Across China on Foot

by Edwin John Dingle

To me it was quite evident that they were deciding my destiny, or so it seemed in the stillness of the night. Looking upwards, I wondered whether I was soon to learn the secret of the stars and sky, and those men seemed to watch the secret workings of my soul. Outside the wind made moan continuously.

Suddenly my door opened noisily, a light was flashed upon us, and I saw the bulky form of the landlord. Then all was well. Soon one of my men appeared, and explained that the soldiers were on their way to meet an official who was coming from Tali-fu, that their instructions were that they would meet him at Hungay. They took me for the "gwan."

So my end was not yet. But now, months afterwards, when I stand and listen to the wind at midnight, there seems borne to me in every sob and wail a memory of that hateful night and the four soldiers with their guns.

It seemed not long afterwards that I was awakened by noises on the doorstep. Looking out, I found a bullock, its four feet tied together with a straw rope, writhing in its last agonies; the butcher, in his hand a cruel 24-inch bladed knife still red with blood, smiling the smile of ironic torture as he looked down upon his struggling victim. He straightway skinned the animal and cut up the carcass immediately in front of my door, where Lao Chang waited to get the best cut for my dinner. My three fellow-lodgers squatted alongside, going through their apologetic ablutions as if naught were happening. Their dirty face-rags were wrung and rewrung; they got to work with that universal tooth-brush (the forefinger!), and that the dead body of a bullock was being dissected two feet from the table at which they ate their steaming rice was a detail of not the slightest consequence in the world.

Hungay is an old-time capital of one of the original kingdoms, destroyed in the year A.D. 749. The road leading out towards Chao-chow was built some considerable time before that year, and has never been subject to any repairs whatever (for this fact I have drawn upon my imagination, but should be very much surprised to know that I am far out in my reckoning). Villagers have appropriated the public slabs and small boulders which comprised the wretched thoroughfare; reminiscent puddles tell you the tale, and the badness of the road renders it necessary for the traveler to be out of bed a little earlier than usual to face the ordeal. The road to-day has been practically as bad as walking along the sides of the Yangtze. But as I studied the patience and physical vitality of my three men, laughing and joking with the light-heartedness of children, with nearly seventy catties dangling from their shoulder-pole, without a word of murmuring, I felt a little ashamed of myself that I, whose duty it was merely to walk, should have made such a fuss. These men were prepared to work a very long time for very little reward, as no matter how small the rewards for the terribly exhausting labor, it were better than none at all,—so they philosophized.

That quiet persistence and unfailing patience form a national virtue among the Chinese—the capacity to wait without complaint and to bear all with silent endurance. This virtue is seen more clearly in great national disasters which occasionally befall the country. The terrible famine of 1877-8 was the cause of the death of millions of people, and left scores of millions without house, food or clothing; they were driven forth as wanderers on the face of the earth without home, without hope. The Government does nothing whatever in these cases. The people who wish to live must find the means to live, and what impressed me all through my wanderings was the absolute science to which poverty is reduced. In such calamities the Chinese, of all men on the earth's surface, will battle along if there is any chance at all. If he is blessed, he once more becomes a farmer; but if not, he accepts the position as inevitable and irremediable. The Chinese race has the finest power in the world to withstand with fortitude the ills of life and the miseries which follow inability to procure the wherewithal to live. Their nerves are somehow different from our Western nerves.

In China nothing is wasted, not only in food, but in everything affecting the common life.

That a beast dies of disease is of no concern. It is eaten all the same from head to hoof, from skin to entrail, and the remarkable fact is that they do not seem to suffer from it, either. At Kiang-ti (mentioned in a previous chapter) I saw a horse being pushed down the hillside to the river. It was not yet dead, but was dying, so far as I could see, of inflammation of the bowels. Its body was cut up, and there were several people waiting to buy it at forty cash the catty.

From Hungay onwards I met a class of people I had not seen before. They were the Minchia (Pe-tso).

Major H.R. Davies, whose treatise on the tribes of Yün-nan at the end of his excellent work on travel in the province, is probably the best yet written, writes that he met Minchia people only on the plains of Tali-fu and Chao-chow, and never east of the latter place. This was in travel some ten or twelve years ago, and the fact that there are now many Minchia families living in Hungay is a testimony to their enterprise as a tribe in going farther afield in search of the means to live. There is little doubt that the Minchia originally came from country lying between the border of the province and round Li-chiang-fu and the Tali-fu plain and lake. Most of them wear Chinese dress; many of the women bind their feet (and the practice is growing in popularity), although those who have not small feet are still in the majority. In a small city lying some few li from the city of Tali all the inhabitants are Minchia, and I found no difficulty in spotting a Chinese man or woman—there is a distinct facial difference. Minchia have bigger noses, generally the eyes are set farther apart, and the skin is darker. Pink trousers are in fashion among the ladies—trace of base feminine weakness!—but are not by any means the distinguishing features of race.