Across China on Foot

by Edwin John Dingle

Climbing was characteristic of the day. Lu-fêng-hsien is about 5,500 feet; Sei-tze (where we were to sleep) 6,100 feet. Not much of a difference in height; but during the whole distance one is either dropping much lower than Lu-feng or much higher than Sei-tze. For thirty li up to Ta-tsü-sï (6,900 feet) there is little to revel in, but after that, right on to the terrific drop to our destination for the night, we were going through mountain forests than which there are none better in the whole of the province, unless it be on the extreme edge of the Tibetan border, where accompanying scenery is altogether different.

From a height of 7,850 feet we dropped abruptly, through clouds of thick red dust which blinded my eyes and filled my throat, down to the city of Sei-tze. I went down behind some ponies. Upwards came a fellow struggling with two loads of crockery, and in the narrow pathway he stood in an elevated position to let the animals pass. Irony of fate! One of the horses—it seemed most intentional—gave his load a tilt: man and crockery all went together in one heap to a crevice thirty yards down the incline, and as I proceeded I heard the choice rhetoric of the victim and the muleteer arguing as to who should pay.

Just before that, I dipped into the very bosom of the earth, with rugged hills rising to bewildering heights all around, base to summit clad luxuriously in thick greenery of mountain firs, a few cedars, and the Chinese ash. Black patches of rock to the right were the death-bed of many a swaying giant, and in contrast, running away sunwards, a silver shimmer on the unmoving ocean of delicious green was caused by the slantwise sun reflections, while in the ravines on the other side a dark blue haze gave no invitation. Smoothly-curving fringes stood out softly against the eternal blue of the heavens. Farther on, eloquent of their own strength and imperturbability, were deep rocks, black and defiant; but even here firs grew on the projecting ledges which now and again hung menacingly above the red path, shading away the sunlight and giving to the dark crevices an atmosphere of damp and cold, where men's voices echoed and re-echoed like weird greetings from the grave. Onwards again, and from the cool ravines, adorned with overhang branches, forming cosy retreats from the now blazing sun, one emerged to a road leading up once more to undiscovered vastnesses. Yonder narrowed a gorge, fine and delicately covered, pleasing to one's aesthetic sense. The center was a dome, all full of life and waving leafage, ethereal and sweet; and running down, like children to their mother, were numerous little hills densely clothed in a green lighter and more dainty than that of the parent hill, throwing graceful curtsies to the murmuring river at the foot. As I write here, bathed in the beauty of spring sunlight, it is difficult to believe that a few hours since the thermometer was at zero. Little spots of habitation, with foodstuffs growing alongside, looking most lonely in their patches of green in the forest, added a human and sentimental picturesqueness to a scene so strongly impressive.

A thatched, barn-like place gave us rest, the woman producing for me a huge chunk of palatable rice sponge-cake sprinkled with brown sugar. Little naked children, offspring of parents themselves covered with merest hanging rags, groped round me and treated me with courteous curiosity; goats smelt round the coolie-loads of men who rested on low forms and smoked their rank tobacco; smoke from the green wood fires issued from the mud grates, where receptacles were filled with boiling water ready for the traveler, constantly re-filled by a woman whose child, hung over her back, moaned piteously for the milk its mother was too busy to give to it. Near by a young girl gave suck to a deformed infant, lucky to have survived its birth; her neck was as big as her breasts—merely a case of goitre. Coolies passed, panting and puffing, all casting a curious glance at him to whose beneficence all were willing to pander.

At tiffin I counted thirty-three wretched people, who turned out to see the barbarian. They desired, and desired importunately, to touch me and the clothes which covered me. And I submitted.

This half-way place was interesting owing to the fact that the lady in charge of the buffet could speak two words of French—she had, I believe, acted as washerwoman to a man who at one time had been in the Customs at Mengtsz. Great excitement ensued among the perspiring laborers of the road and the dumb-struck yokels of the district. The lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire village, she endured such terrible poverty that one would have thought her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out. But no! The lusty dame was still sprightly. She had been three times divorced. The person at present connected with her in the bonds of wedded life—also goitrous and morally repulsive—stood by and gazed down upon her like a proud bridegroom. He resented the levity of Shanks and his companion, but, owing to the detail of a sightless eye, he could not see all that transpired. However, we were all happy enough. Charges were not excessive. My men had a good feed of rice and cabbage, with the usual cabbage stump, two raw rice biscuits (which they threw into the ashes to cook, and when cooked picked the dirt off with their long finger-nails), and as much tea as they could drink—all for less than a penny.

There is something in traveling in Yün-nan, where the people away from the cities exhibit such painful apathy as to whether dissolution of this life comes to them soon or late, which breeds drowsiness. After a tramp over mountains for five or six hours on end, one naturally needed rest. To-day, as I sat after lunch and wrote up my journal, I nearly fell asleep. As I watched the reflections of all these ill-clad figures on the stony roadway, and dozed meanwhile, one rude fellow asked my man whether I was drunk!

I was not left long to my reverie.

Entering into a conversation intended for the whole village to hear, my bulky coolie sublet his contract for two tsien for the eighty li—we had already done fifty. The man hired was a weak, thin, half-baked fellow, whose body and soul seemed hardly to hang together. He was the first to arrive. As soon as he got in; this same man took a needle from the inside of his great straw hat and commenced ridding his pants of somewhat outrageous perforations. Such is the Chinese coolie, although in Yün-nan he would be an exception. Late at night he offered to put a shoe on my pony. I consented. He did the job, providing a new shoe and tools and nails, for 110 cash—just about twopence.

I could not help, thinking of the children I had seen to-day, "Sad for the dirt-begrimed babies that they were born." These children were all a family of eternal Topsies—they merely grew, and few knew how. They are rather dragged up than brought up, to live or die, as time might appoint. Babies in Yün-nan, for the great majority, are not coaxed, not tossed up and down and petted, not soothed, not humored. There are none to kiss away their tears, they never have toys, and dream no young dreams, but are brought straight into the iron realities of life. They are reared in smoke and physical and moral filth, and become men and women when they should be children: they haggle and envy, and swear and murmur. When in Yün-nan—or even in the whole of China—will there be the innocence and beauty of childhood as we of the West are blessed with?