Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Then for several days irrigation took the place of desert again, and we passed towns that claimed to be entirely Catholic. After the Mohammedan rebellion a certain order of that faith began work in the almost unpeopled region along this northwesternmost elbow of the Yellow River, copying the irrigation systems of their Jesuit forerunners of centuries before a bit farther south and building up town after town in which none but Catholic converts are really welcomed. As the broad river valley was barely used at all before the priests came, except for grazing, and was but lightly populated, there can scarcely be any criticism of them on that score. San-shun-gung and Poronor were perhaps the most important of the dozen or more of these towns through which we passed, and which appeared with great regularity every forty li, sometimes every twenty. The first named was walled, rather recently and with mud bricks, perhaps because it was the seat of the bishop, whose residence close to the large church, with a belfry building distinct from it, might have looked less imposing in other surroundings than the usual low, mud-built Chinese village. Services were in full swing, with most of the inhabitants audibly in attendance and the streets deserted, when we passed through this place early one morning; but Poronor of the Mongol name was a noonday halt and we had opportunity there for a chat with the local ruler. He was a Belgian priest, as in the other larger towns, and bourgmestre, too, as he called it; for the priest is always the town mayor and chief authority, though there may also be a Chinese or Mongol “mandarin.” While we were being entertained with wine and cigars in his laboratory-office—for he took account of the bodily as well as the political and spiritual ailments of his converts—a large group of Mohammedan soldiers left a procession of them that was straggling down from the northeast and gathered in the yard, to peer in at us through the glass windows. They were pestering him to death, the priest said, new groups coming every day to ask him to furnish them carts and animals, and naturally drivers, in which to continue their journey. He had done so several times, but was now refusing the request; and nothing could be better proof of the real authority of the foreign priests of that distant Yellow River valley than the fact that the soldiers did not take transportation facilities by force when he declined to furnish them.

On the other hand, any criminal whom the bourgmestre wished to be rid of was turned over to the Mohammedan commanders. The converts were almost exclusively Chinese; for there were naturally no converted Moslems, and only a few Mongol Catholics, who lived in two small villages back toward the hills. In one town where we spent the night the priest was for the moment absent, but this did not hinder us from getting a fairly clear view of his establishment. The large windows of glass—so unusual in western China—along the inner side of the church and the priest’s study disclosed rather bare rooms, the former with a few lithographed saints and benches or kneeling-boards some six inches high and wide, the latter with a rough Chinese-made easy-chair and table and the indispensable paraphernalia of the priestly calling, including a score of rather dog-eared books. Barely had we entered the compound than a flock of boys swooped noisily down upon us. They were “orphans” of the little mud school in a corner of the enclosure, or sons of the townspeople; and they were rather poor witnesses to the advantages of Catholic training, at least in deportment. For not only were they undisciplined but very decidedly “fresh,” and certainly there had been no improvement over “heathen” Chinese children in the matter of wiping their noses and using soap and water. While they were crowded about us the priest’s native assistant appeared and put us through the usual autobiographical catechism required of any lone foreigner surrounded by Chinese, then reciprocated with shreds of information expressed in scattered words of Chinese, French, and Latin. Finally he led the way toward, but not into, the schoolroom, for the flock of unwiped noses surged pell-mell ahead of us and when we entered they were all kneeling in their places on tiny benches similar to those in the church, with their forearms on their home-made desks, chanting at the tops of their voices and at express speed some Latin invocation which probably had about as little meaning to them as it had to us. The assistant proudly announced himself the teacher and displayed his few treasures of learning, among which a religious book printed in Latin and Chinese on opposite pages was plainly the most revered. When at length he was moved to silence the chanted uproar, and we pronounced a few of the Latin words at his request, he gave extravagant signs of delight, much as a great scientist might if a colleague unexpectedly confirmed some fine point on which his own experiments had focused themselves.

Bound and unbound feet were about equally in evidence in these Catholic towns, as if in such minor matters as this and the use of handkerchiefs converts might do as they saw fit. Nor could we see any appreciable advance in living conditions, though the school-girls of Poronor, in their bright red trousers and jackets, were a picturesque touch which made up somewhat for the annoyance of eating in the presence of as mighty a mob audience as in regions never blessed with Christianity. Chang reported, too, that people along the way told him that the Catholic Chinese were heartily disliked, because they were not only unusually dishonest and rather haughty, but because they might do any mean trick that suggested itself, and the priests invariably upheld them, even to using their influence in resultant lawsuits.

The broad valley between hazy and even invisible mountain ranges on one side and, on the other, a river which we hardly saw during the last week of the journey was sometimes a sea of yellow grass high as a horseman’s head and sometimes a big bare plain deliberately cut up by irrigation ditches so wide that there was often no crossing them without many miles of detour. There were times when a compass seemed necessary, so uncertain was the course of the meandering “road,” which even the experienced carters now and again lost completely. Travel was slight, and every few miles a herdsmen’s hut all but hidden in the tall grass was the only sign of population. Thousands of acres of these uncultivated plains had been dug up and burned over, probably by men who make their living by gathering marmot skins, though there were no visible evidences of these gopher-like animals, which retire to their holes for the winter. Snow fell during the night that we spent in Hoang-yang-muto—“Antelope Woods,” so named, no doubt, because there is not a tree and certainly not a “yellow sheep” to be seen for many miles roundabout, and all the next morning our horses were hampered by great balls of snow and earth that formed beneath their hoofs, and which we were forced to remove ourselves, for our brave mafu avoided any unnecessary familiarity with his charges. But by the middle of the afternoon the landscape had resumed its brown-yellow coloring and never lost it again during the journey.

Not long after the Catholics disappeared, big Mongol lamaseries began to rise every few hours above the horizon. These were much more pretentious than anything else between Ningsia and Paotou, the big main building always two and sometimes three stories high and constructed of good modern brick. From a distance they looked like ugly summer hotels that had been foisted upon the simple country, but a nearer view always showed the dozen or more big windows in each wall to be mere bricked-up pretenses of the openings they resembled. Evidently the “Living Buddhas” who graced these establishments had attempted to copy what they considered to be the glories of Shanghai or Tientsin, but could not rid themselves of the notion that a proper dwelling must be as stuffy as a Mongol felt tent. Even the clusters of white houses about these poor imitations of modern Italian villas bore false windows, and only the turnip-shaped dagobas had anything suggestive of the picturesque about them. Swarms of dirty lamas in yellow, red, and purple robes, big stout fellows of every age from boy novices to those whose already almost visible skulls would soon be the playthings of dogs, poured forth from these places if we rode in among the buildings, from which sometimes came ritual noises that were a mixture of the terrifying and the childishly ridiculous. Nor was there any lack of women about these monasteries, in quantities of gaudy jewelry and with real feet.

The plain had been unbroken for days as far as the eye could see, giving the impression that the country was tilted and that we were for ever riding uphill, when a low mountain rose above the horizon at dawn on Friday which we barely reached by sunset on Saturday. All Sunday we plodded close along the foot of this, here and there passing a cluster of huts within a compound more often than not in ruins, but with the assertion in big characters whitewashed on their mud walls that they were “hotels.” Once or twice we stopped at Mongol or Chinese inns, but most of them were still “Hwei-Hwei,” which did not matter so much after the cook hit upon the happy expedient of telling the proprietors that the bacon he served us for breakfast was “American salt beef.”

Though we had expected it almost any day on this journey northward, it was not until this last Sunday night of the trip that we could not get a room to ourselves. The isolated inn at which darkness overtook us consisted of one huge room surely a hundred feet long, with an alleyway from door to “kitchen” and a narrow lateral passage to the end walls, otherwise completely taken up by the four k’angs thus divided. These were already crowded with scores of coolies, ox-cart drivers, and similar travelers much more interesting to look upon than as bedfellows. Luckily there was one paper window in a far corner, and there we gave orders to have the last ten feet of the k’ang swept, the walls dusted, and a blanket and the reed mat we did not need hung up as curtains. If there were drawbacks to this improvised chamber, such as listening to the eating, sleeping, and drinking noises of our fellow-guests, the place at least was warm, thanks not only to the bodily heat of the several scores of men but to as roaring a fire as poor fuel could produce in the mud cook-stove that passed its surplus warmth into the flues beneath the general beds. For the last few days inn “kitchens” had been fitted with an immense shallow iron kettle set permanently into the adobe stove, and from this any one who wanted boiled water dipped it. About such inconveniences our cook competed with the flocking coolies who prepared their own humble fare, but it rarely needed even the commanding word of Chang to impress them with the fact that such great personages as ourselves naturally should have precedence over the mere garden variety of mankind.

Possibly the anxious reader is wondering how our lady companion met the trying situation of the total lack of privacy on that Sunday night. But there was no such problem. For when we had stepped forth into the darkness at the usual hour on the eighth morning out of Ningsia, the “tai-tai’s” cart was still sitting on its tail, thills in air, with a care-free something about it that should have made our own battered and road-weary wains envious. To our inquiry came the response, with more than a hint at our having been so unjust, that our pace was too swift for the lady, that rather than continue to get up every day long before daylight and ride often until after dark, with never a chance of getting out of her cart except at the noonday halt, she preferred to run the risk of being robbed or ill treated, even killed, by bandits, for she could endure it no longer. We refrained from making the obvious reply that, as far as our moderately tenacious memories informed us, we had never even suggested that she try to keep a foreigner’s pace; and thus we had parted, without an embrace, or even a kind word. Indeed, she had never spoken to us during all that intimate week, though I had caught her once or twice exchanging smiles with the major.

A typical farm hamlet of the Yellow River valley in the far west where some of the
farm-yards are surrounded by mud walls so mighty that they look like great armories