Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

CHAPTER VIII

THE CITIES Of CHINA

Nowhere is the transitional period through which China is passing more obvious than in the cities of China; many towns are still completely Chinese, but as you approach the ports you find more and more Western development. The contrast between towns is extremely marked. Shanghai or Tientsin are Western towns and centres of civilisation; the difference between them and such towns as Hangchow or Ichang is very great. The true Chinese city is not without its beauty—in fact, in many ways it is a beautiful and wonderful place. But to appreciate it eyes only are wanted, and a nose is a misfortune. The streets are extremely narrow passages, which are bordered on either side by most attractive shops, particularly in the main street. The stranger longs to stop and buy things as he goes along, but the difficulty is that it takes so much time; he must either be prepared to pay twice the value of the things he wants, or to spend hours in negotiation. There is one curious exception to this rule; the silk guild at Shanghai does not allow its members to bargain, and therefore in the silk shop the real price is told at once.

The shopkeepers are charming, and there are numbers of salesmen—salesmen who do not mind taking any amount of trouble to please. It is delightful, if insidious, to go into those shops; and one can well believe that if a Chinese silk shop were opened in London, and silk sold at Chinese prices, the shop would have plenty of customers. The quality of Chinese silk far exceeds that of the silks of the West. A Chinese gentleman mentioned as an example of this superiority that one of his gowns was made of French silk, and that it was torn and spoilt after two or three years; but that he had had gowns of Chinese silk for twenty years or more which were quite as good as on the day he bought them, and that he had only put them on one side because the fashions in men's garments change in China as they do elsewhere for ladies. The same gentleman related many interesting things about the silk trade. The quality of the silk is determined by the silk guild. This is much more like the guilds in mediæval Europe than anything that we have nowadays, and that is why China is not exporting more silk than she is at present. These silk guilds to a certain extent prevent the Chinese catering for European customers, as they will not allow or at any rate encourage the production of silks that would take on the European market. The West has many faults as well as many virtues, and one of its faults is that it no longer cares for articles of sterling value, which last long and for which a high price must be paid, but it delights in attractive articles of poor quality at a low price. It is to be feared that the West may spoil some of China's great products as she has spoilt the great arts and productions of India.

But to return to Chinese streets. Next the silk shop will be the silver shop. Here again the work is admirable. At such a place as Kiukiang you can spend an hour or more bargaining, and watching the wonderful skill of the silversmiths as they turn out beautiful silver ornaments. It is pleasant to wander along and to look into the shops and see the strange things that are for sale—fish of many kinds in one shop, rice and grain in another, strange vegetables, little bits of pork, flattened ducks; or to glance at the clothes and the coats hung out, many of them of brilliant colours. The signs over the shops and the names of the merchants are a feature in themselves, illuminated as they are in vivid hues of red and gold, in those wonderful characters so full of mystery to the foreigner.

In a native city up-country the traveller is practically forced to go through the city in a chair. There are no wheel conveyances except wheelbarrows, and, except where there are Manchus, horses are quite unknown. Walking is profoundly unpleasant for a European, for as he walks along he is constantly jostled by porters carrying loads of goods on a bamboo across their shoulders; or cries are heard, and a Chinese Mandarin is carried past shoulder high, leaning forward looking out of his chair perhaps with a smile, of contempt for the foreigner who can so demean himself as to go on foot like a common coolie; or perhaps it is a lady with her chair closely covered in and only a glimpse to be seen of a rouged and powdered face, for the Chinese women paint to excess, as part of their ordinary toilette. Next comes the water-carrier hurrying past with his two buckets of water; or perhaps it is some malodorous burden which makes a Western long to be deprived of the sense of smell. But in a chair a ride through a Chinese town is delightful; the chair-coolies push past foot-passengers who accept their buffets with the greatest equanimity, and from a comparatively elevated position the traveller can look down on the crowd.

But when the Chinese city is near a port, all this begins to change. The chair is replaced by the ricksha, and though in many ways it is less comfortable than a chair, the ricksha is after all the beginning of the rule of the West, being a labour-saving machine. One coolie or two at the most can drag a man quickly and easily where with a chair three or four bearers would be needed. Outside the old town will be built the new native town, and the new native town is built on European lines, with comparatively wide streets. In a treaty port the completed specimen of the transitional stage through which all China is passing is to be seen. Shanghai is a most delightful town, although it seems commonplace to those who live there, but to a stranger it is a place full of contradictions and eccentricities. The first thing that strikes one in Shanghai is that none of the natives know any of the names of the streets. It is true they are written up in large letters both in English and in Chinese; but as not one of the coolies can read, they have not the very slightest idea that that is the name of the street—they call it quite a different name; and as they speak a different language both to that of the educated Chinaman and to the Englishman, there is no reason why they should ever learn the names given by them. The habitual way of directing a ricksha coolie is by a sort of pantomime, and there is always a great element of uncertainty as to whether he will get to his destination even with the oldest resident unless he knows the way himself. I arrived at Tientsin and tried to go and see Dr. Lavington Hart, whose college is known all over China, I may say all over the world, but the Chinese porter was quite unable to make the coolie understand where it was, and so we wandered about for some time till the coolie got tired and put me down opposite what fortunately turned out to be the house of a Japanese gentleman. I entered the house, and was surprised that the Chinese servant who met me did not altogether seem to expect me; but as he could not speak English and I could not speak Chinese, it was impossible to inquire if anything was wrong. I was just wondering why Dr. Hart should live in a Japanese house, when the door opened and a Japanese gentleman walked in. Fortunately for me he spoke both Chinese and English well; so after explanations I was again sent on my road, and found Dr. Lavington Hart waiting dinner for me, and wondering how I had got lost. He then told me that I should have asked not for his college but for the hospital opposite, and that I should have asked not for the street but for the Chinese name of the doctor of the hospital who had been dead ten or fifteen years.

There is a moral in all this: it shows the state of confusion that exists in small as well as in large things. I asked several Englishmen why they did not accept the native names of the streets; their answer was that the coolies could not read them; and when I suggested that common sense would expect that the coolies' names should be taken for the streets, for after all that is how most of the streets in England were originally named, the suggestion met with no approval. These small matters show what a great gulf there is between the thoughts of the two races. If the coolies had been Italians or Germans or Russians, their names would have been accepted, or they would have been compelled to learn the new names.

Another example of the difficulty of carrying on the details of city life is afforded by a common spectacle at Shanghai. In the crowded streets you see a little crowd of policemen. The group consists of three splendid men, typical of three different civilisations. First there is the English policeman; next to him is a black-bearded man, bigger than the first, a Sikh, every gesture and action revealing the martial characteristics of his race; then a Chinaman completes the group, blue-coated and wearing a queue and a round Chinese hat as a sign of office. The traveller wonders why this trio is needed till he sees them in action. A motor car rushes down one road, a ricksha comes down another, and a Chinese wheelbarrow with six women sitting on it slowly progresses down a third. All three conveyances are controlled by Chinamen, and when they meet, all shout and shriek at the top of their voices; no one keeps the rule of the road, with the probable result that the wheelbarrow is upset, the ricksha is forced against the wall, and the motor car pulled up dead. Then the police force comes into action. The Chinese policeman objurgates vociferously and makes signals indifferently to everybody; the Sikh policeman at once begins to thrash the Chinese coolie; meanwhile the English policeman at last gets the traffic on the right side of the road, quiets his subordinates, sees justice done, and restores order. Possibly if the matter had been left to the Chinese policeman, he would have arranged it in the end; the traffic in Peking was controlled entirely by Chinese policemen and was fairly well managed.

There is an extraordinary example of the want of consideration for the feelings of the Chinese to be seen in the public gardens at Shanghai. There stands a notice which contains, among several regulations, first, that "no dogs or bicycles shall be admitted"; secondly, that "no Chinese shall be admitted except servants in attendance on foreigners." Considering that the land is Chinese soil, one cannot but wonder that any one who had dealings with the Chinese should allow so ill-mannered a notice to be put up. No Chinese gentleman would object for a moment if the notice had been to the effect that unclean persons and beggars should be excluded from the gardens; but to exclude the cultured Chinese merchant who is every whit as clean as his Western neighbour, or to exclude the respectable people of the middle class whose orderly behaviour is beyond suspicion, is as unreasonable as it is regrettable.

Again, the Shanghai municipality has no Chinese representatives upon it, though the great bulk of the population is Chinese, with the result that from time to time they come across Chinese prejudices and quite unnecessarily irritate the population which they govern. The Chinese have a principle that a woman shall be publicly punished only for adultery and open shameless theft; her "face" or dignity must be preserved; and therefore she should never be made to answer for her offences in open court, her husband or her father being held responsible for her behaviour and for her punishment. The right way of dealing with any woman who is charged with an offence is to do as we do in England with regard to children, to summon not her but those responsible for her behaviour. I was assured by a Chinese official that the trouble which culminated in the Shanghai riots originated from disregard of this principle. The refusal of the Shanghai municipality to have Chinese representatives upon it is the more remarkable, as I was informed at Hong-Kong that they have such representatives, and find them most useful in assisting in the government of the Chinese. It is not surprising that Shanghai is a town to which it is diplomatic to make no reference in conversation with a Chinese gentleman.

There is more to be said for the mistrust of the Chinese Post-office and for the continuation of the curious system by which each nation has its own post-office. Nothing is more annoying to the traveller in Shanghai than the trouble he has to get his letters. If it should so happen that he has correspondents in many countries, he has to go to every one of the many post-offices in Shanghai, and they are situated in different parts of the town and in places very difficult to find. There is the Imperial Chinese Post-office, to which he first repairs, and where he will find letters from any correspondent in China; then with the greatest difficulty he reaches the English Post-office; after which he remembers that some of his friends may be on a holiday in France, therefore he must go to the French Post-office, and so on. When he asks why the Chinese Post-office cannot be trusted, he is told that the Chinese themselves will not trust their post-office unless there be a European official in control, and that the old Chinese system by which letters are forwarded by private companies still continues in many parts of China, although they possess branches of the Imperial Chinese Post-office. Still the traveller wearily thinks at the end of his day's journey that without undue trust in another nationality, or any loss of national prestige, an International Post-office might be arranged in a town like Shanghai, with its vast travelling population.

Shanghai with its mixture of races, with its national antipathies and jealousies, is indeed one of the most attractive but strangest towns in the whole world. Every race meets there; and as one wanders down the Nanking road, one never tires of watching the nationalities which throng that thoroughfare. There walks a tall bearded Russian, a fat German, jostling perhaps a tiny Japanese officer, whose whole air shows that he regards himself as a member of the conquering race that has checkmated the vast power of Europe; there are sleek Chinese in Western carriages, and there are thin Americans in Eastern rickshas; the motor cycle rushes past, nearly colliding with a closely-curtained chair bearing a Chinese lady of rank, or a splendid Indian in a yellow silk coat is struck in the face by the hat of a Frenchman, who finds the pavements of Shanghai too narrow for his sweeping salute; one hears guttural German alternating with Cockney slang; Parisian toilettes are seen next half-naked coolies; a couple of sailors on a tandem cycle almost upset two Japanese beauties as they shuffle along with their toes turned in; a grey gowned Buddhist priest elbows a bearded Roman missionary; a Russian shop where patriotism rather than love of gain induces the owners to conceal the nature of their wares by employing the Russian alphabet overhead, stands opposite a Japanese shop which, in not too perfect English, assures the wide world that their heads can be cut cheaply; an English lady looks askance at the tightness of her Chinese sister's nether garments, while the Chinese sister wonders how the white race can tolerate the indecency that allows a woman to show her shape and wear transparent sleeves.

Yes, Shanghai on a spring afternoon is a most interesting place; and yet as you turn your eyes to the river and catch sight of the dark grey warship, you realise that beneath all this peace and busy commerce lies the fear of the grim realities of war. China may assimilate the adjuncts of Western life, but she will never welcome the Western. The racial gulf that divides them is far too deep. It may be temporarily bridged by the heroism of a missionary; the enthusiasm of Christianity may make those who embrace it brothers; but the feeling of love will not extend one inch beyond the influence of religion; and those who ponder on the future as they watch the many-hued crowd that passes must grow more and more sure that the future of China lies with the Chinese alone; and however much as a race they may be willing to learn from the West, they will as a race be led only by their own people. The Westerner may be employed; Western teaching may be learnt; Western garments may be worn; but, as a Chinese professor said, "The wearer will be a Chinaman all the same."