Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The “fast mail” of interior China is carried by a pair of coolies, in relays of about twenty miles each, made at a jog-trot with about eighty pounds of mail apiece. They travel night and day and get five or six American dollars a month

A bit of the main street of Taing-Ning, showing the damage wrought by the earthquake of two years before to the “devil screen” in front of the local magistrate’s yamen

We came at length to Long-te, surrounded by a big mud wall, but with little except ruins inside. There were great mud buildings spilled into heaps of broken earth, threshing-floors where men and women were tossing grain and chaff into the wind, open fields, many straw-stacks, ponds frozen over, all within the walls, and still plenty of room for the shrunken population. For the earthquake had been serious here. The big city gates were wracked and twisted, sometimes split from top to bottom, in one case overthrown entirely. Mat and cloth tents and makeshift canvas buildings occupied what had evidently once been the business street, and here a market-fair was in full confusion. Some of the toughest, dirtiest coolies I had yet seen were packed in a soiled-blue squirming mass, which seemed to be mainly Moslem, about an improvised gambling-table. Two dice in a porcelain box, which was overturned in a saucer that was twirled, constituted the game. It might have been swift if the evil-eyed promoters had not always waited a long time for more stakes to be laid on the squared and numbered table before lifting the box. Each of these had his coolie valet behind him, who alternately held a cup of tea or the mouthpiece of a long pipe to the lips of his master, who kept both eyes and fingers on the absorbing business in hand. There were grooved “cash” measuring-boards—such as our coolie at home used in washing clothes—to obviate the counting of the money, mainly mere brass, yet totaling large stakes for Chinese countrymen of the poorest class. How intent they were on the whims of fate was shown by the astonishing fact that I stood for several moments packed in with them, without the least notice being taken of me; which did not hinder a mighty mob of men and boys gathering at my heels and raising a great cloud of dust close behind me all over town.

Having won the toss during my absence—so severely honest were my companions—I found myself installed, when I reached it, in the star room of Long-te’s best inn. That is, most of my possessions were heaped about the uneven earth floor, and the thigh-high platform covered with a thin reed mat which the Chinese call a k’ang, of a mud room perhaps eight by fourteen feet in size. Chang was always busy enough with other matters to have it understood that we make our own beds. Such inn rooms are made entirely of mud,—walls, k’ang, and all, except for the soot-blackened beams and thatch above. Sometimes they are so small that an army cot would not go even lengthwise on the k’ang, which was usually too narrow to take two, either crosswise or side by side. The Chinese, of course, sleep on the k’ang itself, which is heated, at least in theory, by a crude flue beneath it; but the foreigner with a prejudice against stone-hard beds and, in warmer weather, against those myriad little bedfellows of which the sons of Han seem almost fond, will find a folding cot easily worth its weight in gold on a trip of any length into the interior. It may cost him more for lodging, for half a dozen Chinese could find plenty of room on a k’ang that would barely hold his cot and leave him space to undress and get into it; but as the rent of the whole room will probably not exceed ten cents gold, unless his “boy” lets the innkeeper succumb to his natural inclination to double or treble it out of respect for “rich” foreigners, he may find the extravagance worth the privacy. Even in their homes the overwhelming majority of Chinese sleep packed together on just such a more or less heated mud platform, so that a cot would be to them not a luxury but a senseless nuisance.

The procedure night after night hardly varied in the slightest degree. When we had driven into an inn yard and Chang had found rooms or caves opening off it which he considered fit to house his “masters,” the carts were unhitched and all but our heavier belongings unloaded. The mules had their unfailing roll in the dust, raising mighty clouds of it that penetrated even the k’ang mats, rose and shook themselves surprisingly clean—so effective for them is this substitute for a showerbath which was denied us—and fell to munching their well earned chopped straw and dried peas in their broad, shallow wicker baskets or in the mud mangers. The cartmen perhaps dust themselves with a horsetail or some rooster-feathers mounted on a stick, and take up the important question of getting their own food. This is indeed important even if it consists only of a bowl or two of some cheap native cookery, since with the rare exception of a lump of hot dough or a copper-worth of something else from peddler or shop along the way, and a scanty mid-morning lunch, they have not eaten since the night before. Meanwhile shrieks of “Gwan-shih-ti!” rend the air. The gwan-shih-ti—if a slightly varied pronunciation is easier, “John-dirty” will do quite as well, and be so exactly descriptive as to be no tax whatever on the memory—is the male maid of all work about a Chinese inn, though his title is somewhat more honorable than either his duties or his income. Chang needs the gwan-shih-ti at once to build fires under our k’angs, to bring water, to tell the cook where he can do his cooking, to bring us a pair of those narrow wooden saw-horses which pass for chairs in rural China to sit on outdoors if there is still daylight enough to read by, to do a hundred other errands “quai-quai!” that is, instantly if not sooner, which is the way Chang learned during his Peking service that foreigners always expected to be served. Meanwhile there are reëchoing screams of “Gwan-shih-ti!” from the muleteers, who want this or that, shrieks of “Gwan-shih-ti!” from the innkeeper himself, who has a few errands with which to keep him out of mischief, again perhaps from other newly arrived travelers, who want to know where in —— in the already crowded inn they are going to sleep, until one might imagine that the poor fellow would get flustered, even in spite of being Chinese.

By this time “Gwan-shih-ti” has probably succeeded in coaxing the straw and dung poked into the k’ang flues to burn; and we have begun bitterly to regret asking to have the k’ang lighted. For any Chinese inn in winter is an absolute refutation of the old theory that wherever there is smoke there is fire. How often have we not groped our way into our mud-built lodgings resolved to make up our beds at last or die in the attempt, only to come gasping and clawing into the open air a moment later—and yet have waited in vain for the slightest suggestion of warmth to mitigate all this suffering. K’ang-flues seldom have any vent except the wide-open mouths for the feeding of fuel inside the room itself, and the volume of smoke that can pour forth from them is out of all keeping with either time or combustibles. Yet the Chinese seem content to go on for centuries more in this time-dishonored way, though they need go no farther afield than Korea to copy an example of heating the floor from the kitchen and letting the smoke out of chimneys at the other end of the house, without loss of fuel and without turning their homes into soot-dripping smoke-houses.

Eventually we drove out enough smoke to come in and make our beds. To what had seemed an impenetrable sleeping-bag from Maine I had been obliged to add a sheepskin lining in Pingliang, and under or over this went every coat and blanket, and even my odds and ends of clothing, for barely did the sun set when the mountain cold came down like a blast direct from the north pole. Long before supper was ready it was often so bitter, in contrast to an almost hot day, that we were tempted to get into bed at once; and on the homeward trip we did, eating off our coverlets. But barely were we settled in such cases than Chang took all the joy out of life by appearing with the wash-basin forced upon us by the leader of the “Third Asiatic Expedition”—then in winter quarters in Peking, where such primitive things are not needed—and the canvas bucket of hot water, whereupon “face” at least required us to crawl out and perform ablutions enough to deceive ourselves into thinking that we had removed all that day’s dust and grime.

Or, perhaps, thanks to our recommendable habit of starting every morning without fail well before daylight, we arrived while the sun was still high enough above the horizon to see something of the native life of the town. We did not need to go out looking for this; it came to us, in all its impurity. Chinese clad in dirty blue and in every stage of undress came with trays of disgusting cooked chickens with their heads fast under one wing and their straddling legs still intact, with boiled sweet potatoes and steaming white balls of dough, with slabs of roasted pork and scores of other native favorites, all equally innocent of even the knowledge that hygiene and cleanliness exist. Not even the Parisians buy as much of their food already cooked as do the Chinese, and there was always great wonder shown that we did not fall upon these tempting delicacies at once, at least to bridge over the vacuum until our own curious viands should be ready. The varied conditions under which these were prepared we surmised rather than knew, for we religiously spared our feelings and our appetites by never unnecessarily intruding upon the cook’s domain. The natives did, however, whenever it was possible, and no doubt set down such attempts to approach cleanliness as Chang and the cook actually observed out of our sight to the incredible idiosyncrasies, not so much of foreigners—for some of them had seen Russian refugees eat—as of men of incomputable wealth, which the mere sight of our belongings, or even of our beds, showed us to be. As a matter of fact, we lived largely on the country, and might have done so entirely had we been content with a simpler diet. Chickens, eggs, the principal vegetables, fruits, sugar, and the like could always be had, on the out-journey at least, every two or three days, and now and then there were local specialties in addition. But such delicacies as jam, butter, cheese, chocolate, coffee, cocoa, and their kindred could only be had from our steamer-trunks on the tail-end of the carts, while our bread supply depended on foresight and the kindness of the rare foreigners along the way.

It is not a bad idea to bring along a few simple picture-books on such a journey. The boys who drift into the inn-yards are invariably keenly interested in any hints of the strange “outside-country” from which you come, and sometimes quite sharp-witted; so that not only will they get pleasure and instruction out of the pictures, but the traveler will learn many Chinese words from them, which will be of use perhaps some day if he ever finds himself stranded without a “boy” in some town that happens to speak the same dialect. However, all tales as to its narrow limits notwithstanding, we found Mandarin, or Pekingese, or whatever it is that one soon picks up a bit of in the capital, as generally understood on all this journey as could be expected of what was no doubt our atrocious pronunciation. Peasants and local coolies sometimes shook their heads, either because they could not understand us or thought we were speaking some foreign tongue and refused to try; but anything like a real knowledge of the general language, or that very similar one of the masses of Peking, would have been quite sufficient in any of the provinces we visited.