Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

In Chinese villages theatrical performances are usually a community undertaking, a way of spending the accumulated funds of this or that communal scheme, which it would of course be foolish to squander in building schools or cleaning the streets. Sometimes it is a treat offered by or forced from some prominent citizen, sometimes a sort of fine exacted from a neighboring village with which there has been a quarrel. That Chinese “actors” wandering through the provinces do not live in steam-heated hotels or ride in Pullman cars need scarcely be emphasized; indeed there is a strong suspicion from as far away as the outer edge of the audience that time and opportunity and inclination to remove the evidences of long cart-road travel very, very seldom coincide. But then, back in the interior players are still rated almost in the coolie class, however much they may suggest the romance of life to gaping yokels.

We actually saw a man mending the road next day; that is, he was chopping out pieces of sandstone from between deep ruts in a very narrow gully, though he may merely have been gathering them for his own use. It had been a crisp, brilliant morning, more pleasant to walk than to ride, white smoke rising from a mud town across a great gorge ahead that would otherwise probably never have been distinguished from the brown-yellow hillside on which it hung. Perhaps a distant mule-bell faintly reached the ear, a pair of coolies on the sky-line caught the eye, and that might be all for long distances except the tumbled verdureless immensity. That day we clambered over a two-thousand-meter pass, then caught a great crack in the earth, along the high edge of which the road went until mid-afternoon, prosperous hills on either hand, and tilted farm-yards surrounded by high mud walls, into which we could look down as from an airplane. The earth had grown harder, a bit less friable than pure loess, though still without a suggestion of stone, and casting itself if anything in still more fantastic formations. Boys herding sheep or goats, and muleteers plodding behind their animals, sang on far-away mountain-sides snatches of song that sounded more Western than Chinese. Always a chaotic world of impossibly sculptured cliffs and incredible hollows unrolled itself before us. Now and again the road crawled across some great earth bridge, in constructing which the hand of man had taken no part, over a vast chasm but an insignificant stream; in some places it had fallen away into another of those breathless abysses, to skirt along the sheer edge of which seemed foolhardy even on foot. Yet all manner of Chinese travel, our own carts included, toiled serenely over these spots, apparently quite oblivious of the fact that the outer wheels more than once dropped to the hub down the side of the mighty precipice. Now and again surely some one must have gone over it with a piece of the crumbling road; perhaps the others burned a little joss at the nearest ruined mud temple and dropped a few “cash” into the big bronze kettle-gong the old beggar priest so constantly beats out in front of it, but certainly they did nothing else to be spared a similar fate on their next journey.

However, it is not true that the Chinese are utterly incapable of learning by experience. In this earthquake country, where living in caves proved so disastrous, they had certainly come out of them. But they were conservative in architecture as in other things, and the new mud huts, set as far out from the dreaded mountain-sides as possible, wherever inhabitants remained, were built in exactly the same shape as the caves, with an arched mud roof and the general appearance of having been dug out of the mountain and carried to the new setting. Such innovations will no doubt continue to be erected in this region until a new generation has forgotten and prefers to tempt fate again rather than go to the extra labor of building houses where it is so much easier to dig them.

Speaking of building, a very false impression prevails in the Western world as to Chinese structures. Because of their scores of centuries of existence and their tendency to cling to old things, many of us have assumed that the Chinese people build for posterity. Quite the contrary is the case. The Chinese, one is constantly being impressed, have their chief interest in their ancestors, or themselves, not in their descendants. Their coffins are made of mighty slabs of wood that have much to do with the crime of deforestation; they may not only spend all they have for the funeral of a father but often bankrupt themselves for a generation. But their houses are the cheapest possible structures, almost wholly made of the earth of the fields—the only material left, to be sure, in many regions. Mud bricks, mud and straw walls, mud k’angs in place of bed, chair, divan, and table—even the roof-tiles are merely a better baked form of mud. Nor is it only the humble homes that are reduced to this material. The dwellings of men of wealth, the palaces of the bygone dynasties, the very Temple of Heaven in Peking, the Great Wall itself, are impermanent structures largely put together with wet earth which is a sad substitute indeed for cement. It is as if, having an unlimited supply of dirt-cheap labor and a great paucity of good materials, the Chinese find something reprehensible in building too solidly, a waste of valuable substance as against inexpensive toil, perhaps a feeling that to build too well to-day will be unjust to those who will want work to-morrow. This point of view pervades everything, from imperial palaces to the tiniest of children’s toys, from temples and pagodas to water-jars and mud jugs; almost all of them are flimsy or easily destructible, whether by use, time, or the elements. The result is that the country from beginning to end is in a constant state of half-ruin or dismal disrepair, for the average life of most structures is so short that while one is being built up again another is sure to have fallen down.

In contrast to the endless processions of wheat-wagons and the like of a few days before, we met only two carts from dawn to sunset, and not many foot-travelers. Back in the crowded loess cañons it had been a pleasure to watch the expertness with which our chief cartman manipulated his loosely joined mules and awkward conveyance, taking advantage of every little break in the line of traffic, of every hesitation on the part of others to forge ahead, and keeping almost at our heels when such a feat seemed impossible. Here where travel was light his expertness was still needed to escape the many pitfalls of the road, and still the carts came close to keeping the pace we set. This was not breathless, to be sure; ninety li a day almost as regularly as the days dawned—and walled cities or at least large villages seemed to have been exactly spaced to accommodate travel at that rate. Our cartmen might have done their best, anyway, but the promise of a dollar cumshaw each for every day gained on the regular schedule assured it. This obviated arguments, worry, and a dozen other possible difficulties, and if our drivers insisted that it was better to spend the night at such a town rather than attempt to push on to the next we could take their word for it, which of itself was quite worth the extra money. In striking contrast to one of the serious drawbacks to cross-country travel in South America one could depend upon most road information. Ask almost any one how many li it was to such a place, and the answer usually was not only quick but fairly accurate. The finest thing about the Chinese li is that you need not worry about crossing a mountain or any other piece of unusually bad going; the li are shortened accordingly, and so many hours of steady plodding will bring you to your destination irrespective of conditions along the way.

Our road at length went down into the great cañon-bed of a little meandering stream that spent its days, and its nights, too, no doubt, in carrying away the cliffs which towered high above it, as they fell in clouds of dust and dissolved into silt. A few hours along this brought us to the rather striking town of Houei-ning, in a wide spot of the river valley with hills piling high above it close on every side. These and two distinct city walls enclosed what were virtually two towns, one somewhat more open and seeming to harbor an unusual number of religious edifices, the other crowded, with very narrow streets, still further darkened by many fantastic old wooden p’ai-lous. There were suggestions that the first was the Mohammedan quarter. Houei-ning was also repairing its walls, had indeed built a big new gate, and was now topping off the inner and principal defense with cream-colored brick parapets, loopholes and all. Pure mud was the only mortar, except between the topmost bricks, and the “masons” were small boys and old men. Boys barely eight years old were carrying great loads of bricks; those of ten or twelve had already been graduated into bricklayers. Almost all of them had glowing red cheeks, but their faces and hands were worse chapped than any one has ever seen, perhaps, outside China, where long sleeves are the poor substitutes for gloves or mittens, and hands toughened, not to say split and blackened, by exposure not only endure greater cold but water several degrees hotter than can our own.

This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest

A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to escort us through the earthquake district, though whether for fear of bandits, out of mere respect for our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a few coppers which he could not give them himself, was not clear