The soldiers, we noticed, actually paid for what they purchased. Not until they got a day or two out of town, our hosts said, did they dare give only what they chose or drop the word “pay” from their vocabulary entirely. In theory Pingliang and its district are governed from Lanchow, as the latter is from Peking. But the local general had his own soldiers and obeyed the Tuchun ten days westward about as absolutely as the Tuchun did the alleged Central Government. Lanchow had sent out orders to stop the growing of opium. The dictator of Pingliang passed the order on, in the form of a public proclamation, and at a same time issued secret instructions—in so far as anything can be secret in China—to his district rulers to encourage the planting of poppies, to compel it if necessary, since he needed the money to be derived from the traffic. An honest mandarin in Kingchow, refusing to obey secret instructions, effectively put an end to the planting in his district—and barely escaped in the night across the river and through the mountains to Lanchow, disguised as a coolie. In a region west of Pingliang, we learned when we reached it, the orders from opposite directions had been so nicely balanced that no one dared either to plant or not to plant, whereupon nature took upon itself the decision and grew nothing. Yet in these very regions poor peasants have been put in cages and left to starve because they dared to let the poppy beautify their fields, and perhaps the very next year some neighbor was prodded into chronic invalidism by soldiers’ bayonets because he had not planted poppies. Thus things go on throughout a large part of China, and opium is probably produced in fully as large quantities as ever, all the noisy demonstrations of burning, in a few of the larger cities, piles of opium-pipes and confiscated opium to the contrary notwithstanding. One large section of Kansu through which we passed was threatened with a famine because Shensi grew opium on the fields where she should grow wheat, and then offered such high prices for Kansu wheat that it all flowed eastward, as we had seen, and left the region that grew it to starve. But China’s many autonomous military rulers must have money, for without money they cannot keep soldiers, and without soldiers they cannot hold sway over their chosen territories; and of all their few scanty sources of revenue the tax on opium is the most remunerative. Naturally few if any of them openly permit the planting of poppies or openly tax the product. Has not China’s Government guaranteed to suppress the opium traffic, and must not even an all but independent Tuchun of the far interior take care what rumors reach that outside country from which protest and pressure and sometimes even military intervention come? The Chinese temperament is always for finesse as compared with boldness or force. In each provincial capital, and in other large centers, there is an Anti-Opium Office, the ostensible business of which is to stamp out the traffic. But the head of it is either appointed by the military ruler or subject to his influence; and if the latter issues secret orders undermining his public proclamations, the Anti-Opium Office collects the taxes and sets them down as fines, and there you are. There are, in fact, many districts where opium taxes are collected for years in advance, and as they are high the peasants have no choice but to plant poppies to recoup themselves.
A day’s journey beyond Pingliang there is a range 2350 meters high, crossed by roads so steep that one marvels how the clumsy two-wheeled carts get over it. Were the animals not hitched in tandem they never would, and even if we had not by this time made concessions to what at first strikes most Westerners as the “idiotic” Chinese way of doing their hauling, we must certainly have done so here. Pheasants almost as tame as chickens fed in the kind of heather and brown grass covering the lower slopes by which we approached. Terraces and caves had for a time died out; sure-footed men came down sheer paths with bundles of dry brush that would be an unusual and a welcome addition to the straw and dung fuel of the region. The range itself was made up of bare hills without a sign of bush or tree except the rows of now somewhat stunted willows which still escorted the wildly zigzagging road. There were many short cuts, heart breaking if your mule was so small or so tired that the carrying of the empty saddle up such a slope seemed work enough for him. On foot it was a stiff climb of some two hours’ duration which brought back memories of my Andean days that were not unpleasant. But here there was a constant sense of security, not to say of self-indulgence, in the knowledge that I was closely followed by ample food and a cook, and best of all, by a bed.
Donkey-loads of joss-sticks in two big square packs to each animal carefully picked their way down from the summit. The view from this showed a gashed and gnarled, a haphazard and truly chaotic world, monotonously yet beautifully light brown in color, to the faint edges of the far horizon. Over the top, coolies carrying whole chests of drawers on the ends of their balancing poles came swinging up the swift descent almost as if it were level ground. Once or twice before we had met the “fast mail” hurrying eastward, and now we came upon it again, jog-trotting over the mountains. Two men in the early prime of physical life, with a bundle of mail-bags at each end of the poles over their shoulders and a square glass lantern lashed on somewhere, are all this consists of in interior China. They carry some eighty pounds each in relays of twenty to thirty miles made at surprisingly good speed and on the second day return with a similar load, all for ten or twelve dollars “Mex” a month, depending on their length of service. Few postal systems are more reliable than that of China; and even though its high officials are mainly Europeans (this time the word is not meant to include Americans) no small credit should be given to the poorly paid coolies who are the chief links in the service in many parts of the country. Letters mailed in Peking a week after we left there were awaiting us when we reached Lanchow—for the coolie “fast mail” travels night and day; and the loss of anything posted is perhaps the rarest complaint heard even from those foreign residents who have developed into chronic grumblers against anything Chinese. Other mail-matter, up to a limited weight, may also be sent by letter-post, at increased postage; the bulk of it goes by long trains of pack-mules, such as we had already several times passed, at an average of twenty-five to thirty miles a day.
There were a few patches of snow, and a region somewhat more prosperous-looking, in the Chinese sense, over the range, with a more solid, reddish soil, though all was dreary brown and utterly bare with autumn now. Cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, fat-tailed sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, not to mention blue clouds of pigeons, were everywhere. Yet the people seemed to live as miserably as ever, wholly without cleanliness, comfort, or plenty; and before long we found ourselves surrounded again by broken, swirling loess. Such regions confirmed the theory that man is made of dust; the children looked as if they had just been finished, and not yet polished off.
The dreariness, the dismal lifelong existence of the great mass of Chinese seemed only emphasized by such scenes as a pair of blind minstrels entertaining a village by beating together resonant sticks and singsonging endless national ballads or ancient legends. Nothing whatever of the myriad simple enjoyments of more fortunate peoples, not even grass to sit on and trees to sit under, lightens their bare-earth-dwelling lot. Yet few peoples show themselves more contented with what they have, perhaps because discontent increases with possessions and possibilities. Lofty philosophers there are who, though nothing could induce them to spend a night out of reach of a hot bath, commend to us the contentment with little, the patience under deficiencies, of the Chinese. These are virtues, no doubt, up to a certain point; beyond it the traveler far afield in China comes to the conclusion they become a curse, and the Chinese surely have in many things passed this limit.
Two blind minstrels entertaining a village by singsonging interminable national ballads and legends, to which they keep time by beating together resonant sticks of hard wood
The boys and girls of western China are “toughened” by wearing nothing below the waist and only one ragged garment above it, even in midwinter
