A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

We came to a stony place, steep and stony enough in all conscience, but as nothing to some of the places we had passed over, where there had been a precipice on one side and a steep cliff on the other, and where to go over would certainly have spelled grave disaster, but here there was a bank at either side and the fawn-coloured mule never even looked round before negotiating it. Up, up went one side of the cart, but I was accustomed to that by this time, up, up, the angle grew perilous, and then over we went, and I was in the tilt of the cart, almost on my head, and the brown mule in the shafts seemed trying to get into the cart backwards. I didn't see how he could, but I have unlimited faith in the powers of a Chinese mule, so, amidst wild yells from Tuan and the carters, I was out on to the hillside before I had time to think, and presently was watching those mules make hay of my possessions. They didn't leave a single thing either in or on that cart, camera, typewriter, cushions, dressing-bag, bedding, all shot out on to what the Chinaman is pleased to consider the road, even the heavy box, roped on behind, got loose and fell off, and the mule justified my expectations by, in some mysterious way, breaking the woodwork at the top of the cart and tearing all the blue tilt away. It took us over an hour to get things right again, and my faith in the stability of a Peking cart was gone for ever.

We were right in the very heart of the mountains now, and the scenery was magnificent, close at hand hills, sterile and stony, and behind them range after range of other blue hills fading away into the bluer distance. Day after day I looked upon a scene that would be magnificent in any land, and here in China filled me with wonder. Could this be China, practical, prosaic China, China of the ages, this beautiful land? And always above me was the blue sky, always the golden sunshine and the invigorating, dry air that reminded me, as I have never before been reminded, of Australia.

But, however desolate and sterile the hills, and they seldom had more than an occasional fir-tree upon them, in the valleys were always people and evidences of their handiwork in the shape of wonderfully tilled fields. There are no fences, the Chinaman does not waste his precious ground in fences, but between the carefully driven furrows there is never a weed, and all day long the people are engaged turning over the ground so that it will not cake, and may benefit by every drop of moisture that may be extracted from the atmosphere. A little snow in the winter, a shower or two in April, and the summer rains in July or August, are all this fruitful land requires for a bountiful harvest, but I am bound to say it is fruitful only because of the intense care that is given to it. No one surely but a Chinese peasant would work as these people work. In every valley bottom there is, according to its size, a town, perhaps built of stones with thatched roofs, a small hamlet, or at least a farmhouse, enclosed either behind a neat mud wall or a more picturesque one of the yellow stalks of the kaoliang. And the people are everywhere, in the very loneliest places far up on the hills I would see a spot of blue herding black goats or swine, and on parts of the road far away from any habitation, when I began to think I had really got beyond even the ubiquitous Chinaman, we would meet a forlorn, ragged figure, an old man past other work or a small boy with a bamboo across his shoulders and slung from it two dirty baskets. With scoop in hand he was gathering the droppings of the animals with which to make argol for fuel, for enough wood is not to be had, and in this respect so industrious are the Chinese that their roads are really the cleanest I have ever seen.

There were strangely enough here, in the heart of the mountains, signs of foreign enterprise, for however desolate the place might seem, sooner or later we were sure to come across the advertisements of the British American Tobacco Company. There they would be in a row great placards advertising Rooster Cigarettes, or Peacock Cigarettes or Purple Mountain Cigarettes, half a dozen pictures, and then one upside down to attract attention. I never saw the men who put them there, and I hate the blatant advertisement that spoils the scenery as a rule. Here I greeted them with a distinct thrill of pleasure. Here were men of my race and colour, doing pioneering work in the out-of-the-way corners of the earth, and I metaphorically made them a curtsy and wished them well, for no one knows better than I do the lonely lives they lead. But they are bringing China in touch with the outside world.

By and by we came to a place where carts were not seen, the people were wiser than I, but there was a constant stream of laden mules and donkeys bringing grain inside the wall. Long before I could see them I could hear the jingling of the collar of bells most of them wore, and in an inn yard we always met the train and saw them start out before us in the morning, though we were early enough, I saw to that, often have I had my breakfast before five o'clock, or coming in after we did in the dusk of the evening. I objected to travelling in the dusk. I felt the roads held pitfalls enough without adding darkness to our other difficulties.

The inns grew poorer and poorer as we got deeper into the mountains but always I found in those inn yards something interesting to look at. By night I was too weary to do anything but go to bed, but I generally had my tiffin in a shady spot in a corner of the yard and watched all that was going on. The yard would be crowded with animals, mules, and donkeys, and always there were people coming and going, who thought the foreign woman was a sight not to be missed. There have been missionaries here or in Chihli for the last hundred years, so they must have seen foreign women, but the sight cannot be a common one judging by the way they stared. There would be well-to-do Chinamen riding nice-looking donkeys, still more prosperous ones borne in litters by a couple of protesting mules, and in every corner of the yard would be beasts eating. And all these beasts of burden required numerous helpers, and the hangers-on were the most dilapidated specimens of humanity I have ever seen, not nearly so sure of a meal, I'm afraid, as the pigs and hens that wandered round scavenging. There would be an occasional old woman and very, very seldom a young one with large feet marking her as belonging to the very poorest class, but mostly they were men dressed in blue cotton, faded, torn, ragged, and yet patched beyond recognition.

“Patch beside patch is neighbourly,” says an old saw, “but patch upon patch is beggarly.” The poor folks in the inn yards not only had patch upon patch, but even the last patches were torn, and they looked far more poverty-stricken than the children who played about this pleasant weather wearing only their birthday dress. But they all had something to do. An old man whose bald head must have required little shaving and whose weedy queue was hardly worth plaiting, drew water from the well, another who had adopted the modern style of dressing the hair gathered up the droppings of the animals, a small boy with wild hair that no one had time to attend to, and clad in a sort of fringe of rags, drove away the hideous black sow and her numerous litter when she threatened to become a nuisance, and from earliest dawn to dark there were men cutting chaff. The point of a huge knife was fixed in the end of a wooden groove, one man pushed the fodder into its position and another lifted the knife by its wooden handle and brought it down with all his strength. Then he lifted it, and the process was repeated. I have seen men at work thus, in the morning before it was light enough to see, I have seen them at it when the dusk was falling. There do not seem to be any recognised hours for stopping work in China. And all the heads of these people were wild. If they wore a queue it was dirty and unplaited, and the shaven part of their heads had a week's growth of bristles, and if they were more modern in their hair-dressing, their wild black hair stuck out all over the place and looked as if it had originally been cut by the simple process of sticking a basin on the head and clipping all the hairs that stood out round it. But untidy heads of hair are not peculiar to the inn yard, they are common enough wherever I have been in China. There were always innumerable children in the yard, too, with heads shaven all but little tails of hair here and there, which, being plaited stiffly, stood out like the headgear of a clown, and there were cart men and donkey men, just peasants in blue, with their blouses girt round their waists. There were the guests, too, petticoated Chinese gentlemen, squires, or merchants, or well-to-do farmers, standing in the doorways looking on, and occasionally ladies, dressed in the gayest colours, with their faces powdered and painted, peeped shyly out, half secretively, as if they were ashamed, but felt they must take one look at the foreign woman who walked about as if she were not ashamed of the open daylight, and was quite capable of managing for herself. Sometimes I was taken to the women's quarters, where the women-folk of the innkeeper dwelt, and there, seated on a k'ang, in a room that had never been aired since it was built, I would find feminine things of all ages, from the half-grown girl, who in England would have been playing hockey, to the old great grandmother who was nursing the cat. They always offered me tea, and I always took it, and they always examined my dress, scornfully I am afraid, because it was only of cotton, and wanted to lay their fingers in the waves of my hair, only I drew the line at those dirty hands coming close to my face. At first it all seemed strange, but in a day I felt as if I had been staying in just such inns all my life. The farther one wanders I find the sooner does novelty wear off. As a little girl, to go fifty miles from my home and to have my meals off a different-patterned china gave me a delightful sense of novelty, and to sleep in a strange bed kept me awake all night. Now in an hour—oh far less—nothing feels new, not even the courtyard of a Chinese mountain inn.