China Revolutionized - John Stuart Thomson

Wuhu, on the Yangtze, half-way up to Hankau, is recovering from the blow dealt it by the Taipings in the 60’s. It will take a prominent place in the coming industrial China because of riches in land, mine, silk, tea and bamboo near it. It is one of the new strongholds in education and medicine under American and European auspices. It has a foreign colony in the hills. The Hwangchi River brings grain and produce down to its marts, and the great Yangtze sweeps by its harbor bund. Game, such as pheasant, quail and duck, abounds. There are very fine pagodas, and in particular a Buddhist rock temple with the figures of men, animals and birds cut solidly out of, or in relief on the solid rock, the shrubbery and grass serving for hair and beard in a startling way. Excursions can be made to the Chin Shan and San Shan hills, temples, lily lakes and flowery restaurants. The town is full of the festival spirit, and the beauty of lanterns, arches, flags and matting shelter is often delightfully exhibited. Wuhu early went over to the rebel movement of October, 1911. Wuhu is a great sufferer from floods. They were so deep in August, 1911, that Lion Hill became an island. The Yangtze, instead of mounting willingly up to Nanking, tries at Wuhu to break across country for Shanghai. The result is deplorable flood and resultant famine, involving millions of people.

Tai Yuen is the walled capital of the great coal, iron and loess province of Shansi, which is as large as England. It is the richest in minerals of all the provinces. The famous Ping Ting coal and iron mines are near. The city lies in a great plain 3,000 feet above the sea on the Fen River, and has railway connection with Peking and all the east and south. It is to have connection with the capital of Kansu province, and all the great northwest for thousands of miles. Mills will arise, for stone, clay, iron and coal are available in this province as nowhere else. Though the air of the city is exhilarating and there is little consumption, skin diseases and diseases due to poor water are prevalent. With irrigation in operation, fertilization of this loess province would be unnecessary, so that Tai Yuen will yet be a great wheat and millet center. Her grain, stock and wool merchants will be taking contracts to feed and clothe America and Britain when our fields are impoverished and overrun with people. It will be a financial center, for Shansi’s wealth in China’s new industrial era can not be computed. Even now the Shansi bankers are the best known, their guild houses being in every city of the land. The railway, electric light, post, telegraph and telephone have arrived, and so has the printing press, raying out reform. The railway has brought progress to quaint Tai Yuen. There are match factories, police department, a public band, modern schools of all sorts, an agricultural and military school, modern roads and a street-cleaning department, a modern jail which aims to teach instead of confirming in despair. Confucius fled here to the Wei State, when his own state persecuted him, and this province is the home of the original clan of Chinese, the Chou, who instituted ancestor worship and the rule of princes at the beginning of history. The great Shansi University was established here in 1901 by the British with indemnity funds restored to the Chinese at the request of British missions, which was a singularly Samaritan act; for on July 9, 1900, at the yamen in Tai Yuen, all the missionaries, their wives and children, were put to a brutal death by the infamous “Boxer,” the Luciferian brute, Governor Yu Hsien, whose name is hated by the progressive Chinese as much as we hate it, and the Manchu officials who took their “tip” from the dowager empress, Tse Hsi. Doctor Timothy Richard, promoter of the successful Red Cross in China, was the first president of this institution, and W. E. Soothill was its second president. Both these gentlemen lead in Britain’s educational influence in China. English, of course, is taught. Like all the northern cities, Tai Yuen is cursed in fall with the penetrating loess and sand-storms. The blue-roofed and blue-walled Temple of Heaven is beautiful, with its magnificent eaves, carved terminals, colored frieze, columns, statues, scrolls, paintings and theater. There are also Confucian, Manchu-Fox, Buddhist and Taoist temples and pagodas, and a Mohammedan mosque, for this is the first city, going west, where we meet this last sect, whose sphere extends right on to the far northwest. There is a notable four-storied fort over the Romanesque south gate.

Treeless mountains of South China, Kwangtung province. Modern road broken down from the disintegrated granite; stone houses of farmers; rice cultivation with water-buffalo.

Sport in South China, Kwangtung province. Dragon-boat racing in June. Crews sometimes number a hundred paddlers to a boat. There is frequently great loss of life. This photograph disproves two statements: that the Chinese are phlegmatic and dislike sport.