Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

A few streets of the central town, to which commerce is confined, are flanked by shops of a hybrid Chinese-Russian character, the great majority of which are inwardly establishments quite like those of China, though often scanty of goods and with a discouraged air in these days of oppressive rule. Then there are numerous open-air markets more worth visiting for their picturesqueness than for their wares. In one wide dusty space Mongolian ponies are put through their paces for prospective purchasers; camels or oxen may be had near-by on certain days; then, there are several blocks lined with displays of furs, mainly of sheep and goats in this season, but now and then offering wild pelts at reasonable figures. Shop after shop is filled from floor to low shack roof with the gaudy boots worn indiscriminately by all Mongols; little portable booths or stands overflowing with every manner of silly and useful trinket, chaotic collections of second-hand hardware spread on the ground, more or less itinerant purveyors of used garments and of the heavy silver ornaments that go with Mongol dress, each strive in their turn to attract and detain the stroller. Almost all these merchants, from horse-dealers to hawkers of lama rosaries and alleged photographs of the “Living Buddha,” are Chinese; the Mongol is frankly a nomadic herdsman and scorns any other occupation. Even in the purulent meat and vegetable market stretching along the carrion-lined stream just outside our window there were but few native venders. The more lowly members of the tribe might consent to slash up and distribute the still bleeding carcasses of cattle and sheep which Urga consumes in surprising daily quantities; even out on the plains that is a necessary and respectable task. But as the Mongol considers it unholy to cultivate the ground, the huge carrots, the turnips larger than cocoanuts, the squashes, potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, kaoliang, millet, and corn-meal all came from the truck-gardens of Chinese in inconspicuous hollows about the city and were sold only by them. Millet and kaoliang and rock-salt were about the only non-flesh wares appealing to the natives, anyway, for boiled meat, each mouthful slashed off before the lips with a sheath-knife, as among the gauchos of South America, is almost an exclusive diet with them the year round.

There is the atmosphere of a frontier town about Urga, for all its age and holiness and costly religious structures. Perhaps it is the great prevalence of mounted people as much as the rough-and-ready style of its architecture and streets which gives this feeling. The poor, and most of the despised foreigners, may or must go on foot, but the true Mongol, male or female, young or old, layman or lama, is by nature a horseman. Even the women, in their incredibly heavy ornaments and cumbersome garments, sit the tight little wooden saddles covered with red cloth as if they were part of the jogging animal beneath them. Children ride as easily and as soon as they can walk. Horsemen are so numerous and so fundamental in the Mongol scheme of things that the pedestrian has only secondary rights in the soft-footed streets of Urga. It is not so much his natural rudeness, nor even his inbred scorn for the horseless, which makes the Mongol so apt to ride down the walker unless the latter sidesteps. Probably it has never occurred to him, any more than to his horse, that all other movable beings should not necessarily always make way for him.

Besides the omnipresent Mongol pony there are strings of haughty camels from, or off again to, the desert; there are oxen and their crudest of two-wheeled carts, and now and again a yak, or a cross between this and the native cattle, identified mainly by its thick bushy tail. It is not only this quaint long-haired animal from the roof of Asia which reminds one of the close relationship between Mongolia and its distant neighbor, Tibet. The lengthwise Tibetan script stands beside the upright Mongolian on the façade of more than one building and on many a monument; not a few of the friendly-looking, darker-tinted natives of the lofty land behind the Himalayas, recognizable also by their different garb, the right arm and shoulder protruding from the cloak, may be met in the market-places; when the visitor begins to poke his nose into religious matters he finds that Tibet is much closer to him than he suspected.

Though there are sights of an inanimate nature in Urga that are well worth seeing, it is especially the unique and striking costumes of her people which cause bitter resentment for the confiscation of a camera. The Mongols are as fond of gaudy colors as the Andean Indians, though somewhat less given to barbaric combinations of them. Of a score of laymen often no two wear robes of the same hue; red, purple, blue, green, and all the combinations and gradations between them may be seen in any gathering outside religious circles. Men who pride themselves on their liberality toward the outside world show a fondness for ugly slouch-hats of a cheap quality that quickly fades to a nondescript hue. But these are so few as to be conspicuous among their orthodox fellows, who display a variety in head-dress which I have not the energy to attempt to describe. Suffice it to say that these are all striking, both in color and form, and that the overwhelming favorite seems to be the pagoda-shaped thing with a ball, generally of colored glass, on top, and side-wings of fur. This is common to both laymen and lamas and is said to have been originally copied from a sacred peak of central Asia.

But it would be unchivalrous to expect the men, even of an Oriental race in which the women form the bottom layer of society, to outdo the other sex in effective decoration of the cranium. Until I came to Mongolia I had been laboring under the delusion that in my various wanderings about the globe I had already run across the final word in woman’s head-dress. I humbly apologize, and hereby bestow the leather medal upon the ladies of Urga, without the least fear of ever again having to modify my decision. In intricacy, ugliness, fearsomeness, unportability, wastefulness, absurdity, not to say pure idiocy, their contraption surely outdistances all competitors, at least in our own little solar system.

It starts, so I have been assured by those of wider experience and reputation for veracity, often at virtual baldness, which under the circumstances, or under such a head-dress, is not surprising. Over this goes a skull-cap of silver in elaborate designs, weighing, if the eye be permitted to judge what the fingers may not touch, several pounds. I am no ladies’ coiffeur, and I may be getting the cart before the horse, but it is my strong impression that the hair comes next, most of it the hair of some one else, naturally, or at least hair which has ceased to derive its direct nourishment from its wearer. In color and texture, too, it has a way of recalling the tail of a horse, though this may be mere coincidence. First of all the hair forms a wig; then it flares out and is wound, in single strands that give it a cloth-like texture, round and round two horns that are thin and flat but wider and longer than those of the water-buffalo, which the lady with these appendages protruding well beyond her shoulders considerably resembles. Across the horns, front and back, at close intervals, run inch-wide bars of silver—replaced by wood or other substitutes in poverty-stricken cases—while from the ends, perhaps as a concession to the timid spectator who cannot rid himself of the fear of being gored, are suspended braids or cords reaching to the waist. A lady of reasonable tastes might conclude that this is enough, but there are innumerable opportunities for adding other silver and colored decorations, and naturally one needs a hat over one’s hair, so that milady of Urga piles on top, at the jaunty angle of a first-year sailor, one of the fur-sided, pagoda-shaped helmets favored by the men, thereby crowning herself in a manner befitting the rest of her costume. Let not the hasty reader get the impression that this ponderous and deeply cogitated head-dress is confined to the consorts of princes and saints, nor relegated to festive occasions and popular hours. The old woman who sold half-decayed fruit opposite our window wore the whole contraption, and all available evidence goes to show that it is as seldom removed as is the fly-trap hat of the Korean male. Indeed, it would be impossible to reconcile daily hair-dressing with the early hours at which many a fully clad woman appears. One easily surmises that this unbelievable millinery was copied from the cattle that have been the Mongols’ constant and chief companions for many centuries; but why hang the horns on the woman? Is it to keep before the mind that she, too, is a dangerous creature, or is it a means of training her in patience and the uncomplaining endurance of lifelong impediments, like the crippled feet of the women of China?

In ordinary circles the rest of the female costume of Mongolia would attract attention, but under the national head-dress it is almost inconspicuous. It includes big puffed sleeves, for instance, not unlike those of the Western world a generation ago, but filled with something that makes them hard and solid, and lifts the puffs some six inches above the shoulders. Unseemly exposure of the person is not a Mongol fault. Though personal habits of an indescribable nature are constantly in evidence among both sexes and all classes, there is never anything even remotely reminiscent of the freedom of a bathing-beach in more civilized lands. The woman’s thick, quilted, colorful jacket-gown covers her from tonsils to instep; her long sleeves serve her, Chinese fashion, as gloves; though it is known that she wears heavy lumber-jack trousers quite like those of her husband, even her trim ankles, if she has them, are never in evidence, for she thrusts her feet into the same mammoth boots which are universal beneath all ages, ranks, callings, and degrees of sanctity.

The Mongol boot, as I may have said before, is knee-high, of soft leather, usually red and most elaborately decorated, the toe turned up like the prow of Cleopatra’s barge, and it is made much too large for the foot, in order that many layers of thick socks may be worn in wintry weather. The extraordinarily slow pace of life in Urga is partly due, beyond a doubt, to the necessity of stalking about like a hobbled prisoner in such boots; but then, they were never made for walking, which is not a natural Mongol means of locomotion. The favorite one is the single-foot pony, with a kind of Indian rawhide reins, stirrups so short that the rider seems to be kneeling, and a tight little red saddle. It is an old joke in Urga that a Mongol would make an excellent cook—if he could ride about the kitchen on horseback. As the women as well as the men ride astride, with the easy abandon of born cowboys, it is perhaps as well that most of them cling to their marvelous head-dress, for without it there is little to distinguish between the sexes.

It is said that almost half the population of Urga are lamas. Certainly there are thousands upon thousands of them, swarming everywhere, in the market-town as well as in their own temple-topped sections, sometimes on horseback, more often plodding through the slovenly streets in their ponderous boots. Their round clipped heads, in contrast to the long cues of laymen, are often bare in any weather. It is visually evident, without asking questions, that they wear no trousers under their long quilted robes, which are similar to those of the marriageable men, yet easily distinguishable from them. Their gowns, originally saffron-yellow or brick-red in color, are well suited to the mahogany tint which the cold of high plateaus gives the Mongol cheeks; but they are so invariably dulled by grease, filth, and rough desert living as to suggest that this is considered the most holy and fitting state for seekers after a pseudo-Nirvana. Cleanliness certainly has no relation whatever to godliness in this unedifying religion of creaking prayer-wheels and barbaric hubbub; laity and lamas alike seem frankly to scorn it. Now and again one saw a prince who had just donned his winter garments, or a group of high lamas rode by in gleamingly new saffron or red robes, the yellow streamers from their high hats trailing behind them, clad in the most spotless of beautiful silks. But there is evidently something unmanly about such a condition, for those even of the highest class seem to make haste to reduce themselves to the common dirty drab, as some of our youths “baptize” a new pair of shoes. From high to low the Mongols are an unlaundered people, like so many dwellers in semi-desert lands, apparently never subjecting their clothing to any cleansing process—so filthy in fact that even the Chinese call them dirty!

Yet these big brawny Mongols of the Gobi, beside whom the Chinese look delicate and harmless, bring history home to the beholder in a striking fashion. It was easy to imagine these fearless nomad horsemen banding together under a Jenghiz Khan and sweeping down upon the rich but weaker people to the southward; once in Mongolia, that breeding-ground for many centuries of new virility for the human race, as it were, it was no longer hard to understand why the timorous but diligent Chinese should have spent such incredible toil to fling a wall across their whole northern frontier, in the vain hope of shutting themselves off from these dreaded barbarians, scorning civilization but ever ready to loot it of its fruits. Now and again I met a prince—not a pampered weakling of a run-down stock, like so many who bear that title in the West, but big powerful fellows who could ride their horses day after day like centaurs, sleep out on the open plain, and master their great herds with the pole-and-noose lasso as easily as any of their herdsmen subjects—handsome Mongol princes with a truly regal poise and dignity, for all the countless grease-spots on their silken gowns, whom one could readily picture in the rôle of another Jenghiz Khan.