From Manchuli one can easily look across into Bolshevik territory; but that was not China, and the traveler must turn back somewhere. An ancient engine and the most rattletrap collection of cars that ever masqueraded under the name of train was preparing to set out for Chita, wretched-looking women and gaunt, hungry babies among the passengers who occupied the dirty, miserably dilapidated compartments that were lighted only by the candles travelers brought with them. Even those of us for whom hardships have a certain zest could hardly regret that the way lay back the comfortable way we had come.
From Mukden on to Peking one has a feeling of being in the real China at last. Silver dollars take the place of convenient bank-notes; the chaotic rough and tumble of Chinese crowds unchecked by foreign discipline pervades stations and trains, both swarming with unsoldierly men and boys in faded, ill fitting, gray cotton uniforms, who pack even the dining-car to impassability; here and there a bullet-hole through wall or window of the stuffy coupés into which the half-breed American-European cars, with certain curious native characteristics, are divided reminds one of recent history in the once Celestial Empire. Endless fields, enormous seas, of kaoliang, enough to hide all the bandits in China, flank the way. For that matter the towns as well as brigands hide in it, for the slightly oval-roofed houses of stone and baked mud are barely as high as this tall grain, and as the roofs themselves are often covered with grass, places of considerable size easily escape the eye entirely. In other seasons it is quite different, for once they are denuded the fields are mere wind-swept stretches of bare earth protesting against the habitual scarcity of moisture in North China by sending frequent swirling clouds of dust to envelop any one and anything within reach. Walled towns far from the stations that serve them, iron-riveted cart-wheels hub-deep in the “roads” through which rural transportation laboriously flounders its way, Chinese in long cloaks, almost universally denim-blue in color, naked children and ragged, diseased adults begging abjectly wherever the train halts, were but a few of the details that somehow we had always associated with China. Even the towns hidden in the grain seemed to be overrun with soldiers, yet about all pretentious properties were big stone walls that suggested bandits in perpetuity. All these things we saw hazily, through a veil, as it were, for some pseudo-genius has had the unhappy thought of lining nearly all the railways of China with willow-trees, which flash constantly past with exasperating persistence, combining with the inadequate little windows of the stuffy compartments still further to reduce the visibility.
At Shanhaikwan, where the Great Wall clambers down to the sea at last, weary with its three thousand miles over the mountains, soldiers were much less numerous than in towns not so important to the north and south of it. For the warring factions had declared a neutral zone on either side of the colossal ancient rampart, which had become again, after nearly three centuries of no real importance, the dividing-line between what threatens to be an independent Manchuria and China proper. On the beach at Shanhaikwan, or neighboring Pei-tai-ho, where half the foreign residents of North China spend the summer, with turbaned Hindus, white and black soldiers of France, an Italian gunboat, and other reminders of their protective home governments to discount rumors of being in danger, the heat was still too scorching to make an immediate entry into still hotter Peking inviting, though August was well on the wane. Even a week later, when much of the landscape was flooded with the brief rainy season, a cool breath of air night or day was as rare as a Chinese field without a grave. Within the Great Wall, beyond which seems to be considered outer darkness for such purposes, these bare, untended mounds, without even the grass which beautifies those of Korea, dotted the country like spatters of raindrops on a placid yellow sea. As we neared Taku, at the mouth of the river that gives Tientsin its importance and all but washes the walls of Peking, higher, newer conical heaps of earth suggested that many men of importance, or wealth, had recently been buried there. But these turned out to be salt-fields, where the surface soil of a great sea-flooded region is thrown up in mounds and rectangular heaps which gradually wash down from earthy brown to the white piles that are sacred to the government salt monopoly.
The traveler who lets his friends rush him about the foreign concession of Tientsin by trolley or automobile will get an impression of a comfortable Western community in an Oriental land, but he will carry off very little idea of the real China, or even of the real Tientsin, which is a swarming Chinese city, none the less so for having had its wall reduced to a street of boulevard width as a punishment for the Boxer uprising. To those for whom commerce and modern efficiency are everything of importance, the Concession at Tientsin is of more consequence than a whole province of interior China, but I found myself more interested in any one of the ten Mohammedan mosques within the native city, or in the former home of Li Hung-chang, now a tomb in which he is worshiped by his descendants quite like any other prominent bygone Chinese from Confucius to Yuan Shih-kai, than in the whole length of Victoria Road.
A foreign concession in China, while it serves its purpose of making life more livable and business more possible to the foreign merchants who inhabit it, is altogether too convenient a refuge for the Chinese crooks who choose to make it one. How many of China’s ex-ministers of finance or of communications, how many former office-holders of every graft-collecting grade, have retired to the protection of foreign jurisdiction at Tientsin alone, living in luxury on their loot of office, and how much of this might have been recovered by the Chinese people to whom it rightfully belongs were there no such safety-zones of easy access, is suggested by the magnificent establishments many of these rogues maintain there. Yet the gaunt human horses who toil past them tugging at heavy carts piled high with imports and exports get barely six cents a day in our money, which they wolf in scanty, unwholesome food copper by copper as fast as their tally-sticks amount to one. As mere passers-by we could not but be thankful that, after a brief following of the example of other nations, the United States decided that concessions on Chinese soil were not in keeping with our national policy. The Russians and the Germans and the Austrians have lost theirs now, as they have their extraterritoriality, and it would not be strange if this recovery of sovereignty taken from them for the misdeeds of the Boxers gives hope to the people of China of chasing us all out before the century has grown much older. Where a bare score of Italians can hold a large tract of Chinese territory under their jurisdiction, trafficking in arms and munitions from it with the various factions that are doing their best to make China a continual battle-field, and selling at almost any price they wish to ask what is virtually the protection of their flag to Chinese rascals, it is not to be wondered at if enmity toward “foreign devils” in general does not show rapid strides toward oblivion. Jealousies among the various nationalities which still keep their holdings also make a queer story. Thus as many police forces and fire departments are maintained as there are concessions, and one miserable little bridge connects the principal foreign quarter with the rest of China, when getting together would make really efficient substitutions. Tientsin is perhaps a pleasant dwelling-place for those who like it, but we left it without regret one morning soon after our arrival and by noon were rumbling along under the massive walls of Peking, which was to be our home for the unprecedented length of nine months that will not soon be forgotten.
CHAPTER VII
SPEEDING ACROSS THE GOBI
In September, when the kaoliang has ripened to its purple-red, there is added beauty to the eight-hour climb from Peking, by leisurely Chinese train, through Nankow Pass and the Great Wall, to Kalgan. Beyond that treeless, mountain-girdled city the railway turns sharply westward, timidly keeping within the outer spur of China’s mammoth rampart, and the traveler to the vast open world to the north must abandon it for a more courageous form of transportation.
Down to the very doors of to-day the camel caravan, drifting along for six weeks or two months, was the swiftest thing from Kalgan to Urga, capital of Outer Mongolia, seven hundred miles away, unless it was sometimes outsped by the forced relays of the Imperial Chinese Post. But the ratio between time and distance has of late undergone violent changes, even in such far-off stretches of the globe. Little more than a decade back mankind was astonished to hear that a venturesome motor-car had fought its way from Peking to Paris; five or six years ago men of more commercial turn of mind took to following this pioneer of swiftness across the Gobi; and to-day it is a rare week that does not see several automobiles, always with room for one more passenger, climb out of Kalgan on their way to Urga.
How some of these ever reach their destination is one of the innumerable mysteries of the Orient. Our own expedition seemed risky enough, yet it was a mere parlor-game compared to those we met or overtook along the way. In the first place there were but four of us—the Russian Jewish fur-merchant from Tientsin who owned the car, his chauffeur of similar origin, and we two wandering Americans whom chance had momentarily thrown together in the intricate byways of the earth. What with our necessary baggage, the food and beds and arctic garments it would have been foolhardy to reduce, and the cases of gasolene that completed the ramparts which made each ascent to our seats a mountaineering feat, I at least fancied we were heavily laden. Yet we passed on the trail cars with eight or nine Chinese passengers, and on a memorable morning one with eleven, besides all manner of baggage, winter garments, and paraphernalia, somehow packed away in them. They were often old and crippled cars, too, and no wonder, while our own was fresh from the factory, with two gasolene-tanks, a host of reinforcements and accessories, and the right-handed drive befitting left-handed China. Like all those engaged in the Kalgan-to-Urga traffic, it came from Detroit, though not of the breed one first thinks of in that connection, but from the second most popular motor tribe of that habitat. Those who should know say that this is the only car sturdy and at the same time economical enough to endure life on the Gobi Desert.
