courageous Christians, those strong souls, who, rather than renounce their religion, had abandoned their families and their country, and gone to end their days in unknown lands. Let us fervently pray that Providence may send missionaries, full of devotion, to bear the consolations of the faith amongst these our exiled brethren.
The road to Ili brought us to the Great Wall, which we passed over without dismounting. This work of the Chinese nation, of which so much is said and so little known, merits brief mention here. It is known that the idea of raising walls as a fortification against the incursions of enemies, was not peculiar, in old times, to China: antiquity presents us with several examples of these labours elsewhere. Besides the works of this kind executed in Syria, Egypt, Media, and on the continent of Europe, there was, by order of the Emperor Septimus Severus, a great wall constructed in the northern part of Britain. No other nation, however, ever effected anything of the sort on so grand a scale as the Great Wall, commenced by Tsin-Chi-Hoang-Ti, a.d. 214. The Chinese call it Wan-li-Tchang-Tching (the Great Wall of ten thousand lis.) A prodigious number of labourers was employed upon it, and the works of this gigantic enterprise continued for ten years. The Great Wall extends from the westernmost point of Kan-Sou to the Eastern Sea. The importance of this enormous construction has been variously estimated by those who have written upon China, some of whom preposterously exaggerate its importance, while others laboriously seek to ridicule it; the probability being, that this diversity of opinion arises from each writer having judged the whole work by the particular specimen to which he had access. Mr. Barrow, who, in 1793, accompanied Lord Macartney to China, as historiographer to the British embassy, made this calculation: he supposed that there were in England and Scotland 1,800,000 houses, and estimating the masonry work of each to be 2,000 cubic feet, he propounded that the aggregate did not contain as much material as the Great Wall of China, which, in his opinion, was enough for the construction of a wall to go twice round the world. It is evident that Mr. Barrow adopted, as the basis of his calculation, the Great Wall such as he saw it north of Peking, where the construction is really grand and imposing; but it is not to be supposed that this barrier, raised against the irruptions of the barbarians, is, throughout its extent, equally high, wide, and solid. We have crossed it at fifteen different points, and on several occasions have travelled for whole days parallel with it, and never once losing sight of it; and often, instead of the great double turreted rampart that exists towards Peking, we have found a mere low wall of brickwork, or even earth work. In some places, indeed, we have
found this famous barrier reduced to its simplest expression, and composed merely of flint-stones roughly piled up. As to the foundation wall, described by Mr. Barrow, as consisting of large masses of free-stone cemented with mortar, we can only say that we have never discovered the slightest trace of any such work. It is indeed obvious that Tsin-Chi-Hoang-Ti, in the execution of this great undertaking, would fortify with especial care the vicinity of the capital, as being the point to which the Tartar hordes would first direct their aggressive steps. It is natural, farther, to conceive, that the Mandarins charged with the execution of the Emperor’s plan, would, with especial conscientiousness, perfect the works which were more immediately under the Emperor’s eye, and content themselves with erecting a more or less nominal wall at remote points of the empire, particularly those where the Tartars were little to be feared, as, for example, the position of the Ortous and the Alechan mountains.
The barrier of San-Yen-Tsin, which stands a few paces beyond the wall, is noted for its great strictness towards the Tartars who seek to enter within the intramural empire. The village possesses only one inn, which is kept by the chief of the frontier guards. Upon entering the court-yard we found several groups of a camels assembled there belonging to a great Tartar caravan that had arrived on the preceding evening. There was, however, plenty of room for us, the establishment being on a large scale. We had scarcely taken possession of our chamber than the passport question was started. The chief of the guards himself made an official demand for them. “We have none,” replied we. At this answer his features beamed with satisfaction, and he declared that we could not proceed unless we paid a considerable sum. “How! a passport or money? Know that we have travelled China from one end to the other; that we have been to Peking, and that we have journeyed through Tartary, without anything in the shape of a passport, and without having paid a single sapek in lieu of a passport. You, who are a chief of guards, must know that Lamas are privileged to travel wherever they please without passports.” “What words are these? Here is a caravan at this very moment in the house, and the two Lamas who are with it have both given me their passports like the rest of the party.” “If what you say be true, the only conclusion is that there are some Lamas who take passports with them and others who do not. We are in the number of those who do not.” Finding at last that the dispute was becoming tedious, we employed a decisive course. “Well, come,” said we, “we will give you the money you ask, but you shall give us in return a paper signed by yourself, in which you
shall acknowledge that, before you would permit us to pass, you exacted from us a sum of money instead of passports. We shall then address ourselves to the first Mandarin we meet, and ask him whether what you have done is consistent with the laws of the empire.” The man at once gave up the point. “Oh,” said he, “since you have been to Peking, no doubt the Emperor has given you special privileges,” and then he added, in a whisper, and smilingly, “Don’t tell the Tartars here that I have let you pass gratis.”
It is really pitiable to observe these poor Mongols travelling in China; everybody thinks himself entitled to fleece them, and everybody succeeds in doing so to a marvellous extent. In all directions they are encountered by impromptu custom-house officers, by persons who exact money from them on all sorts of pretences, for repairing roads, building bridges, constructing pagodas, etc. etc. First, the despoilers proffer to render them great services, call them brothers and friends, and give them wholesale warnings against ill-designing persons who want to rob them. Should this method not effect an unloosening of the purse-strings, the rascals have recourse to intimidation, frighten them horribly with visions of Mandarins, laws, tribunals, prisons, punishments, threaten to take them up, and treat them, in short, just like mere children. The Mongols themselves materially aid the imposition by their total ignorance of the manners and customs of China. At an inn, instead of using the room offered to them, and putting their animals in the stables, they pitch their tent in the middle of the court-yard, plant stakes about it, and fasten their camels to these. Very frequently they are not permitted to indulge this fancy, and in this case they certainly enter the room allotted to them, and which they regard in the light of a prison; but they proceed there in a manner truly ridiculous. They set up their trivet with their kettle upon it in the middle of the room, and make a fire beneath with argols, of which they take care to have a store with them. It is to no purpose they are told that there is in the inn a large kitchen where they can cook their meals far more comfortably to themselves; nothing will dissuade them from their own kettle and their own aboriginal fire in the middle of the room. When night comes they unroll their hide-carpets round the fire, and there lie down. They would not listen for a moment to the proposition of sleeping upon the beds or upon the kang they find in the room ready for their use. The Tartars of the caravan we found in the inn at San-Yen-Tsin were allowed to carry on their domestic matters in the open air. The simplicity of these poor children of the desert was so great that they seriously asked us whether the
innkeeper would make them pay anything for the accommodation he afforded them.
We continued on our way through the province of Kan-Sou, proceeding to the south-west. The country, intersected with streams and hills, is generally fine, and the people apparently well off. The great variety of its productions is owing partly to a temperate climate and a soil naturally fertile, but, above all, to the activity and skill of the agriculturists. The chief product of the district is wheat, of which the people make excellent loaves, like those of Europe. They sow scarcely any rice, procuring almost all the little they consume from the adjacent provinces. Their goats and sheep are of fine breed, and constitute, with bread, the principal food of the population. Numerous and inexhaustible mines of coal place fuel within everyone’s reach. It appeared to us that in Kan-Sou anyone might live very comfortably at extremely small cost.
At two days distance from the barrier of San-Yen-Tsin we were assailed by a hurricane which exposed us to very serious danger. It was about ten o’clock in the morning. We had just crossed a hill, and were entering upon a plain of vast extent, when, all of a sudden, a profound calm pervaded the atmosphere. There was not the slightest motion in the air, and yet the cold was intense. Insensibly, the sky assumed a dead-white colour; but there was not a cloud to be seen. Soon, the wind began to blow from the west; in a very short time it became so violent that our animals could scarcely proceed. All nature seemed to be in a state of dissolution. The sky, still cloudless, was covered with a red tint. The fury of the wind increased; it raised in the air enormous columns of dust, sand, and decayed vegetable matter, which it then dashed right and left, here, there, and everywhere. At length the wind blew so tremendously, and the atmosphere became so utterly disorganised, that, at midday, we could not distinguish the very animals upon which we were riding. We dismounted, for it was impossible to advance a single step, and after enveloping our faces in handkerchiefs in order that we might not be blinded with the dust, we sat down beside our animals. We had no notion where we were; our only idea was that the frame of the world was unloosening, and that the end of all things was close at hand. This lasted for more than an hour. When the wind had somewhat mitigated, and we could see around us, we found that we were all separated from one another, and at considerable distances, for amid that frightful tempest, bawl as loud as we might, we could not hear each other’s voices. So soon as we could at all walk we proceeded towards a farm at no great distance, but which we had not before perceived. The hurricane having
thrown down the great gate of the court we found no difficulty in entering, and the house itself was opened to us with almost equal facility; for Providence had guided us in our distress to a family truly remarkable for its hospitality.