Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The three carts never once broke ranks that afternoon as we plodded on across the plain, with another great lighthouse pagoda and more ox-cart caravans with seven-foot wheels. The whole Yellow River valley seemed to have been flooded a bare week ahead of us, and while this no doubt would be repaid many fold in the spring, it would have made traveling a sad experience if everything had not been frozen over. As it was, our cartmen did much wandering in the rather vain hope of avoiding icy roads, for, old as she is, China apparently has never learned to put calks on her horseshoes. We had a hundred li to make that day, which did not seem difficult in the light of the fact that we had once covered a hundred and forty on this leg of the journey, but the li were stretching perceptibly, and what with the zigzagging and the delay at the city gate we were still well short of our goal when night fell. The moon was rising later now, so that we had to feel our way across the plain in utter darkness, for even by day the “road” was often only faintly marked. The stillness of this great valley at night was impressive—and fortunate, for the only thing to guide us was the sound of our carts ahead, silent underfoot but with a constant thumping of the heavy wheels on the loosely fitting axles.

At that the carts got out of our hearing, and for a long time we rode on at random, keeping as straightforward a course as possible, until finally we were lucky enough to see rising close before us out of the night an imposing gateway of the walled town of Ping-lo. Our chief impression of this is that if it had as much paving as it has ornamental street arches there would be fewer streets to wade and stumble through, hence less temptation to curse the stupidity of such inhabitants as were faintly visible for not being able to put us on the track of our carts. We found our way at last, however, to the inn-yard where they were already unhitched—to discover that the trousered lady had followed us even there. It had not mattered so much at the midday halt, but with several inns to choose from we were tempted to protest when she clung to us even by night, taking indeed the very next room to us, with a thin mud wall between. We did protest, in fact, though for other reasons than any real fear of being “compromised,” of hearing Peking whisper over its bridge-tables and its cocktails at the club, “What’s this about the major and that fellow bringing a Chinese girl along with them, eh?” While we never got a monosyllable out of her ourselves, the lady had in a high degree that fault more or less unjustly charged against all her sex; and as she slept most of the day, after the fashion of Chinese travelers, to whom the horrors of a “Peking cart” seem to be like the rocking of a cradle, it was natural that she needed to relieve herself by chattering all night, with the youth or innkeepers’ wives as the not unwilling listeners. Now, the Chinese language is anything but musical, and the voices of Chinese women are evidently trained to sound as much as possible like the tightening brakes of a freight-train on a swift down grade, so that even in our most charitable moods we could scarcely have lain silently bewailing the departure of our hitherto splendid slumber for more than the two or three hours we did without attempting to do something about it. The vigorous application of a boot-heel to the mud partition, and a few terse remarks that were probably none the less clear for being only partly couched in Chinese, had a desirable effect, which was made more or less permanent by having Chang explain next day to the third driver, who passed the information on through the youth to the feminine part of our aggregation, certain rules of conduct that were essential to a continued membership in it.

In the middle of the next afternoon irrigation suddenly ended, and a stony, barren plain, rising into foot-hills on the left, grew up ahead. Some time during the following day we crossed the unmarked boundary between Kansu and Inner Mongolia and left the Mohammedan province behind. From the town where we spent one of those nights there is a short cut through the Ordos that takes but half the time required to follow clear around the right-angled bend of the Yellow River, but even if one is sure of being able to cross the river at both ends of that trail there is nothing but an uninhabited desert wilderness between, where a single well is worthy a name on the map, and which is practicable only to camel-caravans. Thus there was nothing to do but let the Hoang Ho force us farther and farther westward, though our goal lay to the east, now by stony roads, now through half-days of the drifted sand of genuine deserts, or by river bars spreading out in great masses of ice which it was not always possible to pass without making a great detour. There was a very good reason why we could not float down the Yellow River, or skate or ice-boat either, for not only was it often frozen over completely for long distances but the ice lay in broken chunks a foot or two thick and so packed together that they sometimes were piled high up on the shore. There were days during which we never sighted the river, though we were always following it; at other times we spent midday or night right on its banks, with it the only water available.

Such a place was the one we reached unusually early one afternoon. In spite of its three-barrel name of Hou-gway-tze it consisted of a single cluster of mud buildings, which took all prizes for their filthy condition. Moreover, every room was packed with more coolies than could crowd together on the k’angs, and several of them were suffering from what might easily have been malignant diseases or dangerous illnesses. It looked as if we would have to commandeer one room by driving the coolies out of it—and then take our lady in with us. But General Ma, the uncle, Mohammedan ruler of all this western district, had very recently built a new inn, with high crenelated walls of bright yellow mud and a generally inviting appearance, a furlong or two beyond the unspeakable hovels that had evidently for centuries been the only housing for travelers at this point. Our cartmen seemed to take it for granted that we would not be admitted to the new compound, for it was not only strictly Mohammedan but had really been built to house soldiers. It took Chang less than five minutes, however, to assure the man in charge that we would not cook or eat pork on the premises, and to talk a soldier out of the only one of the rooms that did not have its k’ang crowded. Evidently the hope of being given a few coppers in the morning, in which he was, of course, not disappointed, or the privilege, unless he was Mohammedan, of disposing of some of the scraps left over from our meals and perhaps of getting an empty tin can or two was reward enough for him. Where our feminine companion spent the night is still a mystery, for though she promptly followed us to the new inn we saw nothing of her after her descent from the cart until she crawled out of it again the next noon fifty li farther on.

There was time for a stroll before the sun withdrew its genial companionship. Great masses of crumpled mountains, treeless and velvet-brown, lay just across the river, which here was partly open, with a current of perhaps five miles an hour. No wonder it had to turn out for so mighty a barrier, and double the journey that was left us. On our side of the stream stretches of tall, light-yellow bunchgrass and a kind of sage, of slightly purplish tinge under the sinking sun, were broken by long rows of sand-dunes. In the morning the north sides of these were white with hoar-frost and helped a bit to light the way for us before daylight. Files of coolies who might easily have been bandits—we wondered if many of them were not brigands who had turned in their weapons and disbanded for the winter—were constantly appearing out of the brush and hillocks of this and the other uninhabited deserts beyond. Many of them wore a kind of makeshift turban of pure unspun wool, and all were dressed for cold weather, often in combinations of skin coats and cotton-padded garments that made them picturesque figures. How many hundreds of these we passed on our journey northward there is no way of computing, nor of knowing whether they were followers of some bandit chieftain who would take to the road again in the region ahead, which had been so harassed of late, as soon as the weather made banditry pleasant and travelers plentiful once more. Perhaps they were all what the few we spoke with claimed to be,—men who had taken rafts down the river, or coolies who had worked in Mongolia or Manchuria during the summer and were now walking a thousand miles or more back to their homes, as men do by the millions in overcrowded China.

We were constantly meeting these hardy fellows far from any other evidences of human existence. Long lines of them, bundled up in all they possessed, emerged from the darkness of early morning, one or two perhaps singing in a mixture of minors and falsettos that recalled the songs of the country people of Venezuela. Occasionally a straggler limped past far out on the dreary plain; but with few exceptions they kept the pace, and the cheerful countenances of perfect contentment. We always came upon a group of them at the single lonely huts that were often the only possible stopping-places during the whole day, sitting in a sunny corner sheltered from the wind at noon, perhaps stripped to the waist and diligently searching the seams of their thick padded garments, or already stretched out on the crowded k’angs where we halted for the night; for they seemed to prefer to travel in the darkness of morning rather than of evening. Probably, too, they had in mind the sharp competition for k’ang space, if not also for food and fuel, and the necessity of arriving early if they would be sure of accommodations at these only shelters for forty or fifty li in either direction.

The fixed price of lodging for a coolie in these inns seemed to be five coppers; then there was five “cash” or a copper for hot water for their tea, and not more, probably, for each of their two meals than for lodging; so that the innkeeper got about the equivalent of one to three American cents from each guest, depending on whether he stopped at noon or overnight, and the total expenditure of each coolie perhaps averaged four cents a day, besides the bit of food some carried with them. Now and again they no doubt cut down this extravagant figure by skipping a meal or, like the several score we saw streaming away from a temple early one morning, finding shelter at a lower price. Many of these coolies hardly looked Chinese at all, though it might be difficult to decide what other blood had modified their features. In fact, the northern Chinese, especially outside the larger cities, with their strong bodies and sturdy faces, bear little resemblance to the common Western conception of the sly, slender, pigtailed Celestial; I doubt very much whether the American boy whose only acquaintance with the race has been through the “movies” or a rare laundryman from Kwangtung in the far south would have recognized as Chinese our chief driver, with his strong, almost Roman nose, his leather-dark complexion, and his attributes of a real man even in the Occidental sense.

Though one seldom finds the doubtful joys of chewing tobacco appreciated outside the confines of the Western hemisphere north of the Rio Grande, it was something of a surprise to discover how many Chinese do not even smoke it. Probably the chief reason is that they cannot afford it, though ten cigarettes in gaily decorated packages can be bought for the equivalent of two cents. This would have accounted for the fact that so many of these coolie groups were abstainers. Those who did smoke used the little pipes with long stems, of about the capacity of half a hazelnut shell, familiar to Korea and Japan as well as to China; and their pale tobacco of the texture of fine hay was so mild as hardly to seem to Western taste derived from the dreadful weed at all. Whenever I distributed a few pinches of a brand widely known in the United States the result was a series of sudden coughing spells and the laughing admission that Mei-guo yen is painfully strong. Our cartmen, however, who alternately smoked a larger pipe with a porcelain stem of the size of a policeman’s club, either came to prefer the taste of American tobacco or found it more economical to ask for an occasional pinch from my can than to untie their own strings of “cash.” Several large corporations, all, I believe, British or American, are expending great efforts and vast sums to teach the Chinese the highest possible consumption of cigarettes; and their wares and their “advertising vandalism,” as a more serious-minded traveler has justly called it, are to be found even in the villages and along the main roads of the far interior. But they are hampered by the problem of how to produce a cigarette that can be sold at prices the consumer can afford to pay, even though the wages in their Chinese factories are in keeping with those elsewhere in the country. The fact that the revenue-stamp, which represents so large a proportion of the American’s smoking expenditures, is missing still does not solve the difficulty. Like opium, tobacco was brought to—not to say imposed upon—the Chinese from outside, and not many centuries ago. The weed has not been known in China as long as it has in Europe, to say nothing of America. Long after Sir Walter Raleigh frightened his admirers by causing smoke to issue from his nostrils tobacco was brought to Japan by the Portuguese or the Dutch; from there it crossed to Korea, drifting naturally into Manchuria, and the Manchus introduced it into China along with the cue in 1644.

Scrub trees rose above the tall light-yellow clumps of tough grass during most of the day beyond the general’s inn. Pheasants flew up here and there in large flocks. Once we passed a Mongol rounding up a herd of shaggy, half-wild ponies. We should have known him by his bent-knee yet cowboy-perfect riding in spite of his Chinese sheepskin dress, by his full-blooded, red face, “like a brewer’s drayman in—England,” as some one has put it, even if he had not been unable to understand Chang when we found the road suddenly missing where the river had licked away the side of a hill to which it formerly clung. Now and then we met a Mongol riding a camel at a trot across the bushy country, and a large scattered group or two of these animals were browsing on the tough yellow grass as if it were delicious. Our horses invariably showed fright at a close view of a camel, perhaps because they could not bear the sight of such ungainly ugliness, for certainly the two-humped beasts never gave the least indication either of the desire or of the ability to harm their more graceful rivals in the business of transportation.

Tungkou on the further side of a large bay formed by the Hoang Ho was a town of some importance, evidently a principal port during the season of river traffic, for huge boats built of hand-hewn planks and divided into several partitioned compartments were drawn up in considerable number on the shore. There were half a dozen new fortresses, some of two stories, or with a kind of cupola from which the coming of enemies, such as a force of bandits, could be seen some distance off; and many of the large compounds of the town were also freshly built of the same straw and yellow mud, though there was nothing new or clean about the old familiar, staring, easily laughing inhabitants. In certain moods, such as come at the ends of many long days of hard travel, there is a feeling of loneliness, of indescribable depression, in being long gazed at by multitudes, as if one were a wild beast, or a circus clown. The telegraph line of two wires which serves this region jumped the river at Tungkou in one mighty leap between double and reinforced poles on the two banks and plunged on into a Sahara of high drifted sand-ridges, over which we found our way with difficulty during the first hours of the next morning.