At a genuine “Hwei-Hwei” wedding every one comes on horseback to the bride’s home for the ceremony by an ahong, and then the whole cavalcade gallops back to the house of the groom. There is said to be less infant mortality among the Mohammedans than among their neighbors, not only because girls are perhaps a little less unwelcome, but because of the greater consumption of mutton and milk. “Hwei-Hwei” boys of fifteen often turn muleteers and tramp twenty to thirty miles a day over the mountains and spend much of the night feeding their animals, months on end, while they steadily grow into sturdy men to whom almost any hardship is not even recognized as such.
A Kansu vista near Lanchow, where the hills are no longer terraced, but where towns are numerous and much alike
This method of grinding up red peppers and the like is wide-spread in China. Both through and wheel are of solid iron
Oil is floated down the Yellow River to Lanchow in whole ox-hides that quiver at a touch as if they were alive
The Yellow River at Lanchow, with a water-wheel and the American bridge which is the only one that crosses it in the west
The dinner given in our honor by the “copper”-making Tuchun of Kansu was in most points a repetition of that in Sian-fu. This time, in addition to the invitations on red cards, there was sent around a list of the guests, written in Chinese, of course, on a long sheet of similar color, which we were expected to sign in Chinese after our names. If one is not able to come—or perhaps if he finds some of the other guests not to his liking—he makes an appropriate mark in lieu of signing. When the hour for the dinner approached, messengers came to remind us to come; perhaps I should say to warn us not to be late or absent, for this was plainly a custom of viceregal days which still survived out here in the far west. In those days a visit to this same yamen was an event to cable home about, quite different from dropping in to see a military governor who from the Chinese point of view was extremely “democratic.” The man who hoped to live to boast of having been received by a viceroy got into his best dress about the middle of the night and appeared at the yamen toward four in the morning, when he might possibly be admitted to the semi-imperial presence within an hour or two, since viceroys more or less followed the custom in audiences of the court at Peking; or he might have the pleasure of waiting most of the day, and perhaps of coming back again next morning to see another sunrise. If, when at last he was received, he was of high enough rank to be asked to take a chair or its viceregal equivalent, he sat gingerly on the extreme edge of it, like one who knows how reprehensible it is to dare to draw breath in so sacred a presence. But those same old viceroys knew how to rule the Chinese, and their modern successors seem to come most nearly succeeding at the same task when they adopt viceregal methods, for all their up-to-date uniforms in place of flowing Ch’ing dynasty costumes. Then, there was an exact unbroken line of responsibility all the way from the viceroy clear down to the village elder, and things that were ordered done usually occurred, and vice versa. But we all know what a long row there is to hoe between autocracy and anything approaching real democracy.