It was at Mukden that we first came into personal contact with the swarms of soldiers—“coolies in uniform” might be a more exact term—with which all China is cursed under its putative republican régime. Chang Tso-lin, the war lord of Manchuria, had just been thwarted in his plan to get control of Peking, and his troops in their muddy-gray cotton uniforms were still pouring back into the city by the train-load. Wagon-trains of ammunition, useful another year, were rumbling through the narrow streets, hauled by dust-caked mules. Troops were stowed away everywhere, in every big yard or semi-public compound, in unsuspected corners, in barracks outside the town. Nowhere could one open the eyes without seeing soldiers, lounging in unmilitary attitude before guarded gates, lolling about the streets and bazaars with the air of conquerors to whom nothing could be denied, drawn in endless files through the Japanese city on their way to the railway station stretched out at ease in rickshaws among their bed-stuffed possessions and grasping in one hand the rifle with the butt of which the great majority of them probably paid the perspiring coolies so incessantly trotting back and forth with them. How much more picturesque life would be with us if our soldiers mobilized in taxicabs, and booted the driver out of the way if he dared to call attention to the taximeter.
Scholarly-looking little Chang Tso-lin, in his ugly French-château style of dwelling that seems so inexcusable an intruder among the graceful palaces of China, is an enigma, at least to those who have merely met rather than learned to know him. How this outwardly almost insignificant man can hold a great territory in the hollow of his hand, baffling all the cross-currents of intrigue which sweep incessantly up and down the “Eastern Three Provinces,” was a query worth pondering. Virtually a bandit in his younger days, then a lieutenant in the Japanese army during the war with Russia, Chang gathered somewhere the power to rule which made him an autocrat over his own people and won him even among many of the foreigners who breathe the Manchurian atmosphere the reputation of being the “strong man” of China. His methods are drastic and prompt; he is said to depend more on intuition, on “hunches,” than on ordered reflection. Keys to the leg-irons of serious criminals he kept in his own possession, so that they could not buy off in the time-honored Chinese fashion. Just before we reached Mukden two of his generals had been detected in the not unprecedented Chinese feat of putting into their own pockets a few cents a day from each soldier’s pay. Chang had them up on the carpet only after he had undeniable proof of their guilt, and there was nothing left for them to do but to confess and plead for mercy. A curt order to have them taken to the execution-ground beyond the outer city wall closed the incident. On the same day two common soldiers who had indulged in looting in outlying districts were found in the possession of the extraordinary sum of five hundred dollars each, and for three days their bodies were left lying out in front of the Chinese railway station as a hint to others whose plans might be taking similar shape. Cynics, and those foreign residents whose pet among the “strong men” of China is some one else, lay such personal disasters to the simple fact that Chang himself did not get his share of the “squeeze,” but the consensus of opinion seemed to be otherwise.
Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their crippled feet
The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East
A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the Russians at Port Arthur. Hundreds of such war memorials are preserved by the Japanese on the sites of their first victory over the white race
The empty Manchu throne of Mukden