Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

However, what did all this matter to a mere visitor who could spend his time idly strolling the town? As in Sian-fu, access to its great wall was forbidden; but unlike my experience there, where a lieutenant-colonel and a large military escort was furnished me with the Tuchun’s permission to make the circuit of it, which “face” therefore obliged me to do on horseback, Lanchow’s entire “foreign office,” in the person of a gentleman of delightfully uncertain English, made the stroll with me on a brilliant Sunday morning. Half a dozen temples rose in artistic little open-work structures above the general level, two or three of them the minarets of mosques from which at certain hours sounded the voice of the muezzin, hardly to be distinguished from those of street-hawkers. Dyers had enlivened the scene with great strips of drying cloth, overwhelmingly coolie blue in color; on some of the roofs sat huge jars filled with some local delicacy made of pickled vegetables. We were high enough to look across the crest of the ridge on which stand the round forts against revolting Moslems, and to see these apparently unoccupied, though surrounded by a wilderness of cone-topped graves as far as the eye could be certain of what it saw. At regular intervals we passed the little stone and mud houses to be found on any important Chinese city wall, each with two or three soldiers napping or amusing themselves within. Whistling pigeons, familiar even to the residents of Peking, filled the transparent air with a wailing sound, ebbing or increasing as the flocks behind the whistlers circled back and forth over the city, now flashing white and almost invisible, now suddenly changing again to the blue of shimmering silk as the whole swirl of birds turned their backs upon us. The whistle is a feather-weight one of cylindrical shape, and is fastened to the pigeon in such a way that the wind, rushing through it as he flies, makes him and his few whistle-bearing companions a perpetual orchestra. The Chinese purpose in all this seems to be partly musical and partly to gather other pigeons, which flock about the whistlers like children about the Pied Piper. Perhaps the birds are eventually used as food, but this seems rather to be an example of that Chinese love for feathered pets which so often sends staid old gentlemen out for a stroll, cage in hand, in order to give birdie an airing.

A score or more of big gates tower above the general level of the several-walled city. In the northern and more Mohammedan section we looked down upon a great sheet of blood-pink ice, covering a pond where the Moslems are for ever washing newly slaughtered sheep. The circuit brought us at length to the northern wall, which falls sheer into the Yellow River. The American bridge thrown across this a decade ago, the only one in the west, or, I believe, with the exception of the two on the railways south from Peking, throughout the whole rambling course of “China’s Sorrow,” still looks incongruous against the background of the old walled city or of the heaped-up suburb terminating in a golden-brown pagoda on the further bank. Now and then a train of camels or a herd of wild half-yak come streaming across it, increasing the incongruity. Huddled together in that little perpendicular outskirt at the northern end of the bridge are several mosques and a Moslem school, temples dedicated to Confucius, Lao-tze, and Buddha, nearly a dozen of them piled up the hill at regular intervals as stations on the pilgrimage to the pagoda; and not far beyond these is a memorial hospital bearing the family name of the best known brand of American condensed milk! Not that this is all, of course, for there are also gambling-dens and assorted shops, inn-yards dusty with rolling mules, craftsmen busily engaged in the din of their trades, peddlers of everything shrieking their wares, water-carriers slopping the steep streets with ice, and higher up among the beautiful bare hills that vary with every mood of the unclouded sun one can trace the ruined walls of what was once a Tartar city, long before Lanchow itself was founded many centuries ago. To-day three thousand soldiers were escorting a bright new sedan-chair out along this further bank to meet an emissary of Wu Pei-fu who had journeyed to Lanchow by the northern route, and banners of many colors waved in the breeze that brought the snorting of many bugles to our ears.

Rafts made of blown-up goatskins and a wooden framework come floating down the Yellow River to Lanchow, bringing wheat from the borders of Tibet and travelers from Sining; often a whole stack of hay or straw, which seems to be sitting serenely on the surface of the water itself, glides past. Vegetable oils from hundreds of miles up the stream are landed at the low spot near Lanchow’s picturesque camel-back bridge in big bullock- or half-yak hides, still covered with their long hair, which on land quiver at a touch, like living animals. Down in the perpetual shadow of the north wall one of the goatskin rafts on which Kansu does much of its down-stream traveling in warmer seasons was being tied together for a belated trip, and a cluster or two of logs from the Tibetan slopes was being readjusted before continuing its long cold journey, which would not end until the winter was over, to the coffin-shops of eastern China. A great wooden water-wheel at the edge of the river added another medieval touch to the scene; and at length our stroll was brought to a temporary halt at the locked and soldier-guarded gate beyond which the city wall belongs to the Tuchun’s private grounds. I had already seen these, with their rows of barracks, their gardens and artificial-stone grottos, the two pet Kansu wapiti that bugled so fiercely when a foreigner paused to look at them, and the score of buildings that eventually gave way to the main entrance, with its huge devil-screen and gaudy painted demons, opening on the swarming second-hand market.

In the long open space before the Tuchun’s “yamen”—as they still call it in Lanchow, for all China’s conversion to republicanism—there stand to this day the four high poles, daubed with red and each bearing a kind of seaman’s “crow’s-nest,” which were the symbols of the Manchu viceroy who ruled northwestern China in the old imperial days. From these the military governor still flies four great banners, and it would not be difficult to forget that any change of régime has come over this distant province. The rectangle of public domain between the entrance to the yamen and its farthest devil-screen outpost is the busiest market-place of Lanchow, and swarms from dawn to sunset with as dense a throng of ragamuffins as can be found in one collection anywhere in northern China. For it is made up of the buyers and sellers of all manner of second-hand junk, stuff which in America would be entirely thrown away, of the owners and the clients of outdoor portable restaurants in which the whole menu does not cost more than two or three real cents, of all the odds and ends of Chinese society, among whom Lanchow’s incredibly starved and ragged beggars and her rafts of thieves probably predominate.

Both these latter callings are banded together into gilds, as in most of China. Our host had known well the former head of the thieves’ gild, not because he made a practice of keeping such company, or had any hope of bringing him into the Christian fold, but because all owners of important property found it essential to their peace and prosperity to come to some understanding with him. Though he was strictly Chinese, this clever old rascal had been the accepted ruler even of the Mohammedan “three-hand men,” who flourish in great numbers, and who now obeyed the not yet widely advertised chieftain who had recently inherited his power and unfailing emoluments. Among the Moslem Chinese in particular there is as much pride in belonging to this adventurous calling as to any which the country has to offer, though in the nature of the case this pride may not be as freely shouted from the housetops. Mohammedan children are given long and careful training for it, and the fathers in whose footsteps they usually follow show a justifiable delight in any extraordinary professional feat accomplished by their offspring. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why persons of property find it better to make an agreement with the thieves through their chief than to depend for protection upon officials and police not very distantly related to them. I need scarcely go into details as to how the members of this romantic gild are not only induced to let certain properties alone but to protect them against any outsider, any “scab” thief who does not belong to the union. A single example will be quite sufficient. The innkeeper who held the contract for carrying the government mails in and out of Lanchow paid fifteen dollars a month to the head of the thieves’ gild—through the police at their main station!—and these mails were never molested even in the most desolate parts of the country.

One little tale, too, will suffice to show how expert thieves belonging to the union must become before they can look for praise within their own ranks. If at any instant during the telling the suspicion of exaggeration should raise its head, let it be borne in mind that the host from whom I have it is both a Britisher and a missionary of the highest standing, and the son of a highly respected gentleman to whom the same statements may be equally applied.

A thief who was approaching old age decided to mend his ways before the time came to meet Allah face to face. He opened a mutton-shop on one of the less frequented streets. Next door to him was the large compound of a very wealthy Chinese merchant. One day, as he was separating the carcass of a fat-tailed sheep into its component parts, the ex-thief noticed several young Mohammedans grouped closely together across the way and furtively eying the rich man’s gateway. He recognized these fellows at once as belonging to the organization from which he had recently resigned, and their movements were a plain indication to a man of his experience that they were planning to rob his wealthy neighbor that very night. When he closed shop, therefore, he asked permission of the gate-keeper to speak with the prospective victim, whom he told all he knew, even of his own experience in his former profession.

“But what shall I do?” demanded the man of wealth, as one suddenly stricken might ask for expert advice from a gray-haired lawyer or a septuagenarian physician.

“That is easy,” replied the ex-thief. “The simplest way of breaking into your compound is for a small and supple man to crawl under your gate, where you have not recently taken the trouble to do any repairing. Hide yourself in the darkness beside this, and when the man’s head appears inside put a brick under his chin and go away.”

The merchant conducted himself exactly as his expert neighbor had advised. When the thieves outside found it impossible to rescue their bricked comrade, and dared wait no longer, they severed his body at the neck and carried it away. In the morning the rich man came to the mutton-shop early and in great agitation.