned would have paid the price of his heartless audacity, despite the romantic poetry which Pierre Loti wove around such relationships in his book Madame Chrysanthème.
Perhaps the most significant sign of China’s reform is the new status of women. Never before have Chinese women traveled with their merchant husbands. In a few isolated instances Chinese ministers have taken their wives abroad, but there have never been mixed parties of men and women until the revolution. On November, 1911, a touring party of prominent members of Chinese trading guilds of several of the provinces met at Shanghai for a business tour of Japan. They were accompanied by their wives. The New China has its Mrs. Pankhurst in Miss Yik Yung Ying, of Canton, who is foreign trained and has admission to the Nanking Assembly as representing the women of her province of Kwangtung. She has obtained from the Nanking Assembly a promise of equal suffrage on equal property and educational conditions. Some of her suffragettes attacked the assembly police and broke windows in true Pankhurst style, the patient Chinese wits only remarking: “This froth will blow off the glass and leave the clear liquid!”
Many girls of the mission schools of Canton, Fuchau and the Yangtze cities of the rebellion could not be restrained from serving at the front in the republican revolution. Some of them tried to form bomb-throwing corps. Where they insisted on service the missionaries of Wuchang, Hankau, Shanghai and Nanking organized them in several uniformed Red Cross Corps, which performed effective and brave work. The large clans, or family villages, are sending to the missions for graduate teachers to take charge of their girls. The head man (hsiang lao) sets apart a bedroom, a schoolroom and a courtyard for the school, and the whole family clan contributes. The mothers of course continue their instruction in the Chinese classics, folk lore, religion and their inimitable needlework. Elsewhere I have spoken of the St. Hilda’s school at Wuchang, under American Episcopal auspices, which aims to become the Women’s College of Central China. A daughter of the original reformer, Kang Yu Wei, has studied in America. Miss Li Yu, the granddaughter of Li Hung Chang, took the course at Wells Female College, at Aurora, New York, where she was a prize scholar.
Cornell in particular, Hartford High, Leland Stanford, Columbia, University of Washington State, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, University of Michigan, and all the women’s and co-ed colleges in America have enrolled more Chinese women than all the other women’s colleges of the world, but not so many as they might and will, now that the new régime has opened with rainbow promise. Forty young Chinese women are studying medicine in America through the work of China’s first woman doctor, Miss Ya Mi Kin, who is in charge of the Tientsin Woman’s Hospital and nurses’ school.
A remarkable Chinese woman doctor, going by the name of Doctor Mary Stone (educated at University of Michigan), manages the American hospital at Kiukiang, and Doctor Tsang Cho Kin, a Cantonese lady, is prominent in modern medical work at Canton, Fuchau and Shanghai. The American Presbyterian women (to instance only one denomination here) have seventeen girls’ schools open at Canton alone, and in addition the following exemplary development: a school for blind girls, in charge of Doctor Mary Niles; a boarding school for children of lepers; a hospital school for girls in charge of Mrs. Kerr; a training school for women teachers; the Hackett Medical College for women; and the Turner Nurses’ School, under the charge of the noted Doctor Mary Fulton. At Ningpo there is a girls’ school and a women’s industrial school. At Shanghai there is the well-known girls’ school at the south gate; and at Hangchow and Nanking there are girls’ boarding schools. At Nanking the wives of Chinese taotais (officials such as mayors) are encouraged to preside over mothers’ meetings. At Peking there is the Bridgman College for Women, a women’s medical college and nurses’ school, a girls’ day and industrial school. At Paoting, in Pechili, there is the Union School for Girls; at Tengchow, in Shangtung, a girls’ high school and industrial school; and at Tsinan a girls’ school. At many of these girls’ schools, presided over by foreign women, the Chinese pay much of the expense; and they are copying the schools to the best of their ability all over the land for their girls and women, and calling upon the mission women’s schools for graduates whom they may use as teachers. There is no greater proof that the New China has begun its march toward the sun than that its womanhood has at last been thus recognized in modern education and opportunity.
Womanhood over the world responds to the same chord of sympathy. One of the contributions to the Woman’s Titanic Memorial came from a Chinese girl, Ying Low, with this message: “I send this for Captain Smith’s soul.” The word for woman in Chinese is “nu,” and the probability now is that she will be new indeed, and the foundation stone of the New China for her sons.
The first modern style Chinese marriage among those not Christian was solemnized in April, 1912, in the well-known Chang Su Ho Gardens, Shanghai. The families concerned were wealthy and the marriage was a civil one. A ring, music, flowers, witnesses, a public ceremony and certificate contract all came into use. There was nothing picturesquely old-style or secret, as the middleman, the closed chair, the ceremony at the groom’s house, the joined teacups, the contests between teams of both families, the worshiping of sticks and house coffins, the discordant orchestra, the chairs of food, the goose present and heckling of the bride by practical jokers.
XXVIII
AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY IN CHINA
Agriculture has always been a leading calling in China. The farms are small and are intensively worked. They have been too small, and the immense population has been crowded into the river plains only of the vast country. Not one quarter of China and its territories is worked as it might be. The adopting of machinery and the application of the single tax to some of the unworked land by the new régime will make possible the enlargement of farms, and the consequent stocking with meat, milk, egg, wool and skin-producing animals on a vast scale. The decrease of population that will occur owing to the decadence of ancestor-worshiping Confucianism, and the system of early marriage and concubinage, will necessitate the introduction of agricultural machinery. An increased agriculture will bring about the exportation of food products from so fertile and sunny a land. The enhancement of hygiene with the new medical knowledge will confirm this increased production in agriculture, as there will be no waste of life through ignorance, and human surplus vitality will be directed to increasing the productivity of the land, and the reclamation of the waste spaces.
In agricultural wisdom little can be taught the Chinese. In love of and assiduity in agriculture no one equals him. Professors King and Ross, of Wisconsin University, have dealt in an exhaustive way with the subject, and other books recommended to the inquirer are Ball’s Things Chinese, Williams’s Middle Kingdom, Fielde’s Corner of Cathay, the journals of the Royal Asiatic Society, Lay’s Chinese As They Are, and Douglas’s Society in China. The list of products is exceedingly long. Here are just a few as we run down the gamut from the north to the south: wheat, all millets, maize, buckwheat, sugar beet, tobacco, pulse, hay, straw braid, soy and other beans, barley, sorghum, rhubarb and drugs, hemp, all berries and tree fruits, cotton, sesamum, indigo, persimmons, melons, walnuts, almonds, olives, peanuts, tea, bamboo, rice, sweet and white potatoes, grass-cloth plant, oranges, sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, pumeloes, lichee, quince, ginger, loquat, mulberry, mustard, tallow trees, flowers for perfumery, lily roots for food and candy, colza nuts for oil, rhus nuts for varnish, camphor, all hardwoods, insect wax, matting and opium. Their truck farms are unequaled. They seem to lose not one lettuce or cabbage leaf. Every bug is nipped in the chrysalis by hand; everybody works from dewy dawn to twilight’s star! Where China exports $40,000,000 of agricultural products to-day to the manufacturing nations that border the Pacific and Atlantic, to-morrow she will export $400,000,000, besides becoming herself richer in pantry and bank.
The farmers are always searching for soil enrichers, with such success that you seldom see the nitrogen-starved yellow instead of green field. Not a handful of ashes is wasted; not an herb or branch but is gathered for the compost heap to make humus. Water is brought over the land, that it may deposit its nitrogenous wealth, and the mud of canals is dredged for the valuable rotted slime. Three times a year a part of China, 1,200 miles long and 1,200 miles wide, is one vast flooded field. By placing mud walls around his fields, a farmer does not need to raise all his irrigation water by power. Rather, he directs gravity, for he saves the rapid surface draining of the land, especially in the higher terraces. In the lower terraces he digs wells to store the surface water against drought. The water showered upon the higher fields he lets down to the lower during dry periods. They believe in a rotation of soils as well as in a rotation of crops, and will exchange bodily a rice field’s and an orchard’s top soil. By intensive farming a Chinese gets as much from a ten-acre farm as we get from a hundred-acre one, and he never permits a soil to be impoverished by its crop. You never see his implements, rude as they are, left uncovered over night. He carries home even his straw fork, which is made three-pronged by training nature instead of fashioning by hand. When the farmer’s wife and girls are not in the field they are working up straw braid for America’s and Europe’s hats and weaving silk and making embroidery for western gowns.
South of the Yangtze River human nightsoil is mixed with water and applied to the farms in liquid form. North of the Yangtze the drier climate permits of mixing the manure with earth and drying the slabs for transport. A farmer in South China willingly builds a toilet on the public road and requests the public, including the humorously shocked foreigner, with a sign which is much shorter than my words, to remember how China must be fertilized in order to support more inhabitants to the acre than any other land! The result is that China’s streams, outside of the suspended mud and silt that they carry, alone of all countries, are nearly pure, and foreign sanitary engineers take potable water directly from the rivers, as at Hankau, Canton, etc. The loss to the land of fertilizers by burning them as fuel, in the absence of forests and worked coal mines, is nowhere better illustrated than in Mongolia and the province of Fukien. In Mongolia the camel dung is dried and used as fuel. In Fukien, railway development has been retarded, and the coal of the Ankoi and other mines does not reach the hut in the field. Straw, therefore, instead of returning to the land, is of necessity used as fuel. For instance, take the tanning industry. The hides are thrown in a pond, in which there is a solution of alum. After peeling, the leather is stretched on springy frames of strong bamboo, and placed over an earthen furnace for smoking and drying. The fuel is straw, which gives the hide a yellow color, at a lamentable cost. In their opening era of manufacturing, the Chinese do not intend to permit dyes, chemicals, refuse or sewage to be drained into their streams and rivers, which from their source to the sea are used over and over for irrigation and for drinking.
Chinese matting comes mainly from the West River (Si Kiang) ports west of Canton. The fresh water reed is in some cases fertilized, as at Tung Kun and Lintan, so as to produce size and sheen. The reed is split when cut in the green and the sun rounds the strands. German aniline dyes are used, which produce a sorry product as compared with the famous natural dyes of old China. In producing red, however, the dye is obtained by boiling a Philippine redwood. The looms are simple hand looms, worked in the humble homes of the people. The mats are dried and set over a charcoal fire. The shipping season is in the fall. Vast quantities, baled in reeds, come by junk and steamer from the riverine ports to Hongkong, where they are put in godowns until the arrival of a trans-Pacific or Suez steamer, or a Standard Oil Company freighter and sailing vessel. The very low rate is controlled by the sailing ship, and quantity is of the first essence of importance in making the business pay any one concerned, except the middleman in America or Europe. Better dyes might be furnished to the reed farmers and better looms and designs will now probably be distributed among them. It is a floor covering which should grow more popular from an economic, and especially a sanitary point of view, as it does not harbor moths or germs, and is easy to handle; and from a conservation point of view, its wider use would reserve carpet wool for clothing. The clean Japanese despise us for our use of the fixed, unsanitary woolen carpet. The seed of the reed is planted, just as rice is, in a sheltered spot in the fall. Transplanting occurs early in the year and the fields are irrigated. It takes two men or women four days to weave a roll on a very crude loom.
The farmer is king. He has attacked the old magnificent roads, eight feet wide, cut at great expense in the mountains, carried soil over part of them and planted his corn. Marble-lined lotus gardens of magnificent old estates he has filled up with his rice seed; and the grain waves beneath the windows of deserted palaces, the owners probably long ago, because of their opinions and not their crimes, having, in Manchu days, dropped their heads beneath the blow of the taifo swords while they bowed upon their knees in a line at far-away Peking!
Ginger is grown extensively in China. It is used for cooking and as a medicine. Preserved in sugar, it is known world-wide as a delicious confection. The Chinese prefer it in a heavy syrup. This species of lily grows about two feet high. The roots are very heavy and are kept irrigated in mud. It is one of the few plants which leave their odor in the air in the fields where they grow. The marmalade industry will have a great future in the vast southern provinces. Java, the Philippines and Formosa, are near with their sugar, and the provinces of Kwantung, Kwangsi and Fukien have noble orchards of pumelo, lemon and orange trees. As the family-village farms the apparently undivided fields as a community, watchers have to be set in the fields and at the granary floors, when harvest time approaches. A platform is built of bamboo, and the watcher mounts it, carrying along his gong. As there are no fences and few trees, the watcher commands a wide view, and deters private bands and prowlers of other villages from making sudden raids. Manchuria has been found to be an ideal ground for the sugar beet, the black soil producing a higher percentage of sugar than anywhere in the world. The sugar industry is a most important addition to the agricultural wealth of those three extremely rich provinces, which are destined to help in the feeding of industrial America. Returned Chinese emigrants from Java and America started in 1911, in Fukien and Chekiang provinces the cultivation of cotton on an extended scale, looking to the new mills of Shanghai, Hangchow and Wuchang to buy the product, which will be shipped by junks, steamer and the new coast railway. The Chinese value their highly tilled lands near the large cities at a price equal to forty-five dollars in gold for our acre.
British Hongkong set the example in reforestation. Germany followed at Kiachou, Shangtung, with acacia, fir, ash, larch, walnut and oak trees along the railway line. Japan followed in South Manchuria, and China herself established a forestry school at Mukden in 1908, and in Kansu later. It is absolutely essential to retard the snows and rainfalls at the heads of the great rivers if the awful floods and consequent famines are ever to be obviated in the valleys of the Hoangho, Han, Yangtze and Hwei Rivers. The camphor is China’s own tree, especially in Formosa, Fukien, and the southern provinces. Ceylon, California, Texas, Florida, Jamaica, Malay, Italy and German East Africa have successfully introduced the tree, and will in time help to supply the world’s growing requirements for the arts and industries, which synthetic camphor can not do, because of the deforestation of America’s southern pine, which now supplies the necessary oil of turpentine. Camphor can be distilled from any part of the tree, even the dead leaves, and some conservation foresters, especially Americans and Germans, are urging a world movement to use the leaves, dropped twigs and cuttings alone for this purpose. Camphor formerly was made by cutting up the tree and treating the chips with water in a closed vessel, the volatilized camphor condensing on rice straw packed in the head of the still. The deposit was purified by sublimation in glass retorts in the presence of lime.
I have for years been writing that the Chinese is a born humorist. The humor of their arboriculturists is well known in their stunting and twisting of trees and bamboos. The matched curved bamboos of the Fati and other gardens of Canton are famous. Another quaint form is the splitting of a tree trunk so as to form a living arch. When the tree is young, it is uprooted and split up the trunk and replanted in the road leading to a shrine or temple. As the trunk grows apart, the road leads under the arch. Under the shelter of the north wall of the imperial section of the city of Peking, there are famous old cryptomeria cypresses split in this way. The humorist is saying: “See Nature’s god with his grotesque products laughing at man’s idea of religion!” The farmer and his boy are humorists. They meet you on the highroad and laugh because the pigs and geese which they are driving to market all have tiny straw sandals on their feet, and the water buffalo which they are riding to the exchange has sandals, but they themselves are in their bare feet, and they point out to you the humorous incongruity!
The very handsome Hagenbeck pheasant from the Kobdo valley of Manchuria, fiftieth parallel, can live farthest north of any pheasant, and can therefore withstand our winters. It is large and edible. The Mongolian pheasant has been acclimated on the Rothschild estate in Herts, England. The Manchurian eared pheasant is heavy and edible, but unlike the others is not wild and active enough for the game fields. Accordingly it best suits the poulterer of China. The pheasant is a fairly cheap dish at all the clubs and hotels of China, and the indentured clerk of Hongkong is therefore to his surprise dining like a king daily on the game which the owner of his concern would consider at home a luxury reserved for the Christmas dinner! Some of the native proverbs are:
“No matter where the stream is, the sea is calling it.”
“Frost and ice are made of water, but they don’t grow things like rain and dew.”
“A spark is small, but it can burn a thousand farms.”
“Don’t try to put out the burning field with tears; run for water.”
“One bad bean makes the whole basket rot.”
“Rain on a summer’s dawn means a clear day, but a rain at noon will last.”
XXIX
CHINESE ARCHITECTURE AND ART
“The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” are unearthed a foot at a time to the wondering eyes of the world by the tireless antiquarian-architect. China has some extensive ruins that show the death struggle of a dynasty with the tooth of the destroyer, Time. Near Singan, in Shensi province, are the ruins of the tombs, arches and palaces of the builder of the Great Wall. On the left bank of the Orkhon River in Mongolia, southwest of Kuren, are the ruins of the Uigur empire, seventh to ninth centuries, A. D. These Mongols were first Buddhist, then Nestorian Christian, and afterward Mohammedan in faith, and their fathers took part in the terrific invasions of Europe that have made Russia one quarter Asiatic. Ujfalvy, Schott and Professor Thomsen have written books on the race, and Heikel and Radlov explored the ruins in 1890–1. On the right bank of the same river, fifteen miles southeast, at the edge of the Gobi Desert, are the ruins of the Mongol empire of the thirteenth century, founded by Ogodai Khan in 1234 A. D., and whose greatest conqueror, Kublai Khan, of whom Marco Polo wrote, overran all China and Turkestan. Had it not been for a lucky storm that destroyed his armada, he would have overrun Japan also.
One hundred and fifty miles northwest of Pnom Penh, in a deserted tropical jungle, are the ruins of the Khmer dynasty which ruled Cambodia from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. These gorgeous palaces were built for luxurious Oriental kings when the early Mercian, Northumbrian and Wessex chiefs were shivering in wooden huts in our primeval England. The ruins are at Angkor on the north of the Great Summer Lake. The main temple of the Angkor Wat, in a walled enclosure, is in splendid preservation, and is one pf the world’s most wonderful architectural curiosities. It is shaped like a wide Chinese temple, but has in addition splendid pagodas one hundred and eighty feet high over the entrances. The architecture is Indo-Chinese. There is much carving and sculpture, fine corridors and columns that were colored. Five miles north is another walled ruin, thirty feet in height, enclosing an area of two miles square, the walls pierced by five gorgeous gates. The ruins stand alone in the moonlight, unclaimed and untenanted. What few Siamese, Shans or Annamese may wander here, fall down in speechless worship. The dense jungle is filled with insects, reptiles, wild animals, and but for them the silence is primeval. Pierre Loti recently visited the ruins by sailing up the Mekong River from Saigon to Pnom Penh. There he took elephants and oxen one hundred and fifty miles for the Great Summer Lake, across which he paddled. His book, Un Pelerin d’Angkor, not yet translated, was issued in French by Calmann-Levy, Paris, in 1912. Other French authors on this subject are Delaporte (Voyage au Camboge); Fournereau (Les Ruins d’Angkor), and Tissandier (Cambodje-Java).
Two hundreds miles north of Angkor, at Korat, are further Khmer ruins. The other ruins and tombs of old China are those of the Ming dynasty at Nankou pass, north of Peking, and Nanking; the Manchu dynasty at Mukden and northwest of Peking; and the Sung dynasty at Hangchow. The tomb of Prince Ki Chah of the then Wu principality, who died B. C. 530, and which bears an inscription prepared by Confucius, can be seen to-day lying between the new British-built railway and the Grand Canal, twenty miles east of Changchow in the south of Kiangsu province. The laws of the Tsin principality, 513 B. C., were engraved on iron, but have not been recovered in any tomb or on any wall. Individual pagoda ruins and ancient walls cover the land, as does star-dust the sky. Laws, customs, history and a relation of the Rites, were engraved on metal bowls, which stood on three legs. These bowls were handed down through the dynasties to the princes, together with the ancestral tablets, as a sign of royal authority. There exists to-day in a temple on Silver Island, near Chinkiang in Kiangsu province, such a tripod bowl of the Chow princely dynasty, date 812 B. C. This was about the date when Jeroboam recovered Damascus from Israel. When Confucius was a boy of twelve, and already deep in his study of history, Cyrus the Elder had captured ancient Babylon and founded the Persian empire. It is quite probable that the old Hia, Shang and Chou kings (2200 B. C. onward) left their records, as the contemporary Egyptians and Babylonians did, in brick tablets, but those tablets, being made of non-adhesive, fibrous loess mud of the present Shensi and Shansi provinces, soon crumbled. It was a different thing when centuries later, the Chinese kings, having traveled farther south, employed better potters to use the more adhesive clays of the present Kiangsi province. The Hia kings of what is now Shensi province reigned when the giant sequoia evergreen trees of California were seedlings 4010 years ago.
Chinese bronzes date back as far as the imperial Chou dynasty (1120 B. C.) which instituted the sacrifices and ancestor worship, and a few majestically simple bronze tripods, elemental monsters and sacrificial vessels date back to the Shang dynasty 1800 B. C. These tripods are similar to those that Homer describes in the ninth book of The Iliad, 2500 B. C. The oldest bronzes are, of course, noble and plain in design, the warmer, richer art of Buddhism coming in at a far later date, and bringing in the innovation of the human figure, flowers and incense burners. The Natural History Museum at New York has precious collections of the old mortuary bronzes of the Chou dynasty referred to in Professor Parker’s illuminating work on the days of Confucius. Bronze vases, goblets, censers, mirrors, tablets, baskets, bells, some of them studded, are in the collection which dates as far back as 1800 B. C. Chinese form has been persistent, its ornamentation progressive. When we are looking at these bronzes, we should realize that they were fashioned by men contemporary with Homer. The oldest tombs were in Turkestan, Kansu and Shensi provinces, lying alongside the path of the primeval emigration along the Tarim’s banks from Eden. In various articles I have instanced the similarity between old Greek and old Chinese designs. The dragon was used in art designs and considered a sacred Jovian portent by the Homerian Greeks who were camped before Troy, B. C. 2500. In anthropological customs, Pope relates that the Homerian Greeks of the Euboea tribe, drawn up before Troy’s walls, 2500 B. C., shaved their foreheads but left the hair on the back of their heads to grow long, like the present Manchus.
The new bronze portrait statue of Li Hung Chang at the Sicawei Gardens, Shanghai, is unusual, and marks a new era in memorials in China, pailoo arches and tablets having formerly been erected. True, there are many fanciful statues to Buddha and Confucius, and one to Marco Polo in the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii at Canton, but they are rather to be considered as effigies. In Tibet, they erect engraved, square stone monuments, a figure of Buddha being cut into three of the top panels, representing the past, present and future Buddha. A horned roof, with a little central pagoda covers the monument. These strikingly symmetrical monuments are erected on high places along the mountain passes. The Buddhists cut gigantic figures of the god into cliffs, bushes serving as hair, and grass as eyebrows. Notable among these are the colossal cliff Buddhas at Kiating and Yung Hsien in Szechuen province. Old caves and cave-temples are generally in proximity with these images.
In Szechuen province, the piers of bridges have a stone dragon as a terminal, the head looking up-stream, and across the bridge, the tail pointing down-stream. The proportions are beautiful and the effect delightful. The best known and most beautiful camel’s back bridge in the empire is at Wan Hsien at the head of the Yangtze gorges. Stone steps mount up the arch, which is crowned with a beautiful house of blue stucco. The house is used as a rest place, and a restaurant These bridges show how much the Chinese understood of engineering and also that they were good masons. In the caves along the Min River in Szechuen province, pottery coffins have been found, dating back previous to the Christian era, and showing that the early Chinese of the Chou dynasty did not bring all the civilization of China with them, but found many arts among the aborigines. At Ning Hsia, an oasis city in the horn of Kansu province, is a peculiar pagoda where the joylessness of the north has cut the curling ten galleries down to mere ridges, and roofed the eleven stories with a mere turban roof. Each story has Roman windows, except the top, which has circular windows. The architecture shows Mohammedan influence over these Buddhists, and the structure, with that at Liangchow in the same province, is exceedingly unique in so ornate a land of up-curling roofs, carved screens, and overhanging galleries. While the Chinese never build fences, the Manchus, of Manchuria, construct a curious palisade composed of crosses, one end of which is stuck in the ground. The whole of the Grand Canal was crossed by many thousands of beautiful marble bridges, erected during the Sung dynasty. Many of them still remain, with their great beauty of aspiring arch, balustrade, carving and anchorage. At Sui Fu, on the upper Yangtze, is a temple remarkable not for its size, but for the proportion of its galleries and roof, the cornices of which curl upward violently at great width from the walls. The temple is met by steps that climb up the mountain side from the great river. The walls too, with their panels, frieze and balustrade, are interesting, but the design of the roof is an artistic triumph, equaled only by the Loong Wah Temple which is photographed as a frontispiece in my book, The Chinese. It is this sweeping boldness and generosity of curve which should be copied in roofs and galleries in the new Chinese architecture, which lovers of the old China earnestly recommend.
Many of the poorer huts of Pechili province are built of clay poured around a reinforcing of kaoliang stalks. Sometimes tiles are set in the clay roof, which is very heavy, and in the rainy season, it often falls in on the tenant. In Kiangsu province the thatching is made of reeds. Of course improvements are often designed, and they attempt to make a cement or chunam by mixing burnt lime and stone in the clay. The very poor, however, really live in mud burrows like the fox, whether the mud is made into a hut, or the dwelling is cut as a cave in the loess hills of Shensi and Shansi provinces. The Manchurian and northern Pechili style of architecture is severe and strong, but it has its simple beauties. A Buddhist temple not far from Shan Hai Kwan is a good example. A plain brick and stucco wall, the height of the eaves of the buildings, surrounds the compound. It is broken by a fort-gate, with a Roman arched doorway. The tiled roofs of the fort and temple curl up only slightly. A few high pine trees, branching out only near the top, tower like nature’s banners over the temple, which is matched to the austere lives and buildings of the dwellers in the north. The proportions throughout are nobly and chastely balanced in accord with the architectural influence of the stern Great Wall throughout this region.
At the Edinburgh Mission Conference of the nations in 1908, the Chinese pleaded for the preservation of their architecture. Too great praise can not be given the British for their taste in occupying a Chinese palace as legation headquarters at Peking. Many missions, every foreign business house, nearly every foreign college, the government itself in its new buildings, even the kindred Japanese, and nearly every foreign legation, are all housed in an ugly adaptation of a Renaissance building with verandas. The fashion came from Singapore and Hongkong, but Hongkong gets some picturesqueness out of the style because that colonial city has a mountain to terrace it on. The ventilation and light are poor; the roof is hideous. There is one foreign architect whose soul will never escape from the purgatory of bad architects. He designed for the Honan Assembly a hall at Kaifong which is Moorish in general design; the roof is a Roman dome; the arches are Gothic; and the screens are Chinese. The Japanese do not bring their own beautiful buildings, like those gems, the incomparable Horiuji pagoda and monastery, Yakushiji pagoda; and the shrine of Ieasu at Nikko, to China, and they do not copy or adapt any of the tens of thousands of Chinese gems. They often build a ponderous, ugly, dark, Renaissance building like the Japanese consulate at Shanghai, costly enough but unrepresentative.
St. John’s University (American Episcopal), of Shanghai, has made the laudable concession of putting a Chinese roof on its valuable foreign buildings. The eaves have a slight Chinese up-turn, but there is little of Chinese ornament in apron, ridge, column, double roof, or pagoda spire here and there. However, America, nearly always the leader in sympathy with the Chinese, has here made a beginning in saving China’s peerless architecture and art. At Kweiyang, the capital of Kweichou, the French have erected a notable pagoda church, which concedes to Chinese canons a five-story pagoda entrance, and the rear façade is formed as a pailoo with five roofs. With the same idea the British architect has placed on the costly Renaissance “Audience Hall”, of Bangkok, three ornate Burmese pagoda spires. As Greece stands for simplicity and line, China stands for richness, curve and color. She should not die, if according to Keats, “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Ruskin insisted in his famous lectures to artistic Edinburgh that the salient feature of a building was the roof, and that there adornment should be rich, like a woman’s hair, or hat, her “crown of glory”. This rule, perhaps indirectly, he took from the Chinese, who from the buried centuries have undeviatingly been faithful to it. The Assembly Herald of the American Presbyterian Church, January, 1912, page twenty-seven, illustrates a gem of modern Chinese architecture. It is a chapel built by a native elder in his simple but beautiful faith. On each side of the entrance there is a rich tile grille that relieves the plain façade. Under the eaves is another beautiful grille that relieves the plain surface. Over the door is a heavy tile canopy with characteristic up-curling points. The tile roof is peaked and might have been more up-curling at the eaves in the beautiful, characteristic Chinese style. The apron under the eaves is richly carved. The Chinese still have a strong rich grasp of beauty, when they are encouraged to develop their architecture.
It is not the custom in stores, temples or homes to keep curios, silks, etc., on view. They are all wrapped in paper, and kept in boxes or cupboards. When a trusted guest arrives, there is an exciting scene as the treasures are unpacked and revealed to admiring eyes. China has always had court painters, a notable one in the reign of the Empress Dowager Tse Hsi being Li Shih Chuan. He was a believer in joy, and developed the more human aspects of the countenance. He was a master in painting fine gowns, dainty embroideries and rich furniture. Portrait paintings are not common, but in the Yangtze provinces some are to be seen. They are in water color and painted on screens. Actors carry an enormous bamboo or ivory tusk, on which is engraved or painted their repertoire. The giver of a feast selects from this the plays which he wishes to have performed for his guests. The Chinese manufacture a hard wall-paper, similar to what we call Lincrusta Walton and use on the walls of our parlor cars and saloons of steamships. The mold is of hard wood, on which the sharp design is carefully chiseled en relievo. The blotter-like bamboo paper composition is hammered on this mold, then taken off and sun-dried. Sizing is applied. Afterward the design and final Ningpo or Szechuen rhus-nut varnishing is added. This paper is damp proof, which is an important quality in so humid a climate.
The Chinese of Queens Road, Hongkong, made me two bamboo trunks that have served me on a trip around the world, and are strong enough to make several more. They are remarkable in five important points, elasticity, lightness, strength, resistance to dampness, and cheapness in purchase price and transportation cost. Travelers and explorers bemoan the fact that excess baggage charges cost them almost as much as passenger fares. This problem the wonderful Chinese solved with these remarkable trunks. The framework is of strong bamboo, on which a tough rattan and bamboo envelope is wound. This is lined with soldered zinc, and covered with strong canvas, and for serviceability in the five important points mentioned, the iron and leather trunks can not compare. Go to the Chinese, thou traveler, and be wise! Many of the chairs used at Tientsin have a dome-top, with curious scale design and knob, and are therefore more Burmese than Chinese in design. The chairs of Hongkong are strictly flat-topped. Jade is green, pink and crystal, and retains a soapy glisten. Jades buried in tombs as mortuary ornaments, however, acquire a brown smoky tinge, and the distinction should be made in assorting collections at museums. The Bishop collection of art jades, and the Peters collection of tomb jades in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, are deservedly world famous.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
One of the most ornate pagodas in China, near Shanghai. Surrounding temple buildings are now frequently used for schools.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Steel truss bridges on modern roads; sentry box for modern police; modern flats; felt hats, modern umbrellas; telephone wires, steam launches of the New China.
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The Japanese type of girlhood, as contrasted with the Chinese, shown in another photograph.
The typical Chinese rug shows beautiful apricot ground, spangled with blue medallions. Rich brown and gold rugs are also frequently made, the centers of weaving being Tientsin, Nanking, Hangchow, Canton, etc. The most accessible places where specimens are shown are the large museums. The yellow rugs are used in China in connection with the red tile floorings, and the brown rugs are used often upon blue-tiled floorings, so that if one would catch the true Chinese ensemble, a colored crash must be used in connection with the rugs. Some critics are hasty in declaring that a Chinese rug is glaring when they place a yellow rug on a yellow floor! Chinese rugs were made generally for temples, imperial and viceregal yamens, mandarins’ yamens, and guild halls, as the designs often reveal. Rugs exist which were woven as long ago as the reign of the native Ming kings, fifteenth century. Other rugs date from the Kang Hi and Chien Lung reigns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Temple rugs five by eight feet, or a little over, come from Buddhist monasteries. The ground, as one would expect, is orange, ornamented with clouds, water, figures of Buddha or his mother, Kun Yam, and the zodiac. Imperial Manchu rugs employ the Manchu dragon. Each rug differs slightly, as the artist trusted to his eye alone in following the pattern which hung over his head.
China is almost depleted of her ceramic treasures. The Anglo-French expedition of 1860 under Lord Wolseley destroyed the Emperor Hien Fung’s summer and other palaces near Peking. Some of the allies of 1900 looted Peking itself. The Manchus in the 1911–12 revolution sold the Peking, Mukden and Jehol palace treasures. The collection of the Roman Bishop of Peking, Monsieur Favier, gathered during a long life, was sold in New York in 1912. The Taiping rebellion of 1854 swept bare the pottery province of Kiangsi, and the distress following the 1911–12 revolution and the floods of 1910–11–12 sent the hidden treasures of the Yangtze and Hwei River provinces to the block. An artist of the King Teh Ching potteries would now have to resort to Occidental museums to find his models of cloisonné and champlevé enamels studded with precious stones; yellow and red Lang Yao monochromes of inimitable purity; Ku Hsu Hsuan translucent glass; Kang Hi hawthorn, ginger, and peach-bloom vases, round and square; Yung Cheng landscape and fish vases; flaming jars of the royal Mings; egg shell, rose, green, peony, medallion, dragon, lion vases and plaques of Yung Cheng and Chien Lung periods; the joyous, finely finished pottery of the Kang Hi (seventeenth century period); the rugged, strong, stern work of the tenth century; strutting camels, grinning griffins, spirited horses; the elegant, soft Ming work; the square, flower-covered, green and yellow vases of the sixteenth century; bulging vases of the seventeenth century, with green decoration on a blue ground, as fine as a mixture of emeralds and amethysts; awful gods and funny men stepping about in priceless porcelain. It was not a slight price that to attain political liberty China had to lose her artistic soul. More fortunate Japan never had to pay this price, though she had little art and architecture to lose as compared with the rich and glorious treasures of vast China. A remarkable catalogue of Chinese porcelains with two hundred and fifty-four gorgeously colored plates was written by Messrs. Gorer and Blacker and published by Quaritch, London, in 1912.
In an attempt, even so late, to save China’s art from the foreigner, the public-spirited Tze Tsan Tai, of Hongkong, a collector himself, proposes the establishing of national museums to preserve at least the paintings of China that are notable for their graphic quality, color, humor and love of nature. The most famous schools were in the Sung, Yuan and Ming dynasties, and Mr. Tze’s collection, which he proposes to give to the cause, includes collections from many other schools also. It would be better to open at first museums at Hongkong and Shanghai, and then at Peking, Nanking, Hankau, etc. Some of the names of the artists can be secured in Paleologue’s L’Art Chinois, Owen Jones’ Chinese Ornament, Dyer Ball’s Things Chinese, and E. F. Penellosa’s Epochs of Chinese Art.
Chinese temple and house furniture is made of teak. This wood does not grow in China, but in Siam, Java, Ceylon and the Philippines, the main source of supply being the afforested belt of Northern Siam. The tree is an upland one. It is barked or girdled and allowed to die. After two years the tree is felled, the exposure killing off the small branches and developing the oils which help in giving the extraordinary life of the wood. The government does not permit trees of under six and one-half feet girth to be felled. The Chinese of Canton particularly carve the wood in its rich red color, and they also stain it ebon black. Another desirable quality in the Orient is that the wood resists the white ant. The woodwork and furniture of the palatial Hongkong Club is teak, and many of Hongkong’s, Canton’s, Shanghai’s, Manila’s and San Francisco’s palatial residences and public buildings and yachts now use the wood. Hard as it is, the Chinese seem to prefer to saw it by hand even in Hongkong. They tilt the immense logs on end, and one man works under the log, and one stands on the log, the dust being dragged upward by their contrary cut saws, which are designed to save the eyes of the under-man. The natural oil in the wood prevents driven nails or bolts from rusting, and is therefore valuable in ship-sheathing. It is the most durable wood known. The teak piles of West End, Hongkong, and Kowloon over on the mainland, are a unique sight. Water-buffaloes are used to drag up the immense timbers.
A Chinese proverb is, “Speed for a horse, but a slow race for a good jeweler”. The German machinery-stamping jeweler has not yet reached the Orient with his machines, though his products imitate even the Chinese ideograph-buckles. One of their humorous proverbs is, “He thought he painted a tiger, but only a dog waged his tail at the likeness”, and this is about the relationship between the Chinese and the German products. Wherever you buy, remember the artist can put his soul and his taste only into what he makes by hand.
XXX
SOCIOLOGICAL CHINA
When America was as yet undiscovered, and Europe was largely a forest inhabited by hunting tribes, China had taken up an advanced position on sociology. She has long been the world’s clearest and bravest economical thinker, from whom even Germany has consciously or unconsciously copied, and for thousands of years she has followed a thorough civil service in political appointments. It is not surprising therefore that Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the organizer of the revolution of 1911–12, the first president of republican China, and the leading economist of the race, enunciated himself as follows on April 5, 1912: “I have finished the political revolution and now will commence the greatest social revolution in the world’s history. The abdication of the Manchus is only the beginning of a greater development, and the future policy of the republic will be in the direction of socialism. I am an ardent admirer of Henry George, whose ideas are practicable on the virgin soil of China, as compared with their impracticability in Europe or the United States, where the money is controlled by the capitalists. I have the full consent of the new republican government to start a propaganda immediately, whereby the railroads, mines, and similar industries, will be controlled by the government. The single tax system, and as far as possible, free trade, will be adopted.”
Shang, a minister of the Tsin clan of Confucius’ time—the age of courageous statesmen—said: “To restore balance in the state, and remove the dangerous discontent of the poor, renew taxes on the privileged classes.” The Chinese predate all that we claim in America, Britain and Germany as the modern discovery of the formulæ of sociology, economics, commerce, taxes and tariffs, and their aim is always toward free trade, repression of monopoly, opportunity for the ordinary man, who, instead of the privileged, represents the importance of a state, and the necessity of the greater punishment of the rich than the poor for the same offense, because hunger and self-preservation do not drive the rich to crime. Under the ancient criminal code, the hsiang lao (village head) under penalty of the bamboo, must compel all available land to be cultivated, not only that government may receive taxes, but that famine may be averted. The Chinese, Koun Tze, as early as B. C. 100, wrote: “The more horses that are put to the chariots of the rich, the more those who are poor will have to walk.”
“The more the houses of the rich are vast and magnificent, the more those of the poor will be small and miserable.”
“The more the tables of the rich are covered with dainties, the more people there will be reduced to plain rice.”
“At all costs, government should secure to all, all the necessities of life.”
This last sentence is worthy of being linked with the immortal epigram in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.
Other notable economic writers were Tsien Tche and Leang Tsien, but towering above them all for adaptability to the convictions and crying necessities of our day was Wang Ngan Shih, 1069 A. D., a Rooseveltian statesman of the Sung dynasty, whose capital was the present Kaifong. Remember that this statesman-author wrote when William the Conqueror was putting England under the yoke of feudalism, which hated the principles of liberty. Wang taught partly as follows:
1. The first duty of government is to secure plenty and relaxation for the common people.
2. The state should take possession of all important resources and become the main and dictating employer in commerce, industry and transportation, with the view of preventing the working classes being ground to the dust by the monopolizing rich.
3. Government tribunals should fix the local prices of provisions and merchandise.
4. The rich shall pay all taxes; the small owner shall pay nothing as long as he remains small.
5. Old age pensions.
6. The state to insure work for workmen.
7. The state to assign land, distribute seed and direct sowing, so that there shall neither be cornering of food by the rich, nor lack of food for the poor.
8. Destruction of usurers.
9. Confiscation of large and criminally-won estates; that is, retroactive laws and restitution, instead of “Go and sin no more, but keep what you got by former sins.”
The Boswell of Confucius in the Ta Hio (Great Study) writes: “If those who govern states only think of amassing riches for their personal use, they will infallibly attract toward them depraved men, and these depraved men will really govern the state. The administration of these unworthy ministers will call down the chastisements of heaven, and also excite the vengeance of the aggrieved people. The riches of those who have the honor to govern states should rather be justice and equity, and not only talk of justice and equity.” Is this not excellent statesmanship, even if written in China long before the Christian era?
China’s love of peace was inculcated brilliantly by Lao Tse (604 B. C.) in these words: “The least glorious peace is preferable to the most brilliant successes of war. The most splendid victory is but the light from a conflagration.” The Ancients said: “Render no funeral honors to conquerors; receive them with tears and cries in memory of the homicides they have committed, and let the monuments of their victories be surrounded with the tombs of those whose death they brought about.” Confucius, a practical statesman, fifty-three years later, ineffectually combated this philosophy with these words: “They who discuss by diplomacy should always have the support of a military backing”; that is, the mailed fist and the soft word! The feudal system began to totter in China in B. C. 250, under the reign of the emperor-builder of the Great Wall, Tsin Chih Hwang-Ti. The classical examinations gave it the death blow in A. D. 600. With its martial accessory, the feudal system continued in Japan, which tolerated no democratic examinations for office, until the very late date of 1869 A. D., thus lasting there the longest in the world, for it had died in England eight centuries earlier. Such was the beneficent effect of the famous classical examinations and civil service in old China.
The most brilliant maxim on sociology ever written is Chinese:
“Gold is tested by fire:
Man is tested by gold.”
On this subject of hardships, Mencius himself wrote, in 315 B. C.: “When Heaven (Tien) is about to confer a responsible office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his bravest undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his courage and increases his adaptability.” China was the first country to establish a Price Board, now recommended by all political parties in America for dealing with monopolies until real competition can be again set up. Salt production is a government monopoly. The dealer must buy from the government and sell a fixed quantity at a fixed price in a fixed district. The justice that the government regulates is that the dealer may not adulterate and may not charge an unreasonable profit. If the cost of production is high, the people profit, because the government will not need to collect high taxes in other ways. There is no chance for a crowd of drone-middlemen to get away with immense profits, or for private monopolists to lay a whole people under economic slavery. This is the Chinese theory. In many parts of Eastern Szechuen every farm has its little salt well with bamboo wheel and men treaders. The salt is sold to the government at a fixed price, about two and one-half cents a pound. The Chinese say: “Why do your trusts now want consolidation? The divisions of Europe, by the competition of various ambitions, have made Europe bright and progressive. America’s trusts, by making all things one, will produce decay of genius, invention, liberty and individualism.” A Chinese reformer had written to a rich bribe-taker and bribe-giver for work in one of the industries which he controlled, and he also endeavored to sell to the rich man a copy of one of his books. Chided in later years with seeking employment in his earlier years from a man whom he had later cause to criticize, the reformer said: “The devil is king and has usurped the seats of employment; yet, although he is devil, he owes me employment. A man’s right to work and to retain free opinion are inalienable, and a government, in granting a monopoly, can not sell such rights of the individual; they are a perpetual lien on the monopoly.” Intelligent municipal philanthropy has not been unknown of late years. I will instance an occurrence at Lanchow, a city on the Yellow River (Hoang-Ho) in far western Kansu province. In the fall of 1911 large numbers of people had become a charge upon the city on account of summer floods and consequent famine. By the end of August the moat of the city had become dry. The authorities roofed and partitioned this trench into many houses so as to shelter hundreds of vagrant families.
China has specialized in localization, or home rule. Even in charities this operates. No province, district or city encourages any other district’s imposing its public charges upon it. To illustrate, we shall say that your Chinese interpreter and his wife have accompanied you from Amoy to Chingtu City. The interpreter dies. If you do not send the woman back to Amoy, she will report to the Amoy Guild in Chingtu. That guild will subscribe and send her on her way as far as Chungking, where the Amoy Guild will subscribe and send her in care of the Amoy Guild at Hankau. Eventually, to her great pleasure no doubt, she will reach her people in Amoy. A widow is not molested on her travels; her persistence in widowhood and desire not to sell herself, either as a second wife, slave or strumpet, are highly respected. She would not be encouraged, however, nor would she desire to remain in Chingtu, where, being a stranger, she would be unable to secure employment. The same system would operate inversely if a Chingtu woman were, through misfortune, stranded in far-away Amoy. The Chingtu Guilds in Amoy, Fuchau, Shanghai, Hankau, etc., would relay her onward to her home, where she would be more likely to secure work, remarriage, or properly be a charge upon her own community. A criminal is treated in the same way. He is driven on toward his own community, which can elect whether they desire to board him in jail at public expense or make life so uncomfortable for him by corporal punishment that he will select a virtuous existence in preference to crime.
The community, closely related in cousinship, makes the family clan responsible for the misfortunes and crimes of its members. If a criminal breaks the law, the law does not bother itself long with the criminal. By one fell swoop it makes the clan take the criminal’s course in hand for the rest of his life. There is much talk of revising China’s code, the slogan being the American maxim: “Crime is personal.” China’s code in this particular does not need revision. It saves the state much expense; it is more effective also in real permanent reform. It is the most scientific system of reform ever invented, and beats all farming out of criminals, parole, coals of kindness, pellets of advice, pardons, abolishing of stripes, preachings, coddlings, threats, music-treatment, trepannings, religious advice, hypnotic treatment, flowers, sentiment, visits of the jail angel, etc.! Don’t whip the criminal alone; whip the criminal’s six elder brothers and cousins because they must have been lax in instruction and watch. They will see that never again will they suffer for the scamp’s dereliction! The Chinese say, “Don’t whip your trusts; whip your electorate! They will forever after see that the trusts do not break bounds; they will watch the charters.” Guilt then is not personal; it is communal. We are our brother’s keeper, and if we allow him to meet with misfortune or do wrong, we must suffer with him. How quickly would the Chinese scientific system of localization and communism correct and limit crime, poverty and misfortune.
British vessels trading in China are manned entirely with Chinese crews. During the dock strike in Britain, in August, 1911, the dockers refused to handle the cargoes of vessels which employed Chinese. China then entered a claim for damages, because her citizens were ill-treated, and the Chinese guilds threatened to embarrass the British vessels when they returned to load in the East. The writer has had some experience with such a situation in Hongkong, where the British government exercises a strong hand in preventing the spread of stevedore strikes. The use of the boycott in China calls for special study. In no land is it more in use. It is a powerful weapon for securing justice when laws and diplomacy fail either because of weakness or venalty. China, of course, has no navy to support her diplomacy. Recent boycotts in China have been the following: In 1904 the merchant guilds of Canton and Hongkong desired to support, among other things, China’s protest against the American Exclusion Act. A boycott of American goods and American ships was ordered, and the loss to American trade ran into the millions. In 1908 the Japanese landed arms for pirates in Macao, South China, and with the powerful Japanese navy compelled the Chinese officials who had seized the smuggling steamer Tatsu Maru to give her up. The Chinese guilds of Hongkong and Canton then boycotted Japanese ships, causing the Toyo Kisen Kaisha a loss of millions in earnings and a deficit of $300,000 for the year’s operation. Japan probably would have again declared war on China with this excuse if she had not feared America’s naval support of China’s general cause under the Hay “non-partition of China” policy. The loss to Japan ran into many millions. In 1910 the same body of Chinese guilds boycotted American trade as a reply to the long and costly detainment of Chinese on Angel Island, San Francisco.
We shall hear more and more of international boycotts by the Chinese, and should study the question. They hover on the borderland of justice, and are recommended by many of the women’s clubs of America in dealing with monopolies. They will be misunderstood. They will produce much annoyance and trouble. They are mighty weapons in the hands of the clannish Chinese. Many fortunes of millionaires were really produced by boycotts. For instance, Mr. B controls the X railway, which latter has used the Y railway as a connection for freight. Mr. B wants to buy the Y railway for a song. He diverts all the freight he can to the Z railway, and when the Y railway fails, he buys its stock for a song. Then he restores the freight of the X railway to the Y railway, whose earnings rise and make his fortune, which is immediately entrenched under nonretroactive and nonrestitution laws. In China the boycott is only used by the guilds for patriotic purposes. Of course, we traders in America and Britain object because we suffer, but looking with Chinese eyes and with a world-economical vision at the matter, we must admit that the Chinese guilds are not ignoble or selfish and that their use of the boycott is a mighty diplomatic weapon. It has humbled Japan without the use of a soldier or a thirteen-inch broadside. By threatening a boycott, Wu Ting Fang and the Shanghai Assembly at the darkest hour of the republican revolution, prevented certain nations from making a loan to the imperialists, which was the most brilliant and potential move of the revolution. It really won for the southern cause, the military capture of Nanking following as a matter of course. Let Japan, Russia and others beware how they take advantage of China, whether in Manchuria, the Yangtze provinces, Shangtung, Yunnan, Szechuen or other provinces, or territories like Tibet, Mongolia and Turkestan; the Chinese guilds with their boycott are a sure refuge in time of trouble, back of any failing walls of arms, finance or diplomacy.
The following are some of the sociological proverbs of the Chinese:
“The chain is as strong as its weakest ring, and a corporation is as moral as its most corrupt director.”
“Taking rocks away makes a smooth stream, as removing wrongs makes a placid nation.”
“We can’t all agree exactly, for many faces, many minds, and the ten fingers are not all of one length; but they are all useful.”
“Money covers a multitude of sins.”
“Fire will burn through anything, and money will get through anything.”
“The deeper you go in your cave, the smaller seems your heaven.”
“A living poor man is better than a dead rich man.”
“Some have had a thousand years of sorrow in a hundred years of life.”
“You may think you’re on the right way, but you lose nothing by asking.”
“You can’t carve much on a rotten stick.”
“Some dogs are so intent on chasing the rabbit that they don’t see the tiger chasing them.”
“Right is the only might that lasts.”
“Of all the fools the greatest is the miser. He breaks his back with the burden which he carries when the goal is in sight.”
“Before you beat an irresponsible dog for its howl, think of the manners you owe to its master.”
“If you would have a long twilight of life, you must begin old age early.”
“Riches may ornament a wall, but only virtue can adorn a person.”
“The heart has one language the world over, but the tongues of men have many languages.”
“When you are rich the whole world is your cousin; when you are poor, even your cousin doesn’t know you.”
“He who deserves an increase in his wage is a coward if he does not ask for it.”
“It’s a pretty mean traveler who destroys the bridge which has served his purpose; there are other brother-travelers.”
“With money you can yell like a lion; without it you must squeak like a mouse.”
“There were two fools: one when he was poor thought of days of riches; the other when he was rich never thought of days of poverty.”
“A kind stranger at hand is better than a cold relative afar.”
“Repentance is only good when it looks forward.”
“Be hard on yourself and easy on your fellows.”
“The same thing can be fact to a friend and fiction to a foe.”
“Rough food is strongest, as rough wool is warmest.”
“Emulation is only proper in charities.”
“Charity is like smoking, hard to learn and hard to stop.”
“Jewels in a pig’s nose and riches in a snob’s hand.”
“He gives more who gives a penny to the poor than he who adds a fortune to the wealth of the rich.”
“Those who rose from nothing lord it most.”
“Get at the cause rather than attack the effect.”
“A headlong hero is not so good as a timid man who knows just what he is after.”
“If you would serve a fair master, work for yourself.”
“Once books, art, music, poetry and gardening used to interest the men of China and the world; now it is the new age, when only food and power engage; is materialism progress?”
“The best place to await your enemy is at the graveyard boundary, for he must pass there at last.”
“Another mouth at the table shrinks the bowl on the fire.”
“You can only give a man a stone for bread once.”
“The old boat is full of nails, and the old man is full of experiences.”
XXXI
AWAKENED INTEREST IN AMERICA
Three recent manifestations, selected from many, will indicate the awakened interest in America in things Chinese and the New China. Like the ostrich which pushed its head in the sand, and concluded that the world that was not seen, did not exist, our stage has for centuries persisted in ignoring Sinim-histrionics. Now Chinese plays are not uncommon. One in particular is worthy of mention. William Winter, the dean of the American critics, says of The Daughter of Heaven, playing at the Century Theater, New York: “I have seen every important spectacle displayed in America during the last sixty years and I think The Daughter of Heaven is superior to anything of the kind I ever saw.” The Liebler Company state that it has cost them $100,000.00 to stage the play. How my eminent Thespian friends in old China will marvel when they read this amount! For the same sum they would agree to give four thousand simultaneous plays in the four thousand walled cities of China! Revenons à nos moutons. There are eight gorgeous scenes, the exact detail of which the stage manager brought from Peking and Nanking, where he specially went for local color, and where the play is laid. Scene one introduces a moving state sanpan boat, lighted by lanterns, as a setting for a beautiful tenor love song. Scene two shows the Manchu emperor’s room in the Peking palace. Scene three is of the Ming empress’ gardens at Nanking. This lovely scene is made realistic by living flocks of sacred cranes and peacocks moving about the stage. Scene four is the throne room of the Ming palace at Nanking, a gorgeous representation of Chinese luxury such as we shall never see again, now that the old royal China has passed away. Scene five is outside the pavilion of the Ming empress. Scene six, in contrast to previous gorgeousness, gives a somber Craig-like setting to the battlements of Nanking, and all the remarkable modern art of the stage manager is called into exercise to produce thrilling battle effects. Scene seven is outside the Chien Men gate at Peking, executions taking place, and all the daily life of the Manchus holding one spellbound by its accuracy. Scene eight is the Manchu throne room at Peking.
Now, as to the plot and theme. Pierre Loti, the Orientalist, of course knows his China, for he fought in the relief of Peking, and I have related elsewhere in this volume, his unique pilgrimage to Angkor. Judith Gautier, his collaborator, knows the passionate human heart, as should the daughter of the famous romantic French poet, Theophile Gautier. They have combined their skill to write a tragic Shakespearean theme in a Chinese setting, but the human heart beats to the same pulse under all colors of complexion. In short, the theme is as follows: As there has been for three hundred years, in this play there is war between the Ming and Manchu races. Neither the beautiful young widow, the Ming empress, nor the bachelor Manchu emperor, has been allowed by the factionists of their respective parties to consider the national suicide of race strife. The Manchu emperor resolves if possible to do two things: to restrain in time his army which is attacking the Mings, and in disguise personally to sue at Nanking for the hand of the remarkable beauty, the Ming empress. He can not sue as a Manchu emperor; he knows the Ming empress has only too much cause to hate his race. This worthy Romeo gains admittance to the audience chamber of the Ming empress, and his unusual address and fire carry away the forlorn empress’ heart, despite herself. He therefore has made the personal conquest that could only be made on love’s unsupported basis, and he can afford to wait. In the meantime, the Manchu emperor’s real character is discovered, but he escapes from the Ming palace. His armies, controlled by a cabal of generals, against his will, overcome the Mings, kill the Ming empress’ adored little son and thus break her heart by destroying the dynasty. The Ming empress is captured by the Manchu armies, and is brought to the Manchu emperor’s palace at Peking. There, in real character, the emperor sues for two things: for the fruition of long deferred love, and for the patriotic union of the warring races, in their marriage. In an awful scene of Homeric passion, the Ming empress finally decides that too much blood has flowed between the races for her selfishly to accept of the offered love and honor. She sees the shades of the leaders of the great Ming race, led by her adored little son, and she decides in Oriental fashion, just as General Nogi did, that duty calls her to follow them into the spirit land. The fiery hearted Manchu emperor stands by spellbound, for he can not refute the Cathayan viewpoint, terrible as is his personal suffering. He, too, must be willing to resign love. The Ming empress allows the Manchu emperor to escort her up the privileged central stairway reserved for royalty, to the widest and oldest throne of the human race, and for a hushed and glorious moment she sits radiant in the place of power. The shades of her race, in clouds, approach and reproach her. She asks the emperor to return to her the pearl which she gave him at Nanking, when, incognito, he was an accepted suitor. He hands it to her, and she suddenly swallows it. The lines of Loti and Gautier draw out passion, as the French feel it, in this scene to the limit of endurance, and to its exquisite pain the brave Anglo-Saxon acting of the actor Basil Gill adds a tempestuous power that is thrilling and convincing. When the Manchu emperor at last realizes that the long silent Ming empress really sits dead on the throne, with overflowing emotion he strikes the great audience gong, and commands “to their knees and kotows” the host of viceroys and courtiers which enters; yes, though proud Manchus, they must, indeed, at last worship a Ming empress. As I have pointed out in a chapter on the Portuguese in China in my former book, The Chinese, such a scene is historically correct, for the frenzied king, Don Pedro, once placed the remains of his beautiful bride, Ignez de Castro, who was murdered for love by his enemies, on the throne and compelled a before unwilling people, to pay homage to her. Such is the deathless pride of true love, which mocks at fate even at the triumphant gates of death.
What further shall be said of the acting of Basil Gill and Viola Allen. He makes a brave, eloquent, manly lover, and his reading of the lines can be heard round and full throughout the immense vault of the Century Theater. Viola Allen, as the Ming empress, touches with finished skill, every chord of emotional acting, ever with burning fire and yet ever with artistic control, which best brings the sympathetic tear. They both ring the changes, both in what they suggest and in what they say, on the noble chord: Dulce et decorum est pro patriâ mori. Compared with the silly themes of some popular plays, what a wholesome one is The Daughter of Heaven. While there is little accurate Chinese music, one wishes for more of it, as the Chinese throughout their plays use more music than this play uses. The costumes, the most gorgeous ever seen, will be seen no more, as the old China has passed away. The Liebler Company have rendered a public service by staging so accurate, expensive and educational a production, even if the actors repeatedly mispronounce the word “dynasty”! All Orientalists eagerly hope that the public will avail themselves of the unique opportunity without delay, as there is no telling how long it will pay the producer to stage such an expensive play. No such spectacle will again be seen; the old China has passed away, but it is caught and preserved in the amber in The Daughter of Heaven.
Among the Americans who deserve special credit for awakening an interest in the New China should be mentioned Professor George H. Blakeslee, of the Department of History of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, who for years has brought together a remarkable World’s Oriental Congress, the influence of which, in its published proceedings, etc., is rolling like a golden wheel around the globe, raying forth information, reconciliation, altruism and a forward Americanism in the Orient, which is pro-Oriental and not incursive in any sense, in the opinion of the Orientals. At the last conference there were thirty-six major addresses by specialists.
In closing this long volume, I would like to make a plea for China. America should at once, without waiting for the “concert of Europe” (the “entangling alliances” which Washington prohibited) recognize the new Chinese republic. For some time, with others, I have been working on such a popular movement (as an American, and in no sense in the pay of the Chinese government), writing to editors, authors and influential men, making addresses before learned and popular bodies, and ascertaining the opinions of Orientalists and Orientals. In public meetings, I have found the sentiment of the American people to be entirely in favor. I wrote Ex-president Roosevelt in full on November 25th, 1912, and the Outlook of November 30, 1912 kindly published an article in favor. The editor of the Independent wrote me that they had long been favorable. From my mail, I quote a few representative sentiments as follows:
“Mr. Carnegie asks me to say that he is confident the republic will be among the first to recognize her sister republic.” The frank editor of the North American Review writes: “We are in sympathy with your belief that the time has come for America’s recognition of, and aid to, the new Chinese republic.” President Woodrow Wilson warmly wrote me from Bermuda: “You may be sure that my interest in the fortunes of China is deep and permanent, and that the subject of recognition to which you call my attention will have my very serious and thoughtful consideration.” The earnest Ex-treasurer of New York, Colonel Arthur MacArthur, editor of the influential Troy Budget, writes: “My paper will continue to publish editorials and information in favor, and help to keep the movement prominently before the people.” The Worcester, Massachusetts, Telegram has been most zealous. These are only samples of what the journals of the country are doing. Honorable Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives, writes me: “Individually I think the Chinese republic ought to be recognized, but it has been settled definitely in this country that the recognition of governments is an executive function.” Governor William Sulzer, the “father” of the famous Sulzer Resolution which passed Congress, and which congratulated republican China on her new form of government, writes me: “You can rely on me to do all I can in the future, as in the past, to promote the welfare of the Chinese republic.” Professor Blakeslee, of Clark University, wrote me: “I want to tell you how much I appreciate all that you are doing to urge the early recognition of the Chinese republic. Have you thought of getting up another petition? I should be glad to sign it; so would Professor A. B. Hart, of Harvard University, and three-fourths of those who spoke at the Conference would sign it.”
Of course there are some American “Manchus” and Laodiceans who are not in favor of the movement. At our last conference, at Clark University, of Orientalists recently arrived from the Orient, it was the general opinion that China should be helped by recognition, as miniature Portugal and South American republics, some of a moth’s life, have been helped. Americans at the head of Chinese universities have told me: “We are heart and soul in favor.” The able Chinese officials educated in America, are passionate in their appeal for recognition by America now, without waiting for the “concert of Europe” on this one point. Wu Ting Fang, first foreign minister, and Wang Chung Wei, assistant foreign minister of the southern republicans, who won the battles of the revolution, have been asking for America’s recognition since their first formal note of January, 1912. America has from the beginning warmly appreciated the recognition by France, Spain, etc., of our struggling republic in 1778, and leading Chinese ministers of state have told me that China would have the same feeling if recognition is not delayed till China is strong enough not to care so much as now. The forceful idiom of one official, who smiled as he spoke, was: “You know a beggar appreciates those favors the most which were given to him when he was a beggar, and not when he comes into his estate.” Are we waiting till China gives a quid pro quo in concessions or monopolies, or until some future election confirms the revolution, as though the battles won were not a firmer expression of determination than even an election, in which latter, enemies can cloud the issue. Americans have almost entire charge of China’s higher education. The Panama Canal is going to bring trade intercourse with China very dose to the Eastern and Mississippi states of America. Secretary of State John Hay’s note to the powers in 1900, insisting for all time on the “integrity of China,” really commits America now to the recognition of the republic. Delayed recognition is really encouraging certain powers in ignoring the American altruistic doctrine of the “non-partition of China”. I refer partially to the secession of parts of Chinese Turkestan and Mongolia, largely caused by Monsieur Korostovetz’ intrusive visit in the van of Cossacks to the heart of the latter dependency as late as December, 1912.
My idea is that generously helping China in republicanism, in accordance with the spirit and terms of Washington’s Farewell Address, which specified that Americans “should recommend their form of government to the applause, affection and the adoption of every nation,” will redound to the reputation of America in altruism. America’s largest field for expansion in trade, educational and religious influence, is in the New China, and the new progressive Chinese, from long association with them, I can give my word, fully deserve our unreserved admiration and friendship. As illustrating the general opinion of American educationalists in China, I quote the following letter from my warm friend Doctor J. E. Williams, Vice-president of the great University of Nanking, China. Mr. Williams led in the movement whereby $430,000 was collected for China’s relief in the last flood and famine, and in the conservative administration of that relief, and the model farm colonies which were later established for the Chinese. “I am greatly interested in what you are doing to hasten America’s recognition of the republic. I am heart and soul in sympathy. I also agree with what you write, that there are many who are not the friends of China. To any one who knows the inside facts, the latter make no case at all against China, but to the people who do not know, they put up a plausible story. Compare China’s advance after a year of revolution and reform, with the efforts of our own forefathers to establish the American republic. After one year of enlistment, Washington’s soldiers were leaving him and returning to their homes. As for financial credit, the original colonies had absolutely none. As for trade and commerce, there was nothing worth mentioning. As for the development of popular education as a basis of republican government, there were hardly the rudiments in evidence. As for the ability to open mines and railways as the sine qua non of recognition, the original Thirteen Colonies had not even dreamed of mines and railways. It is my conviction that the Chinese are better prepared for republican government, and have a better outlook for its achievement than the Americans did any time up to the conclusion of the Civil War. I should be pleased to cooperate in any way in your plans for influencing the leaders in bringing about early recognition. Your plan is capital in every respect and I heartily concur.”
Generally, America has in the case of the South American republics, etc., recognized governments after they have been established one year. The year has long passed in the case of China. China has poor railroad communication and recognition should not be delayed until the suffrage is voting in machine form, and perhaps by “machine” plan! How smoothly was the American suffrage voting in 1778 when France, Holland, Sweden, Prussia and Spain recognized America? We did not even have a capital at that time, for our enemies had ravaged Philadelphia. China has two capitals (one of sentiment and one of fact) Nanking and Peking, but would like to have one, if foreigners will permit her! Why should America delay? “China has been forever and will be forever.” Soon she will be strong enough not to care, but what America does now she will forever appreciate, and America will sit nearest to her heart’s gratitude. Think of it! A republic of 400,000,000 people trading and communing with us across the narrowing Pacific, and beneath the smiling rays of the same warm sun which we both face: an altruistic brotherhood of East and West, working for the uplift of the whole world. China should be recognized and sent on her way rejoicing. Be not deceived; the new Chinese know us well, and take due remembrance of any delay that is based on narrow-mindedness or the uncharitable or selfish heart. Great cycles have opened beyond the seas; let America and Britain be great with them, and part of that greatness consists in helping China to be great. One leading Chinese minister and polished orator in our own language, who, I believe, will some day be president of China, for he has the youth, ability and ambition, told me with tears in his enthusiastic eyes, as he declaimed on the great subject, that if America will stand by China in this matter of honor, China will engrave gratitude forever on the core of her heart. The Chinese republican officials say that whether the excuse for delay is that the republic must be tried at the polls; or that China hasn’t railways, or China hasn’t credit, or China hasn’t “Christian science”, and whatnot, the delay is encouraging Russia to encroach, and is discouraging their own people, by the fact that one great Pacific republic won’t officially recognize the other one, which was bought by the same awful price set by Freedom: the sacred blood of patriots sacrificed by the war-sword on the altar of Liberty.
The recognition movement is growing among our people, and is not confined to one class. Many business organizations are in favor of it. The Pacific Coast Chambers of Commerce have adopted resolutions urging favorable action without longer delay. Our National Chamber of Commerce has done the same thing. Senator Bacon, of Georgia, has recently introduced in congress a joint resolution, favoring early recognition. Representative university presidents have written me of their sympathy with the movement. I quote from a letter from Doctor David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford Jr. University, of California, as follows: “I am thoroughly in sympathy with your work for recognition, and am thoroughly in sympathy with the desire of most of the American people that the republic in China may be officially recognized by the United States.” Notable pulpit orators have also joined the movement. I quote from a representative letter from the Reverend Doctor John Haynes Holmes, pastor of the Unitarian church of the Messiah, Park Avenue, New York City, as follows: “The Chinese subjects which you have suggested that my church, along with others, should bring to the attention of our people, are certainly pertinent. I am particularly interested in the second, viz., recognition of China as a sister republic. I shall hope to find place in my preaching for some emphatic favorable mention of these matters. With appreciation of the splendid work that you are doing for China’s recognition, I am.”
It is fitting that I should close this volume with the following important letter to me from my one-time fellow-townsman of Hongkong, Doctor Sun Yat Sen (Sunyacius), the leading citizen of the New China, the greatest of the Chinese reformers, who was at the head of the Chinese republican revolution; the first provisional president of China at Nanking, and who is at present the head of China’s National Railway and Industrial Development Board. This message, which will make history, is really a semi-official message from the vast Chinese republic of 400,000,000 people, through their greatest hero, the Christian founder of their republic, and their most influential official and citizen, to the American people. It reads:
“I have the honor of acknowledging your letters, together with the newspaper interviews with you urging America’s prompt recognition of the Chinese republic. In reply I beg to inform you that your effort in your interviews, books, etc., in conducting this campaign in China’s interest, is highly appreciated by me and my associates. We hope that your efforts for the recognition of China by the United States of America will be speedily crowned with great success.”
Those who know the American people know that their hearts unanimously bespeak a warm and favorable answer without further delay to so momentous an appeal. It is the great privilege and honor of this book to help to convey Doctor Sun Yat Sen’s message to America.
THE END