A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

And the next day we went back to Peking, back through the pass.

The Ching Er Hotel provided tiffin on the train, curried chicken and mutton chops, some form of cakey pudding, cheese, and bread and butter, all excellent in its way—and we were all so amiable, even the poet had come down from the clouds and joined us, that we only laughed when we found we were expected to pile all these good things on one plate, and do it quickly before the train left!

As we were eating it, the guard came round and collected one dollar and ninety cents extra apiece, because we had ridden on the observation-car. We paid, and said hard things about the millionaire, but a little more knowledge of ways Chinese has convinced me we accused him unjustly. I feel sure that enterprising and observant guard took stock of us, saw that we did not know the American, and collected, for the benefit of a highly intelligent, and truly deserving Chinese railway official.

We seldom think of the Chinaman with the glamour of romance, but this Nankou Pass is well-calculated to upset all our former ideas, and give us a setting for China such as might apply to barbaric Italy or Provence of the Middle Ages, only—and it is well to remember, what we barbarians of the West are apt to forget—that in China, things have always moved in mightier orbits, that where there were ten men in the Western world, you may count a hundred in China, for a hundred a thousand, for a thousand ten thousand.

What must the Nankou Pass have been like on some bitter night in winter, when the stars were like points of steel, and the stream was frozen in a grip of iron, and the still air was keen, and hard, and cold, with the bitter, biting sting of the northern winter? When the fires blazed in the beacons on the hillsides, flinging their ruddy light, their message of fear and warning. The keepers of the Wall were failing, the Mongol hordes were pouring over the barrier, and it behoved every man who saw that ruddy glare to arm and come to the keeping of the Pass, to die in its guarding. They died and they held it, and they died and the invaders flung their bodies to the wolves and the crows, and swept on and took the country beyond for their own.

But the country to the south is China, China of the ages and she absorbs nations, Mongol or Manchu, or men from her western borders, and makes them one with herself.

This is the message I read in the Nankou Pass. I have changed my mind again and again, and generally I do not believe what I read that day. But it was firmly impressed on me then. China is not dead. The spirit that conceived and built that mighty Wall is a living thing still. All down the Pass, alongside the age-old mule track, runs a new road, a road of the West, a railway, planned, and laid, and built entirely by Chinese without any Western help except such as the sons of China got for themselves in the schools of America and England. And it is not only well and truly laid, as well as, and better than, many a Western railway, but behold the spirit of China has entered in, the spirit, not of her poor, struggling for a crust of bread, a mess of meal, but the spirit of the men who conceived and planned the Wall, the beautiful Lama Temple, or the spacious courtyards and glorious palaces of the Forbidden City. They have built embankments and curves, tunnels and archways that are things of beauty, and glorious to look upon, as surely never was railway before. They have built, and it is saying a great deal, a railway that is worthy of the Nankou Pass. They are the lineal descendants of the men, who, two thousand years ago, built the Great Wall. Hail and all hail!

And then a railway man talked to me. The railway might be beautiful, but it was costly beyond all excuse. The best of the ideas had come from Europe, certainly these highly civilised, these over-civilised people might be trusted to see and make a beautiful thing, the question was, could they be trusted to manage a railway as a railway should be managed? He thought not. They had somehow lost force. Well, we shall see. One thing seems certain, between us Westerners and the Chinese, is a great gulf fixed. We look across and sometimes we wonder, and sometimes we pity, and sometimes we admire, but we cannot understand.