When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then bearing another name), having centuries before grown into eminence, had been destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering upon its second youth. About the time of the last Caesars it fell into the hands of the Tartars, who gave place to the Mongols after 1215. It was during the reign of the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital, then called Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nankou, built the great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to this day--forty feet high, wide enough on top for four or five carriages to drive abreast, and thirteen miles around.
Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have most often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only ten years and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. The widely current idea is that this Boxer movement originated in anti-missionary sentiment, but this is not borne out by the facts. The late Col. Charles Denby, long American Minister to China, pointed out very clearly that the main cause was opposition to the land-grabbing policies of European nations. Once started, however, it took the form of opposition to everything foreign--missionaries and non-missionaries alike. I passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the siege that sounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs; stories of Chinese Christian converts butchered like sheep by their infuriated fellow countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in another part of the city, was finally rescued by foreign troops, the surviving Christians and missionaries were dying of starvation; they had become mere wan, half-crazed skeletons, subsisting on roots and bark.
The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts {126}during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of the church, but of mankind; for what man of us is not inspired to worthier things by every high deed of martyrdom which a fellowman anywhere has suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers hurled arrow after arrow with letters attached offering immunity to the Chinese converts if they would abandon their Christian leaders, but not even starvation led one to desert. Colonel Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000 Chinese Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day of one family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked out by suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying their Master, and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, "Jesus Is Leading Me." At Taiyan-fu an especially touching incident occurred: Five or six young girls, just in their teens, were about to be killed, when a leader intervened, declaring: "It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and urged them to recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since that is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for their faith with their lives.
I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means river in Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the famous Chinese industrial centre, about 600 miles south of Peking. About Hankow I found farming much more primitive than that around Peking, Nankou, and Tientsin. Instead of the three and four horse plows I found in North China, the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox. The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of buying a "farm"; he buys a "field." In Kwang-tung there is a saying that one sixth of an acre "will support one mouth." As nearly as I can find out, the average wages paid farm laborers is about 10 cents (gold) a day. The average for all kinds of labor, a member of the Emperor's Grand Council tells me, is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18 cents gold a day.
In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in {127} China or Japan there are three or four things that must always be kept in mind. One is that there are no fences between fields; I haven't seen a wooden or wire farm-fence since I left America. A high row or ridge separates one field from another, and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm-houses. The people live in villages, from ten to fifty farmhouses grouped together, and the laborers go out from their homes to the fields each morning and return at evening. The same system, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as population becomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we shall doubtless attempt to group our farm homes also. Even now, much more--vastly more--might be done in this respect if our farmers only had the plan in mind in building new homes. Where three or four farms come near together, why should not the dwellings be grouped near a common centre? It would mean much for convenience and for a better social life. Another notable difference from our own country is the absence of wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any kind. In this part of China the farmhouse is made of mud bricks, or mud and reeds, or else of a mixture of mud and stone, and is usually surrounded by a high wall of the same material.
Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are basking in the joyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights they may reflect that the Chinaman on this side of the earth enjoys no such comfort. Enough fire to cook the scanty meals is all that he can afford. To protect themselves against cold, as I have already pointed out, the poor put on many thicknesses of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wear furs and woolens. When a coolie has donned the maximum quantity of cotton padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-plated cruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him.
At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plowing and harrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out to the Temple of Agriculture, where each spring the Emperor or Prince Regent comes and plows sixteen rows, the purpose {128} being to bear testimony to the high honorableness of agriculture and its fundamental importance to the empire. This happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it is in late fall that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy now flailing grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, or grinding it in mills operated by a single donkey.
In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions--possibly billions--of the Chinese dead are even more in evidence than in the northern provinces. Let China last a few more thousand years with its present customs and the country will be one vast cemetery, and the people will have to move away to find land to cultivate. As not one grave in a thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem as if they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that each Chinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The care of their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even when John goes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be used to bring his body back to the ancestral burying ground.
In a land so given over to superstition I have no doubt that the most horrible disasters would also be expected as the penalty for interfering with any grave. It seems odd that a people who had a literature centuries before our Anglo-Saxon ancestors emerged from barbarism should now be the victims of superstitions almost as gross as those prevailing in Africa; but such are the facts. Chang Chih-tung, who died a few months ago, was one of the most progressive and enlightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but not even a man of his type could free himself from the great body of superstition handed down from generation to generation.
In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as "Dragon Hill," because of the Chinese belief that a dragon inhabits it. This long hill divides the city into two parts; every day hundreds and sometimes possibly thousands of people must climb up one side and down the other in getting from one part of the town to another. Therefore, when Chang {129} Chih-tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that he would make a cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble. And he did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a painful abscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he consulted were quick in pointing out the trouble. By making the cut in the hill, they told him, he had offended the earth dragon which inhabits it, and unless the cut were filled up Chang might die and disaster might come upon the city. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but to restore the ancient obstruction to travel, and so it remains to this day.