Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The coolies of Shensi, or at least most of those we saw in that province, seem to long to be mistaken for scholars—an honor, of course, which would bring joy to any Chinese heart, in contrast to the insult it would often convey in some other lands. Some clever salesman had profited by this strange Celestial longing by selling to more than half the coolies we met a huge pair of rimless spectacles made of plain plate-glass, and of course of no optical value whatever. Had they been in the form of goggles, one might have concluded that they were merely a protection from the dust, but there was nothing about them that could by any stretch even of a coolie imagination be considered anything but ornamental.

Cues have appreciably decreased in China since the fall of the alien dynasty which required them as a badge of submission; but once a custom is established among the conservative Chinese it is harder to eradicate than ragweed, however uncomplimentary may have been its origin. It may be a slight exaggeration to say that every other man we met on our western trip wore a cue, but certainly there is still wound about coolie heads material enough for all the hair-nets that America can consume in another century. Old men, though only a tiny gray braid may be left them, would, it is said, “rather lose their heads than their tails.” In this west country boys are as likely to be adorned with them as not; in any busy street the itinerant hair-dresser may be seen combing out the long black tresses of his coolie clients, calmly seated out of doors even in the depths of winter, and often adding a switch for good measure. Among upper-class Chinese the cue has largely disappeared, but with the masses it is as common a feature in many provinces as the long pipes protruding from the backs of coolie necks when not in use.

A corpse journeying to its ancestral home between two pole-joined mules, the white rooster demanded by ancient custom sitting on top of the ponderous coffin in a little wicker cage, was one of the infrequent, though not rare, sights of the journey. Sometimes we met a long file of black pigs moving slowly eastward under the impulse of several patient men, one marching in front unarmed, the rest with very long but rather harmless whips, and all singing to coax on their charges. It was an addition to my slight knowledge of natural history to learn that hogs are moved by music; but there is no telling what Chinese music may accomplish until it has been tried. We rode, of course, or rested our cramped legs by walking, up out of the cañons as much as possible. Here the variance in the point at which a man or a mule registers dizziness sometimes led to serious differences of opinion between ourselves and our mounts. Along most of the cliffs high above the sunken roads there are several paths, some of them already appreciably wearing down toward the ultimate common level, others narrow ridges of a rather harder streak of earth with barely room on them for two feet at a time. Invariably, whenever there was a choice in paths, the mule would choose the one closest to the edge of the road chasm, the very edge of it, if possible, often with a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more directly under the off stirrup—and the loess soil everywhere seeming ready to collapse at any moment. Sometimes a path worked its way out on the face of the cliff before one noticed, to where it would have been as impossible to dismount as to turn about, and the helpless rider could only prayerfully intrust his future to the mule, wholly free apparently from any suggestion of the trepidation which ran in hot sprays up the human spine. Certainly a mule has no worry-bacteria in his system—and probably has fewer troubles in a lifetime than almost any other living creature, which should be food for reflection to worrying humanity. Once I had the hair-lifting experience of seeing most of the rear end of the major’s mule just in front of me go over the cliff with a crumbling bit of path, but the animal never for a moment lost his mulish poise, nor hesitated when the next chance offered to take the most edgy of the paths again.

On the evening of the second day out of Sian-fu our muleteers respectfully sent word that they would like us to start “ten li earlier” next morning, “because the road went up-stairs.” That was one of the contrasts between Chinese mule-drivers and those, for instance, of South America. Here they were always ready to start at any hour we named, and sometimes asked us to advance it. We accordingly got up three miles earlier, and before the day was done congratulated ourselves on having done so. All morning the road, freeing itself from loess cañons and taking to river-valleys and ever higher plains, ascended at so gradual a pace that we hardly realized we were rising unless we glanced back at the lower and lower world behind. But just beyond the village where we made our usual hour-and-a-half noonday halt, the earth surged up like some tidal wave suddenly commanded to stand still. The road did indeed go up-stairs; nothing could have been a more exact description of its zigzagging course, which at length, hours after we had left the village, brought us in straggling formation to the summit, four thousand feet above it, then plunged even more swiftly down into the bed of a slight stream which trickled away through a region of huge rocks and a formation for a time more solid than pure loess. But this was only a brief and imperfect respite. The crumbling soil soon monopolized the landscape again, and for many days afterward filled our eyes and nostrils with its stifling and all-penetrating dust. Peculiar sights, indeed, the loess often gives. Fertile enough with sufficient water, one might easily have concluded that not a drop of rain had ever fallen here. Mud would have meant more prosperity, but when it does rain these already ankle-deep roads at the bottoms of the great cañons must surely be in close proximity to the infernal regions.

Any suggestion of this was spared us, however, as we were denied any hint of the great transformation that spring brings to the loess country, turning it from the delicate light brown that is as unbroken during the autumn and winter as the blue of the cloudless sky overhead to a vernal green which those who have seen it say is seldom surpassed in beautiful landscapes. Such loess cliffs as no words can describe became commonplace, almost unnoticed sights along the way, cliffs falling gradually from sky to abyss so far below as almost to seem bottomless. All the population for long distances burrowed in human rabbit-warrens dug in these cliffs, row above row of caves, like cities of ten- or twelve-story cliff-dwellings. Many of the caves proved at close sight to be ruined and abandoned; usually these were fallen in, with a great round hole in the roof. Of course the former inhabitants had dug a new home elsewhere—unless they were buried in the old one—and the population was not so dense as the myriad holes in the mountain-sides suggested. There was a great difference, too, in the grades of dwellings even among such unlikely homes as these. A cave could be as noisome a hut as any hovel out on a plain; sometimes a mere hole in the cliff looked like nothing in particular, until a closer glance showed it to be the entrance to a long passageway leading to several courts that were surrounded by a dozen or more arched cave-dwellings, perhaps all well below the level of the sunken road. Sometimes the proud family had even gone to the trouble of putting an elaborate inscription over the doorway, and had fitted it with wooden sills. But this was unusual, for with such slight exceptions literally everything was made of the quickly crumbling earth,—the “devil screen” across the way from the entrance (though this very important feature of Chinese architecture was rare in the west), the wall filling up the great arch of the cave, with a small door cut in it, even the k’ang, or stone-hard family bed, inside.

Thus everything, walls, houses, cliffs, terraced hillsides, even the dreary cave-dwellers themselves, had the selfsame monotonous color, and in all the autumn landscape there was nothing to break it, to give it the faintest contrast. A sad place surely was this for man to live, like an aged world that was wearing out and would soon be fit only to be discarded. Indeed, the process of dissolution was going on under our very eyes. There were often places where the road had very recently dropped away into a mammoth cañon so deep that to peer over the brink was to catch the breath in what might easily have been a spasm of dizziness; yet heavily laden carts still shrieked and lashed their way along the sheer edge of it, and all the miscellaneous traffic passing the spot where the next crumbling might carry it to perdition gave it no more attention than Chinese give to the open, unprotected, curbless wells that abound all over China like gopher-holes in our western prairies.

A world wearing away, and apparently there is no cure for it. The trees which might have held it together with their roots, to say nothing of the rain they would bring, were completely grubbed out centuries ago by those very ancestors whom the wretched modern inhabitants so highly honor. Those short-sighted forebears were all for the past, or at best for what was to them the present; and their living descendants have no choice but to follow the same short-sighted course, for the present is an unremitting struggle for mere existence now, and the future surely holds out little promise. To repair the fatal tree-wastefulness of their revered ancestors would require something like forcing every man in China to plant a tree a week, promptly lopping off the head of any one who cuts one down, and keeping this up as long as their ancestors took to grub out the forests that once graced the land; that is, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

We think we know something of poverty and physical suffering in America, but in crowded, despoiled China we realize our ignorance. Here are perhaps the lowest forms of human beings, creatures in the image of man who are not merely akin to beasts but a kind of living offal. Nor are the dregs of the population to be found in this more roomy western part of the country; there the poorest might be called a middle class, though they are so poor that they burrow in caves and are out long before dawn and late into the night with basket and wicker shovel wandering the roads ready to fight for the droppings of passing animals. Perhaps there are some of them who take life by the forelock and force it more or less to do their bidding. But though here and there were what we would call “tough-looking characters,” even they seemed to be harmless, at least where foreigners were concerned. We hear much in these days of the anarchy of China, and in so far as a responsible, effective government goes the word is not ill chosen. Yet there is a cohesion, a momentum in Chinese society, in the great masses that populate the land, which makes a failure of formal government mainly a surface manifestation, with often scarcely a ripple disturbing the even flow of life in general, as it has gone on for centuries and perhaps will for centuries to come. In all west Shensi we saw hardly a soldier, and almost as little of any other coercive force; yet though there may not have been any bandits left in the province, as its Tuchun boldly asserted, nothing would have been easier than for any group of these thousands upon thousands of sturdy coolies for ever plodding to and fro, or the village crowds which gathered in the inn-yards to watch us eat modest noonday lunches which must have seemed to them princely, to fall upon a few stray foreigners lost in the great sea of Chinese humanity and despoil them of what in this land of utter poverty was their great riches. Not only was there no suggestion of such a thought, not only did they show us all the respect which the most haughty participant in extraterritoriality could demand; they were frankly friendly, neither out of fear nor hope of favor. Given the slightest provocation and they invariably smiled; the men, that is; the cripple-footed women never, and small wonder. Behind us lay a constant trail of childlike comment on our appearance, and especially on the stirrups of our army saddles. The Chinese are so minutely conservative that even to wrap a patch of leather about something which they have always hitherto seen without it is to arouse amazement. Often this amazement expressed itself in a burst of laughter, but never once was there anything about its unforced heartiness which could have been taken for ridicule. Possibly they did find covert ways to make fun at our expense; they nearly always called us moo-sha, for instance, which means missionary. But there was every reason to believe that this startling error was due to pure honest ignorance, perhaps once in a while to a desire to be complimentary; never, I feel sure, was there a deliberate attempt even to be unkindly.

The major likened the rank and file, the coolies at least, to our Southern negroes, with whom his army experience had given him a considerable acquaintance. There is a certain similarity of temperament; one might, indeed, follow up the thought and find a resemblance between the more morose, yet still Chinese, non-laboring classes and the mulatto or lighter types of negro, who so often have an air of brooding over their intermediate state of heredity. But one could easily carry the thought too far. There is much the same easy-going view of life—laughter easily provoked, often in the face of things which seem rather to call for tears; but beyond that the two races part company. The negro still loves his African leisure; if there is any one on earth without a trace of laziness in his make-up, surely it is the Chinese workman—though this be due merely to centuries of bitter competition for existence. Nor do the poorest of our cabin-dwelling blacks suffer anything like the poverty of the toilsome masses of China; even those of Haiti do not approach it. There are worse places in China, but even in this comparatively thinly populated northwest thousands of people quite willing to toil from sun to sun at anything promising them the slightest remuneration live under conditions in which it would literally be illegal to keep pigs in any well governed section of the Occident. You can always get men to do anything do-able, on short notice, in China; there is such an enormous surplus of them. If there is a little stream across the trail, there are sure to be men waiting to set those who are shod across it for a brass “cash” or two; if there is a load too cumbersome or too heavy for a donkey or a pack-mule, you can easily pick up men to carry it. Most of us have the comforting impression that, being inured to them for countless generations, they do not feel their hardships and sufferings as we should. No doubt they do not, for if they did it would be beyond human power to produce that cheerful atmosphere, as wholly devoid of surliness as of melancholy, with which they seem to surround their bitter lives.

It was one of the surprises of our journey that feathered game was more than abundant where every other thing, down to the last grass-blade and the tiniest bit of offal, is laboriously gathered and fully utilized, where hunger drives into the pot everything that can possibly be made quasi-edible. Wild ducks and geese all but obscured the sun along every important river-valley; partridge, quail, and beautiful pheasants covering many a bushy slope, often even the planted fields themselves, as thickly as sparrows a barn-yard, were to be had almost for the shooting. Cliff-sides blue with pigeons, the air filled with drapery-like swirls of them, ceased in time even to draw the attention. Were the major less sensitive to the difference between this and big game stalking, I might mention that single shot which brought down eight of these silky-blue birds; though that, to be sure, was before the attempt to coerce a recalcitrant mule with the butt of a not too young and sturdy—not to say borrowed—shot-gun resulted so disastrously. There seldom was a time during all our long journey out through the west that a little exertion could not add wild fowl to our canned larder; yet, as far as we were ever able to discover, the hungry people of that region made no attempt to kill or capture them—nor to destroy the swarms of magpies, crows, sparrows, and rooks which it was hard to believe left anything of the crops for the men and beasts who toiled to raise them. The laws had nothing to say on the subject; we saw it proved that there is no prejudice against such food when it can be had, and granted that guns are rare and ammunition too expensive for a Chinese peasant, certainly the race has given proof enough of ingenuity and of accomplishing under difficulties to warrant astonishment at the apparent indifference to what in many regions is the most valuable product still ungathered.