The town is old. It was going as a city in 2205 b.c., and it is quite unlike any other I have come across in China. It is a small square city about nine li round, and on each of the four sides are suburbs, also walled. Between them and the city are the gully-like roads leading to the gates. The eastern suburb is nearly twice as large as the main city, and is surrounded by a high brick wall, but the other suburbs have only walls like huge banks of clay, on the top the grass grows, and on my way in I was not surprised to see on top of this clay-bank a flock of sheep browsing. It seemed a very appropriate place for sheep, for at first sight there is nothing to show that this was the top of a town wall.
When the Manehus drove out the Mings, the vanquished Imperial family took refuge in this western town and rebuilt the walls, which had been allowed to fall into disrepair, and they set about the job in a fashion worthy of Babylon itself. The bricks were made seven miles away in the hills, and passed from hand to hand down a long line of men till they reached their destination and were laid one on top of another to face the great clay-bank forty-six feet high that guards the city. According to Chinese ideas, the city needs guarding not from human enemies only. The mountains to the west and north overshadow it, and all manner of evil influences come from the north, and the people fear greatly their effect upon the town. It was possible it might never get a good magistrate, or that, having got one, he might die, and therefore they took every precaution they could to ward off such a calamity. Gods they put in their watch tower over the gate, and they sit there still, carved wooden figures, a great fat god—if a city is to be prosperous must not its god be prosperous too?—surrounded by lesser satellites. Some are fallen now, and the birds of the air roost upon them, and the dust and the cobwebs have gathered upon them, but not yet will they be cleared away. In a chamber below are rusty old-world cannon flung aside in a heap as so much useless lumber, and, below, all the busy traffic of the city passes in and out beneath the arches of the gateway. In that gateway are two upright stones between whieh all wheeled traffic must pass, the distance between these stones marking the length of the axle allowed by the narrow city streets. Any vehicle having a greater length of axle cannot pass in. No mere words can describe the awful condition of the roads of Shansi, and to lessen as far as possible the chance of an upset the country man makes his axle very wide, and, knowing this, the town man notifies at his gates the width of the vehicle that can pass in his streets. No other can enter.
Besides the gods over the gateway, Fen Chou Fu, owing to its peculiar position under the hills, requires other guarding, and there are two tall bronze phoenixes on the wall close to the northern watch tower. I was quite pleased to make the acquaintance of a phoenix, as, though I have read about them, I had never met them before. In Fen Chou Fu it appears that a phoenix is between thirty and forty feet high, built like a comic representation of a chicken, with a long curly neck and a cock's comb upon his head. It would indeed be a churlish, evil spirit who was not moved to laughter at the sight. But though the form is crude, on the bronze bases and on the birds themselves are worked beautifully the details of a long story. Dragons and foxes and rabbits, and many strange symbols that I do not understand come into it, but how they help to guard the city, except by pleasing the gods or amusing the evil spirits, I must confess I cannot imagine. Certainly the city fathers omit the most necessary care: once the walls are finished, the mason is apparently never called in, and they are drifting to decay. Everywhere the bricks are falling out, and when I was there in the springtime the birds of the air found there a secure resting-place. There were crows and hawks and magpies and whistling kites popping in and out of the holes so made, in their beaks straws and twigs for the making of their nests. They would be secure probably in any case, for the Chinese love birds, but here they are doubly secure, for only with difficulty and by the aid of a long rope could any man possibly reach them.
The ramps up to those walls were extremely steep—it was a heart-breaking process to get on top—but Buchanan and I, accompanied by the master of transport carrying the camera, and often by Mr Leete, one of the missionaries, took exercise there; for in a walled city in the narrow streets there is seldom enough air for my taste. The climate here is roughly summer and winter, for though so short a while ago it had been freezing at night, already it was very hot in the middle of the day, and the dust rose up from the narrow streets in clouds. A particularly bad cloud of dust generally indicated pigs, which travel a good deal in Northern China, even as sheep and cattle do in Australia. In Shantung a man sets out with a herd of pigs and travels them slowly west, very slowly, and they feed along the wayside, though what they feed on heaven only knows, for it looks to me as though there is nothing, still possibly they pick up something, and I suppose the idea is that they arrive at the various places in time for the harvest, or when grain and products are cheapest. There are inns solely given over to pigs and their drivers in Shansi, and the stench outside some of those in Fen Chou Fu was just a little taller than the average smell, and the average smell in a Chinese city is something to be always remembered. There were other things to be seen from the top of the wall too—long lines of camels bearing merchandise to and from the town, donkeys, mules, carts, all churning up the dust of the unkempt roadway, small-footed women seated in their doorways looking out upon the life of the streets, riding donkeys or peeping out of the tilts of the carts. I could see into the courtyards of the well-to-do, with their little ponds and bridges and gardens. All the life of the city lay beneath us. Possibly that is why one meets so very, very seldom any Chinese on the wall—it may be, it probably is, I should think, bad taste to look into your neighbour's courtyard.
And the wall justified its existence, mediaeval and out of date as it seemed to me. There along the top at intervals were little heaps of good-sized stones, placed there by the magistrate in the revolution for the defence of the town. At first I smiled and thought how primeval, but looking down into the road nearly fifty feet below, I realised that a big stone flung by a good hefty fist from the top of that wall was a weapon by no means to be despised.
But walls, if often a protection, are sometimes a danger in more ways than in shutting out the fresh air. The summer rains in North China are heavy, and Fen Chou Fu holds water like a bucket. The only outlets are the narrow gateways, and the waters rise and rise. A short time before I came there all the eastern quarter of the town was flooded so deep that a woman was drowned. At last the waters escaped through the eastern gate, only to be banked up by the great ash-heaps, the product of centuries, the waste rubbish of the town, that are just outside the wall of the eastern suburb. It took a long, long while for those flood waters to percolate through the gateway of the suburb and find a resting-place at last in a swamp the other side of that long-suffering town. I must confess that this is one of the drawbacks to a walled town that has never before occurred to me, though to stand there and look at those great gates, those solid walls, made me feel as if I had somehow wandered into the fourth dimension, so out of my world were they.
There was a great fair in a Taoist temple and one day Mr Leete and I, with his teacher and my servant, attended. A wonderful thing is a Chinese fair in a temple. I do not yet understand the exact object of these fairs, though I have attended a good many of them. Whether they help the funds of the temple as a bazaar is supposed to help a church in this country, I cannot say. A temple in China usually consists of a set of buildings often in different courtyards behind one enclosing wall, and these buildings are not only temples to the gods, but living-rooms which are often let to suitable tenants, and, generally speaking, if the stranger knows his way about—I never did—he can get in a temple accommodation for himself and his servants, far superior accommodation to that offered in the inns. It costs a little more, but everything is so cheap that makes no difference to the foreigner. The Taoist temple the day I went there was simply humming with life; there were stalls everywhere, and crowds of people buying, selling or merely gossiping and looking on. I took a picture of some ladies of easy virtue with gay dresses and gaily painted faces, tottering about, poor things, on their maimed feet, and at the same spot, close against the altar of the god, I took a picture of the priest. With much hesitation he consented to stand. He had in his hand some fortune-telling sticks, but did not dare hold them while his portrait was being taken. However, Mr Leete's teacher was a bold, brave, enlightened man—in a foreign helmet—and he held the sticks, and the two came out in the picture together. I trust no subsequent harm came to the daring man.
