Chinese mettle

by E. G. Kemp

The rain grew more and more persistent, and the roads were muddy and slippery to the last degree. Even the sure-footed Chinese kept tumbling down, and it was almost less trying to walk than to be bumped down in our chairs. As we advanced into the province the culture of the opium poppy (papaver somniferum) increased till it was as much as ninety-nine per cent. of the crops, and the appearance of the inhabitants showed only too plainly its disastrous effects. In some of the villages the children were naked, although it was still cold weather, being only the beginning of April. In the markets the goods were of the meanest and cheapest description, and the people looked abject. They rushed out to beg from us. The main industry of the district was evidently the making of coal balls. The coal lies actually on the surface, and has only to be scraped together, mixed with a little earth and water, and then dried: it burns quite well. Some of the coal is used for fertilizing the ground, being reduced to ash by being burnt in pits with stones piled on it. Lime also is used for the poppy fields. Sometimes the coal holes by the wayside are a couple of yards in diameter. The coir palm is to be seen in every village, and loquats and walnut trees are cultivated for their fruit.

We struggled along through a thick mist one day, and one after another went down like ninepins on the slippery path. One of my bearers cut his ankle, and was thankful for the doctor’s attentions. Suddenly I heard an ominous roaring sound, and looked in vain for the cause. It proved to be produced by a big stream, which disappeared into a hole in the earth; this appears to be quite a common phenomenon, and later on we saw one bubble out of the ground in the same strange fashion.

Another shape of hill attracted my attention, and as I tried to reproduce it accurately on paper it became obvious that this was one of the Chinese mountain forms with which one has been familiar from childhood in their pictures, and which one had supposed to be a work of imagination. As they always hold in their canons of art that “form” is quite subsidiary to “spirit,” I imagined that it was not inability to imitate form accurately, but a deliberate intention of ignoring it in order to express some more important truth that was the cause of their drawing, what seemed to me, such unnatural mountains. But here one discovered that these forms are natural in China, and it is after all only our ignorance that makes us so misjudge them.

There were hedges by the roadside all bursting into leaf and blossom, and I never saw such a wealth of ferns of many kinds. There was material for a whole volume on ferns alone. Lofty trees of catalpa bungei with their purple blossom, and Boehmeria nivea grew by the roadside, and rhea grass in the village gardens.

We generally started the day in a damp mist, and were happy when it cleared away, even though there was no sunshine. We scanned the hedges for roses, and felt quite aggrieved if we failed to find fresh varieties every single day. A lovely blush rose filled us with delight, but pink moss-roses were only seen on one occasion. We decided that nowhere else could a greater variety of roses be found: we counted twenty-three varieties before we left the province, and felt sure we should have found many more had we stayed longer, for they were hardly in full bloom by the end of April. One day I picked up a broken branch on the road, thrown away by some passer-by no doubt because it had no blossoms on it, but the bright green leaves were a lovely violet on the under side, and I searched in vain to find a bush of it growing, in order to see what the flowers were like.

Then, too, the birds were reminiscent of home—magpies, larks, woodpeckers, wagtails, and even the aggravating cuckoo. But there was one elusive little fellow, known to all dwellers in Kweichow, though no one could tell me his name: he had a long shrill note with a short tut-tut-tut at the end. We both watched for him daily, as he seemed to haunt our path continually, but never could we catch a sight of him, so dexterously did he hide himself. Occasionally we thought we saw him, but it was so momentary a glimpse that we were never sure; the bird we saw looked about the size and shape and colour of a linnet.

The fourth day in Kweichow we came to a splendid three-arch bridge in a fertile valley, and spent the night in a very different village from most—Kuan Tzu Yao. A number of fine new houses were in course of construction, built largely of stone; amongst others, a post office next door to our inn. The postal system in China is really wonderful, even in this backward province, and we had a most charming surprise at the first post town we entered. Our interpreter went to the post office, and was surprised at being asked if he were travelling with English ladies. On admitting this, he was asked to inform us that if we were in need of money we could draw as much as was necessary at any office we came to, by order of the postal commissioner at Kwei Yang. The reason for this delightful arrangement was that the English Commissioner at Taiyuanfu, whose advice we had asked about transmitting money, said he would write to his Chinese colleague and ask him to help us if we got into difficulties, because of the prevalent highway robberies. This gentleman was ill at the time the letter reached him, but he telegraphed to Taiyuanfu as soon as he was fit, that he would do what he could—and this was his splendid way of meeting the difficulty. No finer testimony could be wanted of the way the Chinese trust our people.

The postal system is a fine piece of organization: it reaches to the utmost bounds of the empire, and although the mails are mainly carried by runners on foot, they travel very rapidly. The stages are not long, and there is no delay when the bags are handed from one runner to the next. For instance, we were told that on this particular road, what we did in seventeen days the mails would do in four, and we did an average of eighteen miles a day. We had postal maps given us of the provinces we were going to visit. On them are marked all the postal stations, with the distances from one to another; the line of route; the various grades of offices; the limit of the district; daily or bi-daily day and night service; daily, bi-daily or tri-daily service; less frequent ones; postal connexion by boat; telegraphic connexion; rural box offices, etc. The names of the main towns are in both Chinese and English, the others only in Chinese. On the whole, letters travel wonderfully safely. The old postal system was quite hopeless, and in the interior the missionaries used to organize their own. Even Peking used to be closed to the rest of the world yearly for several months. I remember six months when we had no letters from my sister in Shansi, due to a misunderstanding at a transmitting station, and there was no telegraphic communication in those days. Now the old Chinese system has practically died out.

We had another proof of the thoughtfulness of the Chinese commissioner later. Having heard from one of the missionaries that we were going into the Miao country before coming to the capital, he sent up all our letters, a tremendous boon after being weeks without any. The postal service is under international control, having been originated in 1896 and built up by Sir Robert Hart in connexion with the customs: in each province there is a commissioner; nearly all are Europeans.