The sudden revulsion of feeling which followed I cannot easily forget. Mr. Clement Allen, our justly popular Consul, met me with a warm welcome. I needed no proof of identity or anything else, he only desired to know what he could do for me. My anxiety was not quite over, for I had to make the humiliating confession that I needed money, and immediately he took me to Messrs. Ferguson and Co., who transact banking business, and asked them to let me have as much as I wanted. An invitation to tiffin followed, and Lady O’Conor, and the wife of the Spanish minister at Peking, who were staying at the Consulate, made up a bundle of summer clothing for me, and my “deportation” enriched me with valued friendships.
Returning in a very different frame of mind to the Higo Maru, I went on in her in severe heat to the mouth of the Peiho River in sight of the Taku forts, and after rolling on its muddy surges for two days, proceeded to Newchwang in Manchuria, reaching the mouth of the Liau River in five days from Chemulpo. Rain was falling, and a more hideous and disastrous-looking country than the voyage of two hours up to the port revealed, I never saw. The Liau, which has a tremendous tide and strong current, and is thick with yellow mud, is at high water nearly on a level with the adjacent flats, of which one sees little, except some mud forts on the left bank of the river, which are said to be heavily armed with Krupp guns, and an expanse of mud and reeds.
Of the mud-built Chinese city of Ying-tzŭ (Military Camp), known as Newchwang, though the real Newchwang is a derelict port 30 miles up the Liau, nothing can be seen above the mud bank but the curved, tiled roofs of yamens and temples, though it is a city of 60,000 souls, the growth of its population having kept pace with its rapid advance in commercial importance since it was opened to foreign trade in 1860. Several British steamers with big Chinese characters on their sides were at anchor in the tideway, and the river sides were closely fringed with up-river boats and sea-going junks, of various picturesque builds and colors, from Southern China, steamers and junks alike waiting not only for cargoes of the small beans for which Manchuria is famous, but for the pressed bean cake which is exported in enormous quantities to fertilize the sugar plantations and hungry fields of South China.
There is a Bund, and along and behind it is the foreign settlement, occupied by about forty Europeans. The white buildings of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, the houses of the staff, the hongs of two or three foreign merchants, and the British Consular buildings, may be said to constitute the settlement. It has the reputation of being one of the kindliest and friendliest in the Far East, and the fact that the river closes annually about the 20th of November for about four months, and that the residents are thrown entirely on their own resources and on each other, only serves to increase that inter-dependence which binds this and similarly isolated communities so strongly together.
I was most kindly welcomed at the English Consulate then and on my return, and have most pleasant remembrances of Newchwang, its cordial kindness, and cheerful Bund, and breezy blue skies, but at first sight it is a dreary, solitary-looking place of mud, and muddy waters for ever swallowing large slices of the land, and threatening to engulf it altogether.
“Peas,” really beans,[26] are its chief raison d’être, and their ups and downs in price its mild sensations. “Pea-boats,” long and narrow, with matting roofs and one huge sail, bring down the beans from the interior, and mills working night and day express their oil, which is as good for cooking as for burning.
The viceroyalty of Manchuria, in which I spent the next two months, is interesting as in some ways distinct from China, besides having a prospective interest in connection with Russia. Lying outside of the Great Wall, it has a population of several distinct and mixed races, Manchus (Tartars), Gilyaks, Tungusi, Solons, Daurs, and Chinese. Along with these must be mentioned about 30,000 Korean families, the majority of whom have left Korea since 1868, in consequence of political disturbance and official exactions.[27]
The facts that the dynasty which has ruled China by right of conquest since 1644 is a Manchu dynasty, and that it imposed the shaven forehead and the pigtail on all Chinese men successfully, while it absolutely failed to prevent the women from crippling their feet, though up to this day no woman with “Golden Lilies” (crushed feet) is allowed to enter the Imperial palace, naturally turn attention to this viceroyalty, which, in point of its area of 380,000 square miles, is larger than Austria and Great Britain and Ireland put together, while its population is estimated at from 18,000,000 to 20,000,000 only. Thus it offers a vast field for emigration from the congested provinces of Northern China, and Chinese immigrants are steadily flocking in from Shan-tung, Chi-li, and Shen-si, so that Southern Manchuria at this time is little behind the inner provinces of China in density of population.
It is different in the northern province, where a cold climate and vast stretches of forest render agriculture more difficult. If it had not been for the war and its attendant complications, I had purposed to travel through it from Northern Korea. But it is unsettled at all times. The majority of its immigrants consists of convicts, fugitive criminals, soldiers who have left the colors, and gold and ginseng hunters. There is something almost comical about some of the doings of this unpromising community.
It comprises large organized bands of mounted brigands, well led and armed, who do not hesitate to come into collision with the Imperial troops, frequently coming off victors, and at times, as when I was in Mukden, wresting forts from their hands. During the Taiping rebellion, when the Chinese troops were withdrawn from Manchuria, these bands carried havoc and terror everywhere, and seizing upon towns and villages, ruled them by right of conquest![28] In recent years the Government has decided to let voluntary colonists settle in the northern provinces, and has even furnished them with material assistance.