Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

If something caused one of us to halt a moment in town or village, all the community that had no possessions requiring a watchful eye quickly flocked closely about us,—dogs, boys, youths, men of all ages, and very young girls, though never, of course, the women. Did we chance to scribble in our note-books or fill a pipe, the crowding all but pinned our elbows to our sides. In larger towns or places where market-day had brought a throng, the dust raised by the dense crowd encircling us became a menace to the lungs. Fortunately timidity equals curiosity in such a gathering. Sometimes when suffocation seemed imminent I have sprung suddenly to my feet with a shout, and a kick or a blow that purposely fell short, and the stampede that ensued would wholly clear the vicinity for a hundred yards around in scarcely the time it takes to draw a long breath. It might be that two or three of the dispersed throng were men of higher caste, the town’s most important merchants or its scholars, and these, being more fearful of “losing face” before the common herd than of having an injury done them by the dubious stranger from another world, would retreat to a lesser distance with as leisurely dignity as their legs would permit, and stand there with an expression which seemed to say, “I dare you to maltreat a great man like me as if he were a common coolie, though I admit that I will retreat if you attempt to do so.” Then, the atmosphere having been cleared and one’s elbows freed from pressure, one had only to smile, implying that it had all been a joke, to have the crowd instantly roar with laughter at its own discomfiture—and soon close in again as tightly as ever.

Especially exasperating to the photographer is this tendency of the Chinese quickly to crowd about any one or anything unusual, for it is often impossible to get far enough away to get them in focus. My old trick of looking sidewise into the finder and pretending to photograph something else at right angles to the real victim was also not so effective as among the stolid, solemn, incurious Indians of the Andes. For if the instantly gathering crowd did not cut off the light or obscure the subject, the latter was almost sure to dash forward for a close view of the kodak. More than once, in trying to catch some street scene, I have pretended to be interested elsewhere until all the floating population in the vicinity was packed about me, then, dashing suddenly through the throng, I have sprinted to the spot previously chosen and snapped the shutter; yet in almost every such case there are at least several blurred objects in the foreground of the picture which in real life were Chinese youths or men who led the throng that pursued me.

Pinchow was the largest town we saw in western Shensi, evidently a place of bygone glories, for a great wall climbing the crest of a high hill surrounded it, and just beyond stood the largest pagoda we had seen in the province. Terraces and caves were piled high, like mammoth walls, on two sides of it, and the road by which traffic from the east descends had been one of the steepest of all the journey, a dust-swirling gully down a mountain-side reëchoing from top to bottom with the panting, as if in death-throes, of the hundreds of mules still bearing eastward wicked cart-loads of wheat. It was in Pinchow, too, that we were forced to drive a sleeping coolie out of one miserable room and hang a saddle-cloth across the door of another in order to find accommodations in a miserable ruin of an inn, where Chang and the cook had to do their best over a little fire of dung and twigs out in the bare, wind-swept yard. By this time the nights had grown bitter cold, and the broken paper windows of a room did not need an open door to aid them.

Here, too, things came to a head with the owner of our riding-mules. Evidently the man who contracts for the carrying of the mails out of Sian-fu had agreed to furnish us animals and had accepted the advance on them first, and had turned his attention to getting the animals afterward. For the first man who accompanied them turned out to be a mere coolie, without money even to buy them food; and when he was overtaken by the owner himself on the evening of the second day, the latter had the unwillingness of one who had been forced to do something against his will. He had with him, in a long sock-like purse worn inside his quilted garments, most of the silver dollars we had paid in advance, the contractor having kept the rest as his commission or “squeeze.” But he hated to transform those dollars into food for his mules, and he was constantly hinting that he should be allowed to take the animals and go home. Just why was not apparent, since we were paying him more than he habitually got for the same journey with loads of mail weighing half again what we did, and which never got off and walked; and of course he had always plodded on foot after his mules just as he was doing now.

It was still black night and we were about to leave Pinchow behind when this fellow suddenly fell on his knees in the yard before us, and, bowing to the earth, like a suppliant before a Chinese emperor, implored us to let him go home, for he was losing money on the journey and so on. The average American, I fancy, does not like to be prayed to; in fact his reaction is likely to be what ours was, such a mixture of disgust and anger at such degraded nonsense as to make it difficult to keep from administering a kick. Yet there was a hint of the pathetic about the fellow—until we reflected that of the dollar a day he was getting for each mule he was paying out only a hundred “cash” or so to feed him. He could not spend more on them, he wailed, because he had a family of twenty to feed and clothe. Chinese families, however, are elastic institutions, and we advised him to let a few of his useless dependents starve and feed the mules, who were doing the work. For if he did not give them a reasonable amount, we warned him, we would feed them, and take the cost of it out of what was to be paid him at the end of the journey. This was not a completely effective cure, but at least it substantially increased the share which the animals had in the reward of their labor.

For many li beyond Pinchow we followed the valley of the King Ho, walled with cliff-dwellers on either side as far as the eye could see. There were persimmon orchards in the rich flatlands close to the stream, the last of the fruit being picked from pole-and-vine ladders, and acres of it drying in the sun by day, with reed-mat covers over them to keep off the night frosts, and little cave-shaped watch-houses near-by to protect them from the omnipresent crop-thieves. Some of the cliffs above us were of sandstone, and the caves dug in these were much smaller than those in the loess. Once we passed a big temple carved in the sandstone mountain-side, with huge colored Buddhas smirking at us from the foot of it farther on; and in two or three places the river crowded our side of the valley so closely that the road had dug itself in along the face of the cliff. Donkeys each carrying two huge lumps of what looked like magnificent anthracite coal began to clutter the way, for some of the best of Shensi’s many mines are in this vicinity. Small wonder the traffic of centuries had worn cañons in the soft loess; we passed places that day and the next where cart-wheels had worn gullies axle-deep in solid rock. Let a cart get caught in one of these, and not a wheel of the long procession could move until some means had been devised to drag it out again. Jang-wu—to spell it as it sounded—was a once high-walled and important city which both man and nature seemed to have decided to scrap. It appeared to be mainly Mohammedan, with a mournful, surly atmosphere, and was mostly deserted, except perhaps on market-days, the loess worn away in mammoth moats on both sides of its half-ruined wall, and all about it myriads of graves. Then one morning, almost unexpectedly, we found that we had left the province of Shensi behind us.

CHAPTER XXII
CHINA’S FAR WEST

From the moment that it enters the province of Kansu, the most westerly of China proper, the ancient route from Sian-fu to Lanchow is lined by huge old willows, supplanted here and there by a sturdy poplar. A heritage from some far-seeing ruler of the province under the old dynasty, these flank with four rows, and occasionally with six, the wide strip of land on which a road might long since have been built, had it not been in China. But though there seems to be some strong sentiment, probably with fear as its main ingredient, against cutting them down, not a few of the trees are missing; and the many more that stand with their roots indecently exposed explain what befell those that are gone. For how can a tree live to ripe old age in a loess region where the earth is constantly dropping away or blowing out from under it?

Yet this unusual bit of Chinese forethought arouses a grateful feeling in the passing traveler. In cloudless summer the shade must be a godsend; and though the November sun was so welcome that travelers had already worn paths along the edge of the winter wheat on the south side of the shaded route, the long rows of waving branches were a joy merely to look upon in a region where one may journey for days at a time without catching sight of another tree, or even the slightest living thing of the vegetable kingdom, as far as the eye can reach on either hand. Magpies and crows build great stick nests in these branches, but it was noticeable that boys who will struggle for the possession of a twig or the most unseemly substitute for fuel on the ground below never climb up after the abandoned nests that would make such a fine haul. The reason is probably simple: they are afraid; for while his Western contemporary is constantly risking his neck in hazardous feats which have no economic value, the Chinese boy displays that timidity which habitually remains with him as a man, even in the face of material rewards for a bit of courage.

We found it 430 li from Sian-fu to the border, and crossed it at the village of Yao-tien early on the fifth morning. By this time we were up on the plateau which, gradually rolling higher and higher, culminates in the lofty land of Tibet; and though here it may not be more than three or four thousand feet above the sea, this was enough to give appreciable aid to advancing winter. All that day there was a wind fit to blow us off the map, with every promise of a snow-storm to come, and everywhere women and children, and not a few men, were out gleaning the little dead willow branches as they fell, almost in showers. With the sun gone it was bitter cold now, and we were forced to walk almost as much as we rode. It was on this fifth day that we met two Russian Jews with long beards, and a string of carts the first of which flew a makeshift white flag bearing some Chinese characters and the assertion, “Belong Americun firm from New Jork.” Possibly, the misspelling aside, it did, but in these days allegiances are often quickly made by those foreigners in China who would otherwise lose their rights of extraterritoriality and the greater protection for their persons and their belongings which goes with it.