It is more than forty years since the Yellow River changed its course to its present one, taking the bed of a small stream known as the Clear River and bringing with the turbid torrent devastation and utter ruin. During more than an entire generation Central Shan-tung has been cursed with “China’s Sorrow,” and even when the course was altered again in 1887, the Government spent fabulous sums, and at last brought the stream back again into its former bed—a feat which few foreigners who saw the new channel thought it possible to execute.
The next year the region was visited by a corps of Dutch engineers, who made an elaborate survey and published an exhaustive report, to which the Chinese Government paid no attention whatever. The plea at that time was lack of money, but the funds could have been had if the execution of the work had been put into foreign hands, than whom no more competent ones than the Dutch could have been found. But at the time when the Director General of the Yellow River—a title the humour of which is lost on the Chinese—memorialized the Throne on the necessity of employing foreign science for this otherwise hopeless task, his proposal was rebuked by the Empress Dowager as “premature and ostentatious!”
According to Chinese ideas the “Three Harmonies” are “Heaven, Earth, and Man.” All three of them are at present out of sorts with each other. What is imperatively needed is a reconciliation, but this can never be had until the Chinese come to a more accurate appreciation of the limits of the powers of each of the triad. A new set of men would soon make a new earth, and then the heavens would be found to be well enough as they are. In the course of ten years enough water falls for the use of all, and not too much to be managed. But man must learn how to control it, and until he does so, “Heaven, earth and man” will never be in right relations.
XVII
THE VILLAGE HUNT
There are parts of the wide province of Shan-tung, in which there are great sheets of clear and deep water much frequented by water-fowl, especially in the autumn and in the winter. In any Western land these districts would be the paradise of hunters, but here the ducks and the geese go their several ways in “peace and tranquillity along the whole road,” undisturbed by the gun of the sportsman or the pot-hunter. This is due to an old-time custom of the yamên in the Prefectural city contiguous to the largest marshes, of levying a squeeze on the results of the gunner’s toil, a squeeze so comprehensive and virtually prohibitory in its action that water-fowl are practically out of the market altogether.
There is a record in the life of Dr. Medhurst, one of the pioneer missionaries in China, and father of Sir Walter Medhurst, sometime Her Majesty’s Consul-General in Shanghai, of a trip which he and a companion made north from Shanghai along the coasts of Shan-tung. Their plan was to debark from the fishing junk in which they had taken passage, cut across from one headland to another and then rejoin their vessel to repeat the same process farther on. In this way they succeeded in penetrating to a few fishing villages and had conversation with a handful of people all along shore. With charming frankness the historian of this pioneer tour mentions that they nowhere saw any wild animals. We can readily believe him, for even at this advanced stage of extended exploration, the only wild animal that the most experienced traveller is likely to see is the hare, albeit there are sundry others such as weasels, a kind of ground-fox, and the like, which do not obtrude themselves to any extent in public.
It is said that in the little kingdom of Denmark the citizens have a winter sport which consists in a general and organized hunt for hares on the part of all the male population of a very extended territory, starting from a given point and working in a definite direction, under precise and carefully observed rules. At the close of the hunt there is a great feast to which all are welcomed, and the whole performance is one to which there is much anxious looking forward on the part of the young and vigorous country-folk. It is strange to meet with a custom of the same kind in China, but there is an ancient district in Shan-tung, known as P‘ing-yüen, or Level-plains, where the Danish custom flourishes in full force, but minus the very important concluding feast. For where is the Chinese who would have the courage or indeed the means to welcome the countless swarms of his country-side to enjoy the pleasure of eating at somebody else’s expense?