Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

In a moment of good-hearted thoughtlessness the major sent his card and our respects to the magistrate of Tsin-ching, who was of course of too low rank actually to be called upon. The latter acknowledged the high honor paid him by sending an official to ask whether he could do anything for us, and though we assured him that there was no way in which our contentment with the world could possibly be improved, we found next morning that he had detailed four soldiers to accompany us. Whether this was out of sheer respect for our rank, from actual fear that bandits might attack us, or because the soldiers needed the few coppers which we might, and which he could or would not, give them, was not clear; but we rather suspected the last-named motive. They were a cheery and picturesque detail. No two of them had two garments that were uniform; their rifles bore a resemblance to some harmless substitute for a weapon, hand-made by some very clumsy youth half a century ago, and habitually misused ever since. In place of the usual strap, each had a string by which to hang the gun over his shoulder, and the bore was such that the cartridges, if there were any, must have been of just about the right diameter for our shot-gun. One of these merry protectors was so filled with song, of a strictly Chinese nature, that had he waited a bit longer to abandon me and give his precious protection to some other part of our straggling expedition he would certainly have had impressed upon him the rights and privileges of extraterritoriality. At the noonday halt we told this escort that, while they were men of whom any army might be proud, we could not dream of putting them to the task of tramping through the earthquake country ahead merely to defend our unworthy selves; moreover, we mentioned, we should be glad to give them at once the little present that they would get at nightfall if they continued. This last was evidently a strong argument, for we had the satisfaction of seeing them accept the suggestion with thanks and alacrity.

In many parts of Kansu, we learned before we left it, there was much the same old story of the inert weight of military pressure as elsewhere in China. The soldiers in many districts were not paid, but were allowed to shift for themselves upon the population. In theory this escort of ours received four thousand “cash” a month! But they depended much more upon such windfalls as ourselves, upon catching their own people gambling or trafficking in opium and confiscating their belongings, or upon foraging pure and simple among the helpless country people. Those groups which had strength and audacity enough called upon chambers of commerce and similar organizations for “loans” without interest—and of course without principal, so far as the lenders are concerned; others wandered the country until they found similar openings to which their strength was equal.

Even before we reached Tsin-ching there had been many signs of the great earthquake that had befallen this district; but in a land naturally so split and gashed and broken beyond repair many of these had passed almost unnoticed. Beyond that battered town, however, the chaotic world on every hand impressed upon us all day long that we were in the heart of the earthquake district, in so far at least as the main route to Lanchow passes through it. Even worse damage was done, people said, in districts off the road, but what we saw was enough to make it clear that the big fish which sits bolt upright and holds the earth between its fore fins had wagged his tail at the wickedness of mankind to excellent advantage. This cause of the tragedy and the Chinese cosmogony it involves were, by the way, firmly and unquestioningly believed not only by our cart-drivers, who were in every-day matters paragons of common sense, but by more than one Chinese of much higher caste. Only Chang, who claimed to be so fervent a Christian as not even to believe in “squeeze,” laughed at this view of the catastrophe; and he could not give any other reasonable explanation for it.

Evidently such things had happened before in this part of the world, for not only does the broken and fissured loess country require some such interpretation but often pieces of old roof-tile protruded from the cliff-sides of the sunken roads a hundred feet or more below the surface. But this was the first quake within the memory of living inhabitants, and apparently within their traditions, though the region, and the inhabitants, too, for that matter, have been trembling ever since. The catastrophe came suddenly, without the slightest warning, at 7:30 in the evening of December 16, 1920, and had taken its appalling toll and gone almost before the survivors could catch their breath. Six hundred thousand people at least lost their lives; the official figures are one million, but the Chinese are prone to exaggerate, just as the Mohammedans habitually refuse to give accurate information in anything resembling a census. How many were injured is suggested by the fact that earthquake victims were still wandering into the hospital at Pingliang when we were there almost two years later. But cave-dwelling, especially in so frail a soil as this, is admirably designed to make an earthquake effective, and there is no computing how many were simply buried alive without any actual physical injury being done them.

The missionaries as well as the Chinese of Kansu assert that the earthquake was a blessing in disguise—some of them even recognize in it a direct interference from heaven with earthly designs; for a General Ma and three hundred Mohammedan leaders were killed in a mosque in which, say their antagonists, they were preparing for another great Moslem rebellion, to begin the very next day. Some went so far as to say that an army of many thousand men, ready to begin its work at dawn, was buried hundreds of feet deep in a great ravine in which it was encamped. These things may not be strictly true, but there seems to be little doubt that, but for the earthquake, there would have been a Mohammedan uprising very shortly afterward. Since the great Chinese Moslem rebellion of 1862, in which eighty thousand non-Moslems are reputed to have been slaughtered, and in which certainly large cities and great districts were so devastated that they have not recovered to this day, there have been three smaller revolts against Chinese rule, so that although Kansu may not recall her earlier earthquakes she has by no means forgotten the terrors which this one is credited with having averted.

The more pietistic of the missionaries make much of the belief that, while many thousands of the wicked followers of the false prophet were buried in their caves or dashed to pieces in their ravines, not a Christian was killed. One by one, it was said, they straggled into the mission stations with stories of the untold damage that had taken place all about them, but weeping reverently at the miracle by which they and theirs had in every case escaped injury and even property loss. Without a discount for the unconscious exaggerations of overworked and over-pious apostles, such a fact would not be absolute and final proof of wrath of God against the Moslems for having picked the wrong faith, for while there are several million of them in the province, the number of Christians would not entirely preclude the possibility of their having been spared by mere chance rather than by divine intercession. In Pingliang, for instance, after thirty years’ work there are fifty baptized Christians; in another district two hundred converts are claimed among two hundred thousand families.

In the stiff, short climb through a ruined world an hour or two out of Tsin-ching, trees that had once shaded the road were hanging so precariously over great abysses that even this fuel-starved people did not dare to try to cut them. Here and there great pieces of the road, big willows, poplars, and all, had been pitched pell-mell over the edge. Yet villages still lived on lumps of earth half broken off from the rest of the world and ready to collapse into mighty chasms below. The mountains had indeed “walked,” as the complicated yet sometimes childishly simple Chinese language has it. Whole sides of terraced peaks had slipped off and carried the road intact, trees and all, half a mile away, had bottled up deep-green unnatural lakes at the bottom of great holes in the loess earth—to become what; a future menace or mere salt?—unless released by the hand of man. Sometimes half a dozen mountains had all danced together and left the brown loess churned up as if it had been boiled, with a new self-made “road” and the telegraph-wire on new poles stretching away across it, yet without the suggestion of an inhabitant, nothing but a deathly stillness for long distances, rarely broken perhaps by a magpie whose gay manners were utterly out of keeping with the desolate scene. Farther to the north, they say, one may still see shocks of harvested grain rotted in the fields, where the population was entirely killed off and none has come to take its place. Sometimes only half the terraced mountain-side had come down to overwhelm the tree-lined highway, or to bury a village as deeply as beneath the sea, the other half still supporting an uninjured hamlet below, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb this quiet, bucolic existence. Ends of the mud walls of former villages protruding from the yellow chaos were often the only suggestion that human beings had once lived and bred and died there. Sometimes the wide road bordered by its venerable willows ended suddenly against a mighty bank of convulsed earth where the mountain had piled high over it, the new route clambering away over the débris with that indifference of youth to the experiences of old age that keeps the world moving onward instead of crouched at the roadside weeping over its disasters. In several places hundred-yard pieces of the old haphazard highway, twenty yards wide, had been gently picked up and set at right angles to its former course, without so much as a crack in its dozen mule-paths and the narrow strips of turf between them.

Up over this broken and wrecked world came toward noon twenty coolies trotting under heavy loads of antlers oscillating from their pole-burdened shoulders. Wapiti and other deer are still found in the high mountains of Kansu, but the Chinese demand for their horns, preferably in the velvet, as medicine, is sure to exterminate them as completely as wanton destruction has the forests, probably pine and hemlock, that once covered all these tamed and terraced ranges. There is something strikingly un-Western, something akin to our own medieval ancestors, about the Chinese temperament in such matters, when they will continue century after century to pay fabulous prices—a good pair of elk-horns in the velvet will bring as much as fifty dollars gold in the large cities—for something of entirely imaginary value, without ever thinking of attempting to find out whether it is really good for anything or not. Their forebears thought so, and that settles the question. If once a custom can get a place with the Chinese, it need have little worry about holding its position, no matter how inefficient, useless, or even harmful it may become.

Well on in the afternoon we came upon a beautiful blue-green lake imprisoned in a ravine, miles long and with a side arm of unknown length, all in a barren brown world without any other form of water. One might have fancied that the people roundabout would have been delighted to have it, and thank the earthquake for blocking the tiny stream that had formed it; but what do the people of Kansu know of the beauty of water, or of its usefulness, beyond what is required for their own and their animals’ gullets? So, with the help of American relief funds, they had cut a great gap through the fallen hill at the head of the lake—how queer that Kansu had to be paid by people on the other side of the earth for repairing their own land!—to assure themselves against being flooded out by such unnatural lakes when they rise above their barriers or seep away through the loose loess soil.

We spent that night at the upper end of this lake in Tsing-kiang-yi, the town worst treated by the earthquake of any along the way. It was split into many fantastic forms, and threshing-floors had grown up in what were merely mighty earthquake cracks. This did not keep the inhabitants, however, from enjoying life in the orthodox Chinese fashion. A theatrical troupe had come to set up a makeshift stage of poles and matting on six-foot legs in a corner of a filthy open lot overhanging the mighty gorge into which much of the town had disappeared two years before, and most of Tsing-kiang-yi and the surrounding country stood crowded together in front of it. There is a difference only in degree between the theatrical performances given on such outdoor contrivances at country fairs and on village market-days and those in the most imposing theaters in Peking. The same nerve-racking “music” is torn off in hundred-yard strips by men at one side of the stage, who conduct themselves as freely all through the performance as if they were peanut-sellers in the market-place. There are the same more or less mythological beings in astonishing costumes, somewhat more soiled, surmounted by masked or painted faces, and these in turn by strange creations in wigs and head-dresses poorly joined to the wearers, who saunter out at intervals from the partly concealing mat dressing-room behind the stage proper and screech for long periods in the selfsame distressing falsetto with which Chinese theater-goers everywhere allow themselves to be tortured. The same property-man wanders incessantly about the stage, setting it to rights or bringing anything needed, like a nonchalant coolie at work in a coal-yard; the same unwashed ragamuffins, carelessly stuffed into absurd and multicolored garments which make them generals, gods, court attendants, or anything else the play may call for, are herded on and off in the wooden manner of “supers” the world over. Small boys—not to mention full-grown ones—clamber about the hasty structure in their eagerness to make the most of one of the rare treats of a dismal lifetime, even sitting in the edges of the stage itself, to the annoyance apparently only of a stray foreigner with his own queer notions of stage propriety. Down below, the standing audience may not behave with what the Western world would call rapt attention, but it has its own restless, free-for-all way of showing its delight.