A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

Since I heard that man's story, I always read that order has been restored in any Chinese city with a shudder, and wonder how many innocents have suffered. For I have heard stories like that, not of one city, or told by one man, but of various cities, and told by different men. The Chinese, it seems to me, copy very faithfully the European newspapers, the great papers of the Western world. Horrors like that are never read in a Western paper, therefore you never see such things reported in the Chinese papers. After all they are only the proletariat, the slaves of Babylon or Nineveh. Who counted a score or so of them slain? Order has been restored, comes the message for the benefit of the modern world, and in the little city the bloody heads adorn the walls and the bodies lie outside to be torn to pieces by the wonks and the vultures.

And when I heard tales like this, I wondered whether it was safe for a woman to be travelling alone. It is safe, of course, for the Chinaman, strange as it may sound after telling such tales, is at bottom more law-abiding than the average European. True, he is more likely to insult or rob a woman than a man, because he has for so long regarded a woman as of so much less consequence than a man, that when he considers the matter he cannot really believe that any nation could hold a different opinion. Still, in all probability, she will be safe, just as in all probability she might march by herself from Land's End to John o' Groats without being molested. She may be robbed and murdered, and so she may be robbed and murdered in China. The Chinese are robbed and murdered often enough themselves poor things. Also they do not suffer in silence. They revenge themselves when they can.

A man travelling for the British and American Tobacco Company, he was a young man, not yet eight-and-twenty, told me how, once, outside a small walled town, he came upon a howling mob, and parting them after the lordly fashion of the Englishman, who knows he can use his hands, he saw they were crowding round a pit half filled with quicklime. In it, buried to his middle, was a ghastly creature with his eyes scooped out, and the hollows filled up with quicklime.

“If I had had a pistol handy,” said the teller of the tale, “I would have shot him. I couldn't have helped myself. It seemed the only thing to put him out of his misery, but, after all, I think he was past all feeling, and I wonder what the people would have done to me!”

They told him, when he investigated, that this man was a robber, that he had robbed and murdered without mercy, and so, when he fell into their hands, they had taken vengeance. Was that Babylon, or Nineveh, I wondered? Since such things happen in China one feels that the age of Babylon and Nineveh has not yet gone by. Talk with but a few men who have wandered into the interior, and you realise the strong necessity for these walled towns.

When the rumour of the slaughter of the Manchus, and the killing in the confusion of eight Europeans at Hsi An Fu in Shensi in October 1911, reached Peking, nine young men banded themselves together into the Shensi Relief Force, and set out from the capital to relieve the missionaries cut off there. One of these young men it was my good fortune to meet, and the story of their doings, told at first hand, unrolled for me the leaves of history. They set out to help the men and women of their own colour, but as they passed west from Tai Yuan Fu, again and again, the people of the country appealed to them to stop and help them. The Elder Brother Society, the Ko Lao Hui were on the warpath, and, with whatever good intentions this society had originated, it was, on this way from Tai Yuan Fu to Hsi An Fu, nothing less than a band of robbers, pillaging and murdering, and even the walled cities were hardly a safeguard. Village after village, with no such defences, was wrecked, burned, and destroyed, and their inhabitants were either slain or refugees in the mountains. And the suffering that means, with the bitter winter of China ahead of them, is ghastly to think of. They died, of course, and those who were slain by the robbers probably suffered the least.

“What could we do? What could we possibly do?” asked my informant pitifully. At last they came to Sui Te Chou, a walled city, and Sui Te Chou was for the moment triumphant. It had driven off the robbers. The Elder Brother Society had held the little city closely invested. They had built stone towers, and, from the top of them, had fired into the city, and at the defenders on the walls, and, under cover of this fire from the towers, they had attempted to scale the battlements. But the people on the walls had pushed them down with long spears, and had poured boiling water upon them, and, finally, the robbers had given way, and some braves, issuing from the south gate had fallen upon them, killing many and capturing thirty of them. It was a short shrift for them, and a festoon of heads adorned the gateway under which the foreigners passed.

But, though victorious, the braves of Sui Te Chou knew right well that the lull was only momentary. They were reversing the Scriptural order of things, and beating their ploughshares into swords. The brigands would be back as soon as they had reinforcements, the battle would be to the strong and it would indeed be “Woe to the Vanquished!”

“We could not help them. We could not,” reiterated the teller of the tale sadly; “we just had to go on.”

It was old China, he said, let us hope the last of old China. In that town were English missionaries, a man and his wife, another man and two little children, members of the English Baptist Church, dressed in Chinese dress, the men with queues. These they rescued, and took along with them, and glad were they to have two more able-bodied men in the party, even though they were counterbalanced by the presence of the woman and two children, for everywhere along the track were evidences of the barbaric times in which they lived. Human head? in wicker cages were common objects of the wayside, and the wolves came down from the mountains and gnawed at the dead bodies, or attacked the sick and wounded. Old China was a ghastly place that autumn of 1911, during the “bloodless” revolution. Chung Pu they reached immediately after it had been attacked by six hundred men.