Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

For miles before we reached the wall the sage-brush plain was piled everywhere with Chinese graves of all sizes, some of them completely covered over with drifted sand; but beyond it there was not a single artificial mound of earth, as if there were no use in being buried at all unless one could find a resting-place within the Great Wall. The vastness of the brown uninhabited world was particularly impressive in the absolutely dead silence which lasted for long periods, unbroken even by the chirping of a stray bird. One might have been in some “death valley,” yet only water seemed to be wanting in what might otherwise have been excellent farming country.

Evidently this lack was increasing, for there were only abandoned ruins left of what had once been a town, big temple and all, at the end of the ninety li. There was one hole in the sandy earth, at which all trails converged, and shepherds, cartmen, and miscellaneous travelers were constantly using the cloth bucket on a stick with which crude troughs about it were filled, and where great flocks of sheep disputed with horses, cattle, mules, and donkeys; but this only water for many miles in any direction was evidently growing insufficient for the demands made upon it. We had a frozen luncheon in the lee of a ruin, from which we could look across a vast section of the plain, dotted in the foreground with the grazing camels of a great caravan that had pitched its tents and piled its cargo within easy distance of the well, to where the yellowish brown turned to purple and rolled up into the wrinkled, snow-topped range that shut off the world on the west. All that afternoon there was the same silent, rolling landscape, which ended at last, just in time, as bitter cold night was settling down, at a single mud compound in a little hollow of the great solitude.

The next day, in contrast, was absolutely cloudless, and so were nearly all those of December. We rambled for more than twelve hours across a lifeless wilderness where a human being was a sight to remember and in which two rabbits were the only visible representatives of the rest of the animal kingdom. Deep sand, here and there alternating with a sort of sage-brush, made the progress of our carts exasperatingly slow—until I suddenly discovered the ease and pleasure of reading on horseback, with the result that I devoured every book we had with us and memorized a primer of the Chinese language before the journey ended. Yet two inns just rightly spaced greeted our eyes at noon and at nightfall, as two others did on several similarly unpeopled days. It hardly seemed possible that these had grown up so accurately by mere chance, especially as there was no natural feature to attract and sustain them, and sometimes water had to be brought thirty li or more on donkey-back, so that it cost us twelve coppers each to wash our faces and hands. In every case in which we asked, the proprietor was the son or grandson, born right here in the wilderness, of malefactors or political prisoners who had been sentenced by the Manchu dynasty to keep these inns at certain specified points along this old imperial highway.

On the sixth day north of Lanchow we reached the great sand-dunes which make what might almost be a possible automobile trail impossible even for Chinese carts. Great ridges of pure sand, everywhere given a corrugated surface by the winds that had piled them up during the centuries, stretch from some unknown distance back in the country, perhaps clear from the foot-hills of the western ranges, down to the very edge of the Yellow River. We might easily have fancied ourselves in the midst of the Sahara as we waded for three hours, much more on foot than on horseback, across this effective barrier to wheeled traffic, had it not been for the sight of the Hoang Ho sweeping around it in a half-circle so far below as to look like a mere brook, and the tumbled masses of mountains beyond, culminating in a cone that has smoked uninterruptedly, we were assured, for more then seven centuries. Boats that seemed from this height mere boys’ rafts rather than cumbersome barges capable of carrying two loaded carts glided up and down the stream amid myriad floating chunks of ice; but we strained our eyes in vain to make out, even through this brilliant, moistureless air, anything resembling our own outfit. Beyond the dunes we came down upon a cluster of mud compounds, most of them prepared to pose as inns if the opportunity offered, and just then unusually crowded with west-bound travelers. These were almost all soldiers, Mohammedan in faith and in many cases so Turkish of features that with their big reddish beards they seemed to be actors wearing masks above their cotton-padded Chinese uniforms. They were the escort of a new governor on his way to Eastern Turkestan, and the expedition was so large that though we came upon the vanguard, accompanying some veritable houses on wheels, early in the morning, we passed the last straggling carts and horsemen toward sunset.

This extraordinary demand upon the ferrying facilities brought upon us the dreadful experience of being separated from our commissary and forced to shift for ourselves. The rights of extraterritoriality are one thing, and the joy which Chinese soldiers sometimes take in putting a foreigner to annoyance and delay even without reason when so good an opportunity offers is quite another. The major had known of a colleague who, traveling in Manchuria, had been deliberately held on a river-bank for forty-eight hours because soldiers crossing to his side insisted on sending the boats back empty rather than delay one or two of them long enough for the “outside barbarian” to get his carts on board. With neither of us in evidence, and without even one of the major’s cards in his pocket, no doubt Chang was finding it impossible to prove that ours was an expedition of foreigners and therefore in a hurry, whatever might otherwise have been the attitude of these more western Moslems in Chinese uniforms.

When our usual lunch-hour was long past, and still no word came from the rest of our party, we mustered Chinese enough to get chopped straw and peas put before our horses, and eventually to obtain for ourselves a bowl of plain rice boiled and served under conditions and amid surroundings that had best not be specifically described, lest the major’s still unsullied reputation be seriously injured. Then we suddenly realized that it was already three o’clock, that the only place where we could possibly spend a night without our cots and our cook was still forty li away, and that this was a walled city where the gates probably closed at sunset. The result was the most speed we had attained since the spasmodic truck had dropped us in Sian-fu more than a month before. In fact, even the several goatskin rafts plying from town to town along an open stretch of the river could hardly keep up with us.

It was a curiously sudden change to a rich wide valley from the barren unpeopled wastes that lay behind us; yet the only real difference was irrigation. This had been brought to the western Hoang Ho centuries ago by the Jesuits, who had introduced a complete system, still functioning, with great sluices—ornamented in Chinese fashion with fancy water-gates and bridges showing the heads and tails of great fish in stone. What the good fathers probably did not introduce was the custom of turning all the roads into irrigation ditches and making travel virtually impossible whenever the peasants along the way chose to do so; for that one may see just outside the walls of Peking, and listen in vain for any law or even effectual protest against it. Clusters of trees that were almost numerous rose from in and about farm compounds, which grew so frequent before the day was done as to form nearly a continuous town, and every little while we passed a new, or a very well preserved, temple, high above each of which stood two slender and magnificent poplars that recalled the “pencil minarets” of Cairo.

But we had no time to spare for mere sight-seeing, nor even for debating the social effects of Jesuit foresight. For fast as we urged our horses on, the sun seemed to outdistance us without effort, like some runner of unlimited speed and endurance and a weakness for practical joking sauntering easily along just in front of his breathless competitors. The so-called roads, too, abetted this red-faced humorist; for they would of course instantly have lost their certificates of Chinese nationality if they had marched straight forward even when the goal was plainly in sight, so that they wound and twisted incessantly here on the flat valley just as they had in their random wandering across the uninhabited rolling plains behind us, just as a Chinese road will always and everywhere, though there is no more reason for it than for putting mustard on apple-pie. Even the accuracy in distances that had hitherto been almost praiseworthy had suddenly disappeared, as if still further to worry us. For it seemed at least a dozen times that the same answer was given to our question as to how far we still had to go, though we spaced this at considerable intervals; and the very best we could do, even at the risk of having to give our animals a day’s rest, was to hold our own.

We arrived at length, however, just as dusk was spreading, to find the gates of Chungwei still open and the sense of direction among its inhabitants so much better than outside the walls that we brought up before the home of the only foreigners in town without mishap and without delay. Fortunately this couple were Americans, in fact, the most American of all the missionaries we met on our western trip, so that there was no more embarrassment on our side than hesitation on the other when we walked in upon them to say, “Here we are, with nothing but the clothes we stand in; please take care of us.” It is a long cry, of course, from auxiliary work among American soldiers in Europe to the establishing of a mission in a town of far western China where foreigners had never lived before, so that we rather flattered ourselves that we, the first visitors this new station had ever known, were almost as welcome as we were made.

Chungwei is an ancient and more or less honorable town which claims eight thousand families within its walls, among whom only three merchants, without families, were Mohammedans. The city has no north gate because there is no more China north of it, the so-called Great Wall being almost within rifle-shot, and beyond that lies Mongolia. The broad plain on which it flourishes is shut in by mountains and sand-dunes, but is divided by the Yellow River, from which all the prosperity of the region comes. For in the autumn, after the harvest, the top layer of soil is cut up everywhere into big mud bricks, held together by the roots of the crops, and of these all buildings, even walls, fences, and most furniture, are made, and still there are always great piles of them left over. Then the river is let in upon the land and covers it once more with a rich silt that produces splendid rice—certainly there was no suggestion of a rice country on a cloudy December day with a high wind blowing—wheat and linseed in abundance, millet, kaoliang, buckwheat, potatoes as large as if they had come from America, cabbage enough to keep the population from starving if there were nothing else, magnificent grapes and peaches, and what our host assured us were the finest walnuts in China. In other words, all Chungwei needed to be a land of plenty and comfort, and possibly even of cleanliness, was to be somehow broken of the apparently unbreakable Chinese habit of bringing into the world, in the madness for male offspring, every possible mouth which the land can feed, with an instant increase to take up the slack offered by such improvements as the irrigation projects of the Jesuits.