Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old tree-lined highway. In places this was covered hundreds of feet deep for miles; in others it had been carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile or more away

In the earthquake district of western China whole terraced mountain-sides came down and covered whole villages. In the foreground is a typical Kansu farm

Badly hit by the earthquake, Houei-ning was still full of cracks and chasms and ruins, and the “roads” leading down into or out of it seemed in many cases to drop into pitfalls and sometimes entirely to lose themselves, or at least their sense of direction. There were many times as many dead as living inhabitants. The almost golden-yellow landscape of the verdureless mountain slopes about the town were more thickly covered with graves than I could remember ever having seen before, either in China or Korea; the myriads of little conical mounds suggested spatters of raindrops on a rolling, golden sea. High in the hills close above were what seemed to be a plethora of temples and monasteries, while all the landscape bristled with stone monuments, most of them on the backs of turtles, the rest handsome old ornamental arches of carved stone, all more or less cracked and ruined. Houei-ning must have had something of a history in bygone centuries, like so many now sleepy old towns of China.

Now it seemed to be the big market for those crude forked sticks which do duty as pitchforks among the Chinese. All this region made a four-tined one, with a wooden crosspiece let into and tied to the tines and the end of the handle with tough grass, but Houei-ning evidently had a monopoly on those grown in the form of a two-pronged implement. In Honan perfect three-tined ones were grown in abundance, as rose-bushes and the like are trained into fantastic shapes in Japan. The flimsiness of construction which everywhere impresses itself upon the traveler in China is nowhere more noticeable than in such peasants’ tools,—rakes a mere bamboo pole with one end split, spread, and bent over in the form of teeth; woven-wicker buckets for use at open holes in the fields that do service as wells; little bent-willow shovels for the countless thousands of boys and men, and not a few women and girls, who wander the roads with their baskets—for gathering the droppings of animals seems to be the favorite outdoor sport of China; it is a lonely trail and a depopulated region indeed where these are left to mingle with the soil. It was in Houei-ning, too, that we saw offered for sale guns that must have been old when the Manchu dynasty began, guns slender as a lance, eight feet or more long, with tiny butts apparently meant to be used against the thumb instead of the shoulder, and some contraption for firing that probably antedated the flint-lock by many decades. A fetching touch of color that increased as the weather grew more bitingly cold were the earlaps worn by nearly every one. In Kansu these are almost always home-made and hand-embroidered in gaily colored designs of birds, flowers, and the like, with much less violation of artistic standards than one would expect.

All through this region a custom wide-spread in China was very generally practised. That is, almost all boys from perhaps four to twelve years of age wore round their necks an iron chain big enough to restrain an enraged bulldog, and usually fastened together with a large native-forged padlock, though there would have been no difficulty in lifting off the whole contraption. The object of this adornment is to protect the precious male offspring from ill luck—here, perhaps, to keep the big fish from wagging his tail again. If parents have any reason to suspect that evil spirits are on the trail of a son, they hasten to a temple and put him in pawn to an idol, as it were; that is, they have a priest hang a chain, with much hocus-pocus, about his neck, thereby deceiving the powers of evil into believing that he is not their son at all but that he belongs to the temple. In a way this is true, for before he can be “redeemed” again by the parents the priest, who keeps the key of the padlock, must be generously rewarded. Let a boy fall ill, and no time is lost in evoking this sure protection; especially if one dies, his surviving or later-born brother is chained at once. The constant efforts of evil spirits to do injury to a family through the still unmarried sons, of whom ancestor-worship requires posterity, is one of the greatest banes of Chinese existence. Not the least uncommon of the tricks resorted to for the discomfiture of these unseen enemies is to give the boy a girl’s name, for naturally no evil spirit is going to waste his time in trying to injure a mere female.

The city gates of Houei-ning do not open until six, after which we went down again into labyrinthian loess gullies, across a broad fertile valley, and finally into a river cañon. Nothing could have been more dull than the long morning through this dreary chasm, in utter silence except for our own noises, and a rare donkey-boy singing his way along the top of the cliff far above. But, as if to make up for this dismal stretch, the road clambered early in the afternoon to the summit of a high ridge, with perhaps the most marvelous series of vistas of all our journey. There were crazy-shaped fields at every possible height, ragged little hollows that looked exactly like shell-holes, even their tiny bottoms carefully cultivated, threshing-floors throwing up grain like bursts of shrapnel, clusters of farm buildings of the identical color of all the landscape, and always surrounded by high mud walls, a wildly chaotic yet completely tamed land, utterly bare brown, turned golden by the brightest of suns and the clearest of air, with only the faintest purple haze on the far edges of the horizon. The trail had taken again to one of the pell-mell slopes of a mighty stream-worn crack in the earth and worked its way in and out along the haphazard face of this, across natural earth bridges, over jutting spurs and perpendicular ridges, into pockets where, cut off from the breeze but still in the brilliant sunshine, it was almost uncomfortably warm, and gradually carried us higher and higher on a ridge that swung more and more to the south. The miserable half-ruined mud village in which we found lodging was so high that to step out into the night was like diving into ice-water. Yet we kept to the ridge for hours more next morning before the road abandoned it at last and plunged headlong down into a big valley supporting the ancient town of Ngan-ting. An unusually huge wall of irregular shape, with very fancy high gates, surrounded the same crowds of staring, dirty people, of filthy-nosed, half-naked children and crippled women, all huddled together in the cold shadows instead of spreading out in the sunshine of the open world all about them. Ngan-ting seemed to be an important garrison town, through which we passed just in time to become entangled in some manœver resembling formal guard-mount, amid the barbaric blaring of many Chinese bugles. Our carts meanwhile had scorned the town and were on their way down the widest river valley yet. Along this the avenue of trees, some of their trunks scarred with pictorial obscenities, kept up in a half-hearted way; but scrub-poplar and sometimes almost branchless trunks were poor substitutes for the magnificent old willows farther east. Many of these had been cut down in this region, as huge stumps on a level with the earth showed. Apparently there is nothing that so exasperates the Chinese as the sight of a live tree; it would look so much better shaped as a coffin or turned into temple doors.

Suddenly, just beyond Ngan-ting, both sexes and all ages took to making yarn, in the Andean style of twirling a bobbin as they wandered about, and to knitting, not merely caps and stockings, but whole suits. We had once or twice been shocked some days earlier at the sight of a camel-driver calmly twiddling his knitting-needles as he strode or rode along, a pastime bad enough in talkative old ladies and tea-party guests who decline to waste their time, and certainly far beneath the dignity of the great male sex! But some missionary, it seemed, had started the craze—for a generation or so ago knitting was as unknown in China as real peanuts or the weaving of woolen clothing—and had neglected to explain its proper segregation. There had been no rain in all this region for a whole year, they said, and we had been advised to buy rain-water only of the Mohammedans, even if they forced us to pay high for it, since that to be had from the mere Chinese might be rank poison even after boiling. Somewhere along the way I had seen a blind youth marching round and round one of those two-stone grist-mills to be found all over China, and most often operated by a blindfolded donkey. His short hair where cues were still the fashion, and a not unattractive young woman watching him from a near-by doorway with an expression that might easily have been taken for a satisfied leer, naturally called up the memory of Samson and Delilah. Indeed, the fellow swung his head from side to side and lifted his feet unnecessarily high at every step in a way to prove that the late Caruso had learned at least one stage trick from real life. But the Philistines in this case were only the filth and lack of care which leave so many Chinese children sightless. There was a little blind boy of five that morning, for instance, carrying a baby brother of two, each wearing a single rag; and the baby was telling the boy where to step, though he afterward ran a bit alone and made the threshing-floor without mishap through many pitfalls.

In the account of his travels in China a decade ago Professor Ross has a chapter entitled, “Unbinding the Women of China.” One of the professor’s finest traits, however, is over-optimism. Foot-binding most certainly showed no signs of dying out in any of the territory through which we passed in our two months’ journey out into the northwest. A group of little girls from six to eight years old toddling along the road on crippled feet, yet carrying heavy baskets and driven, like calves to market, by a sour-faced old woman whose own feet still seemed to pain her at every step, was no unusual sight. One might easily have fancied they were to be offered for sale—girls can be bought for a mere song in this region. How often we passed a child in her early teens astride a donkey urged on by a man on foot, her little tapering legs ending in mere knots, her face so whitened and rouged that she looked like some inanimate and over-decorated doll! Only another bride, or concubine, on her way to the home of a husband or a master she had never seen. Girls certainly not yet ten years old were already shuffling about house- and threshing-floors in their football knee-pads; little girls dismally crying in some mud pen to which they had been banished because they could not suppress such signs of pain from their newly bound feet, or hobbling a few yards along the road with set lips, emphasized the fact that there are far worse fates even than being born a boy in China.