At last supper would be announced, with whosoever’s k’ang that showed any signs of heat as a dining-table, and six-inch-wide saw-horses as chairs. By this time the mountain cold would be like ice-packs applied to the marrow of the bones—if that is anatomically possible—and unless we watched the door, if there was one, all manner of Chinese odds and ends, even ladies so consumed by curiosity as sometimes to forget the stern rules of their sex, would gradually replace it by a bank of gaping faces, the boldest of which might even find some poor excuse to come clear inside. Perhaps the police would arrive, though this was rare, with two or three huge and gaily decorated paper lanterns, to ask for our visiting-cards and bow their way ceremoniously out again into the weirdly flickering night. Then one last brief sortie with a toothbrush and into our luxurious beds, perhaps to read and smoke a bit by the American lantern that we succeeded in getting and keeping oil enough to use one night out of three. For however much we paid for oil, it never seemed to be real kerosene, and the Chinese genius for flimsy constructions had evolved in place of a can a slightly baked mud jug that broke at the least lurching of a cart and even seeped through upon the back of the mafu who was finally sentenced to carry it. Sleep always came long before the end of a cigar, however, and never have I enjoyed more sound and satisfying slumber than on most of those Kansu nights, in spite of legs, accustomed to another form of travel, aching from ten or twelve hours in the saddle, and though one might hear the mules just outside munching their hard peas off and on all through the night. The drivers always got up between two and three o’clock to feed them, and then one might hear the steady rump! rump! of the chopping of straw as one man fed it to the big hinged knife everywhere used for this purpose, and another manipulated the knife itself. Sometimes this wicked implement has other uses, as in one village along our route where the peasants captured a bandit and, not caring to make the long journey to the hsien seat, with the risk of his escape or rescue, had calmly beheaded him with a straw-knife.
But all supreme pleasures have an untimely end, and before the delicious night seemed well begun Chang would come to light the lantern, or the candle, or the string wick floating in the half of a broken mud saucer of thick native oil which Chinese inns furnish, and to break the bitter news that it was five o’clock—or four, as the case might be. Stifling our curses as becomes married men who should at least have reached years of discretion and self-control, we would crawl from the tropical luxuriance of our sleeping-bags into the arctic iceberg of early morning with a pretense of bravery that deceived neither ourselves nor each other, and lose more breath than time in getting inside our icy daytime garments. A hot breakfast larger than the full daily consumption of all but the wealthiest Chinese, however, always brought about a great change in our spirits. In and about the yard would rise noisy disputes in which could be heard endless repetitions of the word “ch’ien,” which means money, or, more exactly, brass “cash,” and when at length these had subsided our expedition would trail away again into the darkness. As nearly as I made out, we paid between one and two hundred coppers a night as our share of the inn expenditures, which included our alleged rooms, heat, and light, k’ang space somewhere for our retinue, and various and sundry other charges exclusive of food for the mules and their attendants, which was not our affair. But I defy any Occidental to make head or tail of the intricacies of paying a bill at a Chinese inn. There seemed to be a “straw charge” on our merely human part of the bill, and each kettle of water was so many coppers, and we were expected to pay for the right to let the carts stand all night in the inn-yard; or at least Chang informed us that gentlemen always did and seemed on the verge of tears that might have resulted in loss of “face” for him and loss of our chief link with the outside world for us when we opened for discussion the fact that our contract with the muleteers required them to pay everything having to do with their part of the expedition. Nor was that all, by any means; for the Chinese seem to like nothing better than the utmost complications in money matters. Perhaps this is because so many of them depend for their livelihood on the odd coppers and “cash” that are chipped off in the process of making impossible adjustments in the chaos of exchange and incompatible coins and intricate charges, modified by vociferous bargainings, which are never alike in two parts of the country. Possibly it is merely because they love complexities and gratuitous difficulties for their own sake—as their language, for example, suggests, especially in its written form—and which have grown up during the hundred centuries of social intercourse that lie behind them.
CHAPTER XXIII
WHERE THE FISH WAGGED HIS TAIL
Whatever the dreadful hardships of our journey, they would have been increased by at least one had the loess country been as dry and arid as it looked, and thus compelled us to travel by camel-train. For, all trite humor about the ship-like motion of that worthy animal aside, he is an objectionable companion because he is an inveterate and incorrigible night-hawk. Or perhaps that word approaches the slanderous when applied to him, for the cause of his night-hawking is quite the opposite of that of his human prototype. The camel prowls about in the small hours because he can eat only by day and, given that unusual idiosyncrasy, must work by night. Frequently the beginning of our day’s journey was broken by a long camel-train looming up out of the first thin white light of dawn, the dull bells gently booming, each “string” of six or eight or ten camels led by a bearded man of red-brown, slightly surly features that often looked more Arabic than Chinese. This impression was increased by long white sheep- or goatskin cloaks, turned wool in, surmounted by what seemed to be turbans, though at closer sight and in the full light of day these last proved to be the dirty-white skullcaps of felt to which the Chinese Mohammedans are largely addicted, perhaps wound round with a soiled towel of cheap crash that is often the traveling coolie’s only concession to the worship of soap and water. One must take care, however, not to consider white caps and “Hwei-Hwei” as synonymous. For many a Mohammedan wears black, quite like his fellow-Chinese, while a wide white band about the cap is a sign, not of belief in the Prophet of Medina, but of mourning for father or grandfather. But, to come back to the camels: it would have required no great strain on the imagination to fancy oneself in Arabia as these endless lines of silent-footed beasts stalked disdainfully past in the half-lighted defiles, though one would have been forced to overlook such minor details as their two humps instead of one. Often we heard the muffled booming of their bells as they went by in the night; but by day they were seldom seen, unless it was kneeling in crowded contentment in an inn-yard or sauntering packless about some hillside thinly dotted with dead-brown tufts of coarse grass, under the care of a cat-napping driver or two.
A wide valley we had been following for some time narrowed until it drove the road high up above the river, whence it came down again into another fertile vale containing many graves and the city of Tsin-ching. There was an unusual animation about Tsin-ching. For though it had been more nearly destroyed by the earthquake than Long-te and other gloomy collections of ruins that lay behind us, it had many brand-new buildings, and great gangs of men and boys were rebuilding the city wall, quite irrespective of the fact that it was what should have been a quiet Sunday afternoon. Custom, fear of bandits, of another Mohammedan rebellion, of evil spirits, perhaps of cold winds, and no doubt the laudable desire of the authorities for an opportunity to make some “squeeze” that will be understood by many of our own city dwellers, seem to be the principal causes of this anachronistic repair of city walls; and the strongest of all these, probably, is custom. This one might have inferred from the fact that this one was being rebuilt exactly in the style in vogue centuries ago, with the crenelated top all the several miles around it pierced by thousands of little loopholes convenient in medieval warfare. But in China there is still some practical value to a city wall if it has gates that can be locked and is not so badly ruined that any one with a little diligence can find a place to climb over it. For it is a real protection against bandit raids if they are not too strong, against tough characters in general, and it is not without its use in those quarrels between towns which sometimes become serious. Besides, Tsin-ching seemed to be a kind of anti-Mohammedan stronghold, for there were few Moslems in town—the prevalence of pigs would have told us that, even if the human inhabitants had not—and who can tell when the next Islamite rebellion will sweep over Kansu?
The only foreigners in Tsin-ching or for many miles around were two Swedish ladies, one of them from Minnesota, who had recently established a mission station. They had not yet made any converts, but they had brought about a kinder and more tolerant feeling toward themselves, and toward “outside barbarians” in general, by which they hoped in time to profit. One of the richest and most significant men in town, who began as a declared and ruthless enemy, had sneaked over a few weeks before to let the detested missionaries of the despised sex cure him of an injury which neither the herbs of the local druggist nor the hocus-pocus of the local priests had helped, and, though he scarcely showed gratitude in the Western sense, rumors of the miracle had begun to have their influence. One of the difficulties these missionary ladies, like the few others we met on our journey, had to contend with was that the Chinese women with whom they tried to come in contact, especially in outlying districts, fled at sight of them because they took them to be men. This was largely due to their unbound feet and their skirts in place of ladylike trousers, but, quite aside from these details, there was, indeed, a wide difference both in appearance and manner between these big, vigorous Nordics and the tame little Chinese women.
Exchange-shops with their huge wooden “cash” signs out in front were more than numerous in Tsin-ching, and perhaps they were all needed. There a Mexican dollar was worth 2500 “cash,” but more or less in theory, since both the silver dollar and the brass coins with square holes in them had largely disappeared from circulation. In place of the former there were taels—irregular lumps of silver requiring a pair—or two—of scales for any transaction in which they were involved—and “Lanchow coppers.” Between these two extremes, as formerly between the silver dollar and the “cash,” there was nothing; and if the American, with his convenient little silver coins of fixed value, his unquestioned paper money, and his check-book, will pause a moment to visualize just what this means, he will understand why doing business is a complicated process, and why the streets seem to swarm with exchange-shops in such communities. Fortunately prices—and certainly wages—were low in Tsin-ching. The missionary ladies, who were their own architects, contractors, and bosses in the construction of their mission, had formerly paid their workmen 500 “cash” a day; but recently, food prices having gone up, this had been changed to 310 “cash” and food. It amounted to about the same thing for the ladies, since the two native meals furnished the gangs cost approximately two hundred “cash” a day per man, but they could buy and prepare the food in quantity at considerably less than the men themselves must otherwise have paid in native restaurants, where meals were less sanitary and nourishing. Native bosses got 400 “cash” a day, with food. Skilled carpenters, who need not have been ashamed of the samples of their work which we saw, were on a salary rather than a mere wage basis, as befits their higher caste; that is, they received, besides their food, 10,000 “cash” a month, in other words, fully two American dollars! Correspondingly, the ladies could buy chickens for the equivalent of our nickel, a leg of lamb for little more, and many other things in proportion. On the other hand, they had the task of counting their “cash,” for every string of a thousand was almost sure to be short, perhaps to have only ninety-two or so to the hundred; and even if it was not they had to be sure of that fact before paying the string to some carpenter who might otherwise return half an hour later with visible proof that he had been underpaid. Then recently their troubles had been appreciably increased by the influx of “Lanchow coppers.”
Though the proper place for airing that scandal might be Lanchow itself, there were so many evidences of it before we reached there that clarity requires an earlier mention of it. As in other countries of poor transportation facilities and sluggish circulation, the back-waters of China are in many cases chronically short on coins, particularly on small change, for their interminable transactions. The Tuchun of Kansu, hoping to remedy this difficulty—and incidentally further to obviate the possibility of eventually leaving the province a poorer man than he entered it—hit upon what was to him perhaps a highly original scheme. He called in the “cash” and the rather scarce coppers in circulation, had them melted and mixed, and reissued them as new coin. This would not have been so bad, so atrocious, in fact, if he had actually minted the stuff into money. But what he did do was to give men all over the district the right—at 20,000 “cash” royalty a day, gossip whispered—to resmelt the current coins in their little dung-fire, box-bellows forges, mix in great quantities of sand, and pour the molten result into crude molds, from which issued such a caricature of a coin as has scarcely circulated in the civilized world since the last find of Roman money disappeared into the museums. They are light as glass, give out the ring of a hat-check, are barely legible, vary greatly in design and lettering, with misspelled attempts at English on one side of several styles of them, and are so hopelessly mixed with dross, according to experts, that the bit of metal in them can never again be reclaimed. At first they were made as single coppers, worth ten “cash” each; but when it was discovered that the cost of making a coin was three “cash,” the double copper, or twenty-“cash” piece, was substituted, though with but slight changes either in size or other details.
How a Chinese general, steeped as it were in the intricacies of exchange and familiar since childhood with the daily fluctuations of the money he used, could have overlooked the certainty of a swift decline in value of such alleged coins is hard to understand. Perhaps he realized all this, but lost no sleep over it so long as he got his own rake-off in real money. At any rate, whereas a “good” or “red” copper was valued in Kansu at two hundred or less to the Mexican dollar, and the new ones announce themselves to be worth the same, the latter had already fallen to about seven thousand to the dollar in the exchange-shops of Tsin-ching. Even if this rate had been uniform throughout the province, the situation might have been endurable. But not only did it wildly fluctuate every day, almost every hour; it varied greatly between towns only a few miles apart, with an upward tendency as one approached Lanchow, where the Tuchun’s power was at its height. Long before the borders of the province were reached this oozed away entirely, at least in so far as his experiments in currency and finance went. His autonomous subordinate in Pingliang had refused point-blank to allow the new coinage to enter his district; Liangchow and most other large towns had followed suit, and only within a certain limited area around the provincial capital itself had the Tuchun succeeded in imposing this substitute for what elsewhere was still “red” coppers and stringable “cash.” Where he actually ruled, it meant a heavy fine or a prison sentence to refuse to accept the miserable stuff; but he had little or no influence over the value set upon it by the money-changers. Any one with even a bowing acquaintance with the science of finance need not be told what disasters this condition of affairs brought upon shopkeepers and business men, especially upon those whose stocks were more or less imported from the outside world.
One of the amusing points of the affair was that Liangchow and Pingliang and many another town and district that would not use the stuff themselves were manufacturing vast quantities of the spurious coins and shipping them to Lanchow, without, of course, paying the Tuchun his “rake-off.” It is hard even for the Chinese to outwit the Chinese, and no sooner had the daily royalty rate been set than most coineries within the Tuchun’s influence put on two shifts and worked twenty-four hours a day. Moreover, it is no great task to counterfeit miserable counterfeits, and almost any little cave-village in the loess hills could mold coins to its heart’s content, so long as it could get the bit of copper and brass needed. Transporting the stuff was in itself a problem worthy an expert. “Cash” can at least be strung and hung round the neck, but to carry enough of this new stuff for his immediate wants would have taxed the endurance of any pedestrian above the coolie class. In fact it was a serious matter to others than pedestrians. Every little while we met some traveler, usually a merchant, no doubt, mounted on a mule and followed by a donkey sagging under the weight and noisy with the falsetto rattling of “Lanchow coppers”; and it was no uncommon thing to pass long lines of coolies with big bundles of the new coins oscillating at the ends of their shoulder-poles, jogging eastward, as if the false currency were spreading, like a plague. Indeed the towns toward the end of our outward journey sounded like brass check factories perpetually in the act of taking stock. The latest rumor, as we neared the capital of the province, was that the Tuchun had decided to coin dollars also; “and then,” as a merchant sadly put it, “we will have no money at all left.” However, the harassed people might have cheered themselves up with the hope that the day may come when Lanchow’s despised coppers will be worth their weight in gold among numismatists, for coins cast in a mold are a rarity in this day and generation.