THE TALI LAKE
The city itself is neither more nor less attractive than dozens of other Chinese cities. Its numerous ruined houses, however, have a pathetic interest of their own, for they are just in the same condition as they were immediately after the great siege. Even after thirty-five years of peace Tali-fu has not recovered from the disasters of those terrible days. I spent two days and three nights in Tali-fu, during which time I explored the city, and wandered for miles beyond its walls.[278] Late one afternoon I found myself by the lake side. The view of those tranquil waters, overshadowed as they were by the great mountain-barrier on the west, was very beautiful. The blue surface of the lake was dotted with crowds of white sails rose-tinted with the light of the setting sun. Nearer at hand crowds of wild-duck floated in the midst of rippling circles, showing but little fear of the noisy little boys who swam and dived as skilfully as themselves, and whose splashing and glad laughter were almost the only sounds that broke the utter peacefulness of a perfect summer evening. Very different was that terrible scene which only a generation ago was enacted by the shores of the Tali-fu lake, when its blue waters were incarnadined with blood and its now peaceful shores rang with the despairing cries of thousands of homeless women and children. For it was Tali-fu and the borders of its lake that in 1873 witnessed the last and most tragic events of the great Mohammedan rebellion.[279] Tu Wên-hsiu, the so-called "Sultan," who had so long and successfully defied all the military power of China, had fixed his court at Tali and had converted it into what he believed to be an impregnable stronghold. The closing scene of the great conflict which devastated the whole province of Yunnan, and converted many of its most flourishing towns into blackened ruins, has been several times described, but nowhere so graphically as in the account by M. Emile Rocher,[280] the brilliant and sympathetic Frenchman who was an eyewitness of much that took place during the course of that terrible civil war. The following is a crude translation of his account of the events that occurred when all hope of holding Tali-fu against the imperial troops had been abandoned.
TALI-FU.
(Photograph by Dr Clark, Missionary, Tali-fu).
DEATH OF THE SULTAN OF TALI
"Tu Wên-hsiu ... awaited with resignation the hour that would deliver him from his last agonies. His wives and several of his children, being unwilling to survive him, poisoned themselves in his presence, and the day before he left the palace he caused all articles of value that he possessed to be destroyed, or, if they could not be broken, to be thrown into the lake. On the 15th January 1873, Tu Wên-hsiu arrayed himself in his handsomest robes of ceremony, and playing the part of a sovereign to the very end of his career, ordered the preparation of his yellow palanquin—yellow being a colour that none but the emperor of China had the right to use. Before leaving his palace, he bade a last farewell to the city in which the best years of his life had been passed, and gazed for the last time on the chain of mountains, the 'Azure Hills'[281] on which he had loved to ramble. Before leaving his apartments he swallowed a ball of opium.... The road which his retinue had to follow in order to reach the south gate was crowded with people who came to prostrate themselves before their Sultan for the last time. It was a solemn procession, and many people who had not always had reason to praise the administration of the fallen Sultan could not hide their emotion. Tu Wên-hsiu, whose senses the poison had begun to paralyse, seemed to be little affected by what went on around him. Arriving at the gate of the city he made a great effort to get out of the palanquin in order to thank the people and the leaders who had accompanied him, and his children were commended by him to the care of Yang Wei.[282] An escort of soldiers, sent by Yang Yü-k'o,[283] conducted him to the village occupied by that general. The latter treated the vanquished chief with respect, and asked him several questions, to which, however, Tu Wên-hsiu had difficulty in responding. Seeing that he could only extract confused words out of the Sultan, whose moments were numbered, the general sent him on to Hsiao Kuan-i, where the Governor of Yunnan was residing, in order that the latter might at least see him alive. He was already too late ... the Sultan breathed his last shortly after his arrival, towards seven in the evening.... The next day the Governor caused his head to be cut off, and a courier specially charged with the burden was sent post haste to the capital of the province, where the head was placed in honey for preservation before being sent on to Peking."
Baber, who visited Tali-fu a few years after these events, adds a graphic and pathetic touch, the truth of which was amply vouched for. He says that when Tu Wên-hsiu was brought into the presence of the imperialist general he begged with his last breath that the conquerors would be merciful. "I have nothing to ask but this—spare the people." This request—which Baber describes as perhaps the most impressive and pathetic ever uttered by a dying patriot—was treated with disregard. The real tragedy came later, and is described by M. Rocher in a passage which I translate as follows: "The Governor, under pretext of celebrating the surrender of the city, invited all the Mohammedan leaders to a great banquet.... He received them very well, loaded them with praises, and, just as they were going into the banquet hall, the soldiers who had been placed in readiness for the event seized upon the doomed guests. Seventeen heads simultaneously rolled on the ground. The Governor then gave the order for six guns to be fired, the signal already agreed upon for the commencement of the massacre in the city. It was the eleventh day of the occupation. What followed is indescribable.... After three days of this human butchery, Tali and its environs presented a pitiable spectacle. Out of a population of fifty thousand men, thirty thousand had perished during those fatal days, and the rest were all dispersed."
MASSACRE AT TALI-FU
There is some reason to believe that the number of those said to have been slain was largely exaggerated. Curiously enough the leaders of the imperial armies who, according to our Western notions, should have been zealous to hush up the whole grim episode, were the first to spread abroad the news of the massacre and to magnify the numbers of the slaughtered; not because they took any delight in the butchery for its own sake, but because they wished to strike such terror into the scattered bands of rebels who were still at large that they would no longer have the heart to strive against the great emperor whose armies they had defied for seventeen years. That the wholesale slaughter cannot by any possibility be excused, goes without saying. But it is only fair to remember that the great object which the imperial leaders had before them was to inflict so terrible a chastisement on the rebels that they would never again be able to threaten the stability of the empire. That object was attained. Had any considerable body of men been spared it is highly probable that they would merely have carried on the warfare from another centre, and protracted, for another decade, the strife and bloodshed which had already devastated the province of Yunnan for nearly twenty years, and reduced the population—so it is estimated—from eight millions to one.
Two years before the end, Tu Wên-hsiu made a great effort to prop up his falling cause by securing the help of Great Britain. With this view he despatched his son to England in 1871, and as a token of his desire to become the vassal of the British Crown he sent Queen Victoria four pieces of rock hewn out of the four corners of the great Tali mountain. "Our unsentimental Foreign Office," as Baber says, "blind to romantic symbolism, would not suffer them to be extricated from the bonded warehouse of the Customs;" at any rate the Sultan and his unfortunate followers were left to their doom, and the Dragon flag flew once more over the walls of Tali. The mountain, if it could think and feel, might perhaps console itself for the contempt shown to its corner-stones with the reflection that since its history began nations have grown up and passed away like the wild-flowers that live and die on its green slopes, and that the great thrones and dynasties of to-day will have become empty names, signifying nothing, long before its jewelled fingers cease to traffic with the eternal stars, or to duplicate themselves in the still waters of the Tali lake.