Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

A Chinese soldier and his mount, not to mention his worldly possessions

Mongol women on a joy-ride

The town where we made our midday halt was denim blue with market-day. There were big, upstanding six-foot men whom America would hardly have recognized as Chinese; and some of them, from back in the hills, though they had heard of white people before, had never seen them. These and their hardy, red-cheeked boys timidly crowded nearer and nearer the knock-kneed table which Chang had somehow found and placed for us in a wind-sheltered, sun-flooded corner of the inn-yard, retreating in a pell-mell mass if we rose to our feet or looked fixedly at them. In China market-day is usually a fixed institution, frequently recurring in most towns. Then the wooden-box bellows with a stick handle manipulated by a boy or a coolie, which is indispensable to craftsman or cook reduced to a mainly dung fuel, may be heard thumping by scores or hundreds along the thronged street. The shallow eating-shops, which thrust their customers out of doors to squat on raised strips of board or on their own haunches, steaming bowl and chop-sticks in hand, are so busy that they almost cease to shout for clients. The outdoor hair-dressers for men may sometimes not move their portable paraphernalia from a chosen spot all day long, and take in what to them is a small fortune, though their charges would by no means keep an American barber in soap. Wielding a razor suggestive of a carpenter’s draw-shave, a wooden comb which the maker across the way saws out by hand with a dozen or a score of others from a single round block, and carrying a most scanty supply of other essentials, they all but transform the hirsute countrymen who fall into their hands. For they are not satisfied with mere shaving as we understand it, but wipe out everything the broad blade encounters—down the upper cheek, a stray hair on the nose, the eyebrows, the hair itself, leaving the victim a striking resemblance to a boiled onion, unless he calls a halt with the information that he still considers the cue essential to his beauty and well-being. Even then, they say, the barber sometimes talks him out of the old-fashioned notion—though it is hardly that in Kansu—and he joins the growing ranks of Chinese men, who, having recognized the pigtail as a badge of servitude rather than an honorable adornment, go as far to the opposite extreme as is consistent with a whole—no, often a sadly gashed—scalp. But if the client’s taste is not to be changed by preaching or example, the last rite is the combing out of his often magnificent black tresses, reduced of course in area to about the size of a saucer, and the making of them into a braid which may perhaps not be undone again for two or three moons.

But our carts perhaps are creaking out again through the inn-yard gate, and we must ride after them, leaving the hundred other scenes of market-day for some other place, for they are constantly repeated everywhere. Caves and terraces and cañon roads continue; the afternoon is June-like, the leaves of the willows and rare poplars hardly beginning to turn, though November is stepping on. Down in the river valley the soil is somewhat harder, so that for a little time we move without being enveloped in a cloud of dust; but the air is so dry that cigars and lips suffer. Passing coolies carry their money in strings of “cash,” a thousand to each string, broken up into hundreds by knots and the ends tied together to make carrying easy. We would hardly call it that, however, if in addition to already mighty burdens we had to plod our way across a thirsty country with ten pounds of money worth less than an American quarter; for in this region the exchange averaged twenty-three hundred “cash” to the “Mex” dollar. This does not, of course, reduce the perforated brass coin of China to anything like the low estate of the Russian ruble or the German mark, but those are of paper and may be printed in any denomination, while the “cash” always remains the single coin, both in weight and bulk. I do not recall offhand any commodity that represents the value of a “cash”; I might say it is worth about one peanut, but that would be true only in China, and only in certain regions during the most plentiful peanut season, certainly never in America, for it takes fully forty “cash” to make an American cent. Perhaps a match comes most nearly being an even exchange, and then the wonder comes up that they do not use those instead, and save weight and some of the difficulties of reckoning, and always have something of real immediate value as well as a nominal and fictitious one. But your Chinese coolie, once out of gunshot of the big cities at least, and even the merchants up to a surprising grade, prefers his money in “cash,” irrespective of weight and all its other drawbacks.

In Peking and the treaty-ports small transactions are usually in coppers, which are worth a whole fourth of an American cent each; and silver ten-, twenty-, and fifty-cent pieces, unknown and unacceptable in Shensi and Kansu, are as frequent there as the “Mex” dollar of which they are fractions. It is no uncommon thing, indeed, for Peking coolies to accept bank-notes, if they are sure of the giver and if the issuing bank is not Chinese but foreign, with a local branch. But, after all, a copper is not much lighter than ten “cash,” and less convenient, having no hole for stringing, and next above that in the west comes the dollar, which is more than many a coolie ever owns at one time, and may turn out to be false anyway; while, as to bank-notes, they are no more current in the interior than Confederate shinplasters are in New York. Our own funds, by the way, we carried in the form of letters of credit issued by the Chinese post-office in Peking and payable by the postal commissioner at the several large cities we visited, in which he was either a foreigner or the graduate of a foreign school. But even our cartmen, who were well above the coolie status, lugged strings of “cash,” usually about their persons, and every morning and every noon they unfailingly engaged in a loud and heated controversy with the innkeeper and all his functionaries, down to the ragged fellow who drew water, over the amount that should be transferred from the traveling strings to those that remained behind. Only in a few cases was there a grooved measuring-board to obviate the laborious task of counting the miserable bits of poor brass one by one. For of course no one could take it for granted that there were a hundred “cash” between each knot; and usually he would have been swindled if he did. Aside from the all but universal Chinese custom of short-changing wherever it is possible, in many regions accepted fictions in money matters reign, so that in one town a “hundred cash” is really only ninety, and if you are informed that six walnuts cost a copper you hand over nine “cash”; and perhaps in the next place a string of “cash” is nominally a thousand but really nine hundred and forty, and “nine coppers is ten coppers here, master, only if it is in ‘cash’ it is nine and then a little bit, and so....” And so, while we might have been able to get along without Chang, or the cook either, for that matter, so far as mere eating and the like go, he became indispensable in saving us from insanity in the handling of money.

Pingliang was the largest city on our route between Sian-fu and Lanchow. In a way it was the most picturesque, too; at least there were few such pictures as that down its swarming, shop- and hawker-crowded thoroughfare seen through the outer gate with the inner one in the middle distance. I reached it somewhat ahead of the others, and as I was worming my way through the second barrier, leading my mule and showing every evidence of having been on the road for a week, a man in the human stream bound in the same direction addressed me. It was not until his second remark that I realized that he was speaking English, and even then I took him to be some inn-runner who was trying to induce me to patronize his miserable establishment. We had looked forward to being spared that fate in Pingliang, for several sets of Protestant missionaries had made us promise to look up their co-workers there. I replied, therefore, still giving my attention to the picturesque chaos about me rather than to the speaker, that I expected to stop with foreigners at the Fu-ying-tong. How should I have known that I, suddenly bursting into town in the guise of anything but a reputable person, was informing a total stranger that I expected him to take me in as a guest as soon I could find his house? For it was the first time in my life that I had met a foreigner parading the streets in Chinese garb; besides, the Swedish-American head of the Protestant work in Pingliang happens to be of a physical size not inclined to make him conspicuous in a Chinese crowd.

Before the days of the republic, I learned later, when in spite of my barbarism we were comfortably installed in his home with the glorious prospect of a hot bath in the offing, he had sported even a blond pigtail, like many of the inland missionaries. I need hardly add that this was removed when, on rare occasions, he visited the “home church” in Ruggles Street, Boston. His son also wore native garb and, being born in Pingliang, could not be distinguished from a Chinaman in the dark, as a native policeman once discovered to his discomfiture. On second thought, when one had recovered from the slight shock involved, of course native dress is the thing to wear in such cases. For one thing, it is many times more economical than foreign garb, which would have to be individually imported. Chinese clothing is much better adapted to Chinese living conditions; and not the least of the advantages in cities of the interior where only two or three foreigners live is that they can go about their business unnoticed in the throng, instead of becoming the center of a gaping, jostling mob whenever they halt for a moment.

I cannot, naturally, give any testimony as to the efficacy or value of the missionary work of a host of barely twenty-four hours, though I can speak very highly of his hospitality and of the spick and span efficiency of whatever we saw in his two compounds. In one the church was reached through the hospital, which seemed a fitting and sensible arrangement. Pingliang is not well supplied with curative facilities, and naturally the mission hospital is overworked to a point where even charitable foreigners unconsciously grow more or less callous to mere human suffering. Chinese strolling into the place in what to us seemed horrible conditions were such commonplace sights to those who had spent a generation among them that they showed little more feeling over them than over a cut finger. “Oh, been in a fight, I suppose,” was the sum total reply to my anxious inquiry about a man whose face and chest were cut into ribbons and who seemed to be half groping, half stumbling his way toward the hospital. With beggars of both sexes and all ages wandering the town and sleeping out of doors all winter in a few fluttering rags that expose far more skin than they cover, their cadaverous faces blue yellow with starvation, it is hardly to be expected that a young man born amid such scenes should lose much sleep over them.

Pingliang, I discovered in a stroll about its wall, is not so large as the first impression suggests, being long and narrow, with nearly all its movement in that busy main street by which we passed through it. The suburbs were so crowded, we found, because no Mohammedan is allowed to live within the walls. The soldiers of the local dictator had just been paid, and many of them were sauntering about town with six or eight strings of “cash” over their shoulders, pricing this and that. One had a full ten thousand looped about his neck, a veritable millstone, yet his weighty wealth only amounted to about $2.30 in real money. I have said that interior China has no paper money; hence I must apologize for the oversight. For there are paper “cash” by the millions. Boys were stamping them out of great sheets of a kind of tissue-paper, piled twenty or more thick, so that each blow of the die accomplished something worth while; and great cylinders of the finished coins, still loosely held together, hung shivering in the breeze along the busiest street of Pingliang. But this is dead man’s money, to be burned at his grave along with paper horses and servants and perhaps a “Peking cart” of the same material, so that he shall not find himself penniless and unattended in the next world. The mere living must be content with solid brass.