While at Yarkand we visited the little colony of boys and girls who were being trained by the Swedish missionaries in their large compound. These children were taught to read and write in Turki, to weave and to sew. The girls cooked all the food, made the bread and did the housework, wearing aprons over their gowns of pretty Russian print. The boys were dressed in clothes of their own weaving, and Mrs. Hoegberg hoped that the girls might later on marry the boys, who were being trained to be self-supporting. In any case she trusted that they might lead happier lives than usually befall the maidens of Chinese Turkestan, who are practically sold by their parents and are often handed over to old men. It is true that the husband engages to pay a certain sum for the maintenance of his wife should he divorce her, and this he does in the presence of witnesses. But the onus of finding these witnesses and bringing them up before the Imam lies on the woman, and the man can often persuade them to swear that he promised to pay his wife much less than he really did. The parents of a wealthy woman can help her to obtain her rights, but a poor woman may have a hard fight for bare existence before she can find a new husband to support her.
Village life is better for the women than life in the town, for they have fewer matrimonial adventures, and there are none of the temporary marriages that are common in all the centres of population. I noticed that they veiled far less in Yarkand than in Kashgar, the result of stronger Chinese influence; but here and throughout the province they were not permitted to enter the little village mosques that are such a characteristic feature of the country. These places of worship are usually built by some pious benefactor, who gives a piece of land for an endowment fund. This is called a wakf or “trust,” and the trustees appoint a mulla, who is often a villager with a good voice who merely calls the Faithful to prayer.
Dr. and Mrs. Hoegberg had done missionary work in Persia, and said that they found the Turki very slow-witted and disinclined to discuss religion, a strong contrast in this respect to the keen-brained, argumentative Persians, who enjoy nothing more than metaphysics, and, being Shias, are less orthodox and priest-ridden than the primitive Sunnis of Chinese Turkestan.
Whether Christianity is gaining a hold in Chinese Turkestan or not, the high standard which it sets up is not without its influence, as the following anecdote told me by Dr. Hoegberg shows. A Yarkandi merchant went with some traders to buy figs, and on the way his friends jeered at him on account of his leanings towards Christianity. When they reached the market they were offered the fruit packed in baskets said to contain a hundred, but the buyers never dreamt of trusting the word of the vendor, and counted the contents of the baskets, finding several figs short in each. The merchant then enquired of his colleagues whether, when they bought calico or print that had come from Europe, they found any deficiency in the number of yards that were stamped upon each piece. “Never,” they answered in chorus, and he then pointed out that this honesty was due to Christian principles of fair-dealing.
CHAPTER X
THROUGH THE DESERT TO KHOTAN
... The view was boundless, there were no traces either of man or horse, and in the night the demons and goblins raised fire-lights as many as the stars; in the day time the driving wind blew the sand before it....—Travels of Hiuen Tsiang.
Yarkand is the richest oasis in Chinese Turkestan, but we did not appreciate this fact until we had left the city and saw the open country covered with wide stretches of rice, maize, wheat and millet; and I confess that I had to revise my opinion as to the lethargy of the Yarkandis, or at all events of the peasantry, when I realized the ceaseless labour required to produce such abundance.
The Yarkand River, the source of which had recently been fixed by the Filippi expedition, was about six miles from the town, and we crossed it in broad ferry-boats like punts, which were some forty feet long. We clambered over a barrier at one end of the boat, and our nine horses, stepping in nimbly behind us, one after the other, without any fuss, were packed in tightly, close up to the plank that separated us from them. Sattur’s mapa was fixed into a second boat with some difficulty as it was too broad, but finally all our belongings were settled, and two muscular men—one handling a long pole and the other a paddle—took us across the river, which is dangerous on account of its shifting quicksands. Our horses seemed to enjoy the novel experience, some of them craning over to drink as we slowly approached the opposite bank. There I anticipated some trouble, as the animals had to turn round and step out at the end by which they entered. However, they grasped the situation at once, and very soon we were mounted, fording a couple of shallow branches of the main stream and stumbling over a dreary waste of rounded boulders which formed an old river bed. Beyond this lay trees and villages and a band of British subjects ready to welcome us with the inevitable tea, fruit and sweetmeats; an attention that I did not appreciate, as several of our hosts were afflicted with goitre in its most distressing forms.
At Posgam, where we halted for the night, quarters were assigned to us in a garden that boasted a magnificent walnut-tree, and we had our beds placed on platforms outside the attractive garden-house, where my room, carpeted with crudely coloured products of the loom, had fretted woodwork windows.