At sunset we reached Hankow (so called because it is on the Han river), and were kept waiting a long time at the first station, close to the banks of the Yangtzekiang, so that it was dark by the time we reached the town. We drew up alongside a crowd of people, dimly illumined by the gay Chinese lanterns they were carrying, and found it difficult to distinguish the friends who had come to meet us. Nearly every one carries a lantern, or has a servant to do it, for the place is miserably lighted. The station is in the middle of the foreign concession, and you might easily imagine yourself in a poorly lighted London suburb, as you pass big warehouses and shops and suburban villas. It is the centre of the commercial life of the place, and there is a large European population.
All along the river-bank the city stretches for miles, and across the river is the town of Wuchang, to which ferries ply continually. If the wind is against you it may take an hour or more to get across, and you could easily imagine yourself on the sea. Indeed, it is nothing uncommon to go across in calm weather to pay a call, and for the wind to rise suddenly and prevent your coming back for a couple of days. At Wuchang there are various missions with hospitals and schools. At one of these we saw a slave girl who had been almost burnt to death with incense sticks by an enraged mistress, and then bricked up in a wall to die of starvation. She will probably never entirely recover the shock to the system. Large boat-loads of girls are continually passing down the river from the province of Szechwan, we were told, for sale at the ports; and although there has recently been an edict prohibiting the traffic, that edict is a dead letter. Many slave girls are not badly treated, but in fits of passion a Chinese mistress becomes capable of diabolical cruelty. One child was brought to the hospital at Taiyüanfu, some years ago when I was there, almost dead. She had been beaten and knocked about and bitten till she was one mass of bruises and sores, and was almost blind and quite lame. She screamed at first if any one came near her, and it was plain that kindness was a thing unknown. Soon she learnt that she had come into a new world, and responded beautifully to the new treatment. Her face lighted up with joy at any small gift, a flower or a sweet, and the necessary suffering caused by dressing her wounds was borne in heroic silence. Her one dread was lest she should recover so as to have to return to her old mistress. Several months of diplomatic negotiations passed before her mistress was persuaded to make her over as a gift to the hospital, on account of her incurable lameness and blindness, which rendered her practically useless.
So much has been said about the cruelty of the Chinese as a race, that I cannot forbear pointing out one or two things that have struck me. The Chinaman never appears to be cruel from innate love of cruelty for its own sake of sport, and I have never seen or heard in China of the atrocities which make travelling in southern Italy and Spain a misery to any one who loves animals. Cruelty for the love of money—such as that witnessed on the Congo and elsewhere—is not to be found in China, except in isolated cases, such as in the gaols. If it were not for the humanising influences of Christianity, I believe that we should be a more brutal race than the Chinese, for unhappily the sporting instinct, which we so strongly possess, is closely allied to cruelty. A Chinaman looking on at many a football match in Lancashire or Yorkshire might reasonably have much to say on the subject of kicking, for instance, as a proof of our brutality. Another point that is apt to be overlooked is that the Chinese are extraordinarily insensitive to pain; witness every operating theatre in the country, where anæsthetics are much less used or required than for Europeans. There is no denying that the Chinese can be unspeakably cruel when under the influence of passion, but not more so than Europeans; and that Chinese punishments are barbarous in the extreme; but there is little doubt they will soon be altered and brought into line with Western ideas, if one may judge from other changes now taking place.
There is a Bund at Hankow running along the river-side as at Shanghai, but it is not nearly so fine a one. Large ships pass daily between the two cities; for Hankow is a most flourishing place, the centre of the tea trade, and in its warehouses is packed all the tea for the Russian market which can be despatched to Russia without transhipment.[8] Immediately to the east of Hankow, and only separated from it by the Han river, is the large town of Han-Yang, and this and Wu Chang form one big city with Hankow.
We had to wait a few days before we could get a steamer going to Ichang, and though small, we found it remarkably comfortable, so that we enjoyed our three days’ trip. The country at first was flat, but there was always something to see—long, V-shaped flights of geese, or solid blocks of ducks. Herons, too, and many other kinds of birds we saw; and wild turkeys we ate, as well as pheasants.
The river was unusually high, but not too high, we ascertained, for us to get up the rapids. In consequence of the height of the river the tiny steam-launch had to be let down at one point, as well as continual soundings to be made to test the depth of the river-bed. This is always changing, especially during the fall of the river, and is one of the main difficulties of river navigation in China, making it most tiresome and dangerous.
Wet weather set in next day and lasted more or less for a week, so that the crags overhanging the banks near Ichang looked grand and forbidding as we steamed up to it.
CHAPTER XIII
On the Yangtze: Ichang to Wanhsien
We reached Ichang on Sunday afternoon, and were glad to be in time for a service in the Presbyterian church, the last really homelike church we attended till we reached Burma. In all other churches there were things to remind us that we were in China, but here we were in Scotland once more, and this is the only station of the Scotch Established Church in China proper: they have a flourishing work, however, in Manchuria.
Ichang has quite a colony of Europeans. They were anxious to have a good road outside the town for the sake of exercise, and when we visited the tennis club we saw the one they had made. The whole surface of the ground for miles and miles is covered with mounds (= graves), so closely packed together that it is impossible to help treading on them if you leave the path. The Europeans knew there would be great difficulty in obtaining permission to make the road they wanted, so they subscribed the requisite funds among themselves and took French leave to make it. Before the Chinese had recovered from their surprise, or had decided what to do, the road was made. Then the Chinese acted in a truly magnanimous way. Instead of simply seizing it, as they had every right to do (according to my informant’s story), they paid the Europeans all they had spent upon it, saying they must have the road in their own hands.