Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Kuling, China,

August 16, 1923.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER		PAGE
I	In the Land We Call Korea	[3]
II	Some Korean Scenes and Customs	[23]
III	Japanese and Missionaries in Korea	[36]
IV	Off the Beaten Track in Cho-sen	[53]
V	Up and Down Manchuria	[71]
VI	Through Russianized China	[82]
VII	Speeding across the Gobi	[108]
VIII	In “Red” Mongolia	[124]
IX	Holy Urga	[135]
X	Every One His Own Diplomat	[160]
XI	At Home under the Tartar Wall	[174]
XII	Jogging about Peking	[195]
XIII	A Journey to Jehol	[230]
XIV	A Jaunt into Peaceful Shansi	[252]
XV	Rambles in the Province of Confucius	[265]
XVI	Itinerating in Shantung	[288]
XVII	Eastward to Tsingtao	[308]
XVIII	In Bandit-Ridden Honan	[330]
XIX	Westward through Loess Cañons	[349]
XX	On to Sian-fu	[366]
XXI	Onward through Shensi	[387]
XXII	China’s Far West	[405]
XXIII	Where the Fish Wagged His Tail	[423]
XXIV	In Mohammedan China	[447]
XXV	Trailing the Yellow River Homeward	[468]
XXVI	Completing the Circle	[485]

ILLUSTRATIONS

A constant stream of pilgrims, largely blue-clad coolies on foot, passed up and down the sacred stairway	[Frontispiece]
	FACING PAGE
Map of the author’s route	[12]
Our first view of Seoul, in which the former Temple of Heaven is now a smoking-room in a Japanese hotel garden	[16]
The interior of a Korean house	[16]
Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter	[17]
At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a little oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his precious horsehair hat	[17]
Some of the figures, in the gaudiest of colors, surrounding the Golden Buddha in a Korean temple	[32]
The famous “White Buddha,” carved, and painted in white, on a great boulder in the outskirts of Seoul	[32]
One day, descending the hills toward Seoul, we heard a great jangling hubbub, and found two sorceresses in full swing in a native house, where people come to have their children “cured”	[33]
The yang-ban, or loafing upper class of Korea, go in for archery, which is about fitted to their temperament, speed, and initiative	[33]
The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmic rat-a-tat of which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in the peninsula	[40]
Winding thread before one of the many little machine-knit stocking factories in Ping Yang	[40]
The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with their green mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully tended by the superstitious descendants	[41]
A chicken peddler in Seoul	[48]
A full load	[48]
The plowman homeward wends his weary way—in Korean fashion, always carrying the plow and driving his unburdened ox or bull before him. One of the most common sights of Korea	[49]
The biblical “watch-tower in a cucumber patch” is in evidence all over Korea in the summer, when crops begin to ripen. Whole families often sleep in them during this season, when they spring up all over the country, and often afford the only cool breeze	[49]
A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper in his high hat at the rear	[64]
The interior of a native Korean school of the old type,—dark, dirty, swarming with flies, and loud with a constant chorus	[64]
In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea	[65]
The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean cooking	[65]
One of the monks of Yu-jom-sa	[68]
This great cliff-carved Buddha, fifty feet high and thirty broad, was done by Chinese artists centuries ago. Note my carrier, a full-sized man, squatting at the lower left-hand corner	[68]
The carved Buddhas of Sam-pul-gam, at the entrance to the gorge of the Inner Kongo, were chiseled by a famous Korean monk five hundred years ago	[69]
The camera can at best give only a suggestion of the sheer white rock walls of Shin Man-mul-cho, perhaps the most marvelous bit of scenery in the Far East	[69]
Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their crippled feet	[76]
The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East	[76]
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	[77]
The empty Manchu throne of Mukden	[77]
The Russian so loves a uniform, even after the land it represents has gone to pot, that even school-boys in Vladivostok usually wear them,—red bands, khaki, black trousers, purple epaulets	[80]
A Manchu woman in her national head-dress, bargaining with a street vender of Mukden for a cup of tea	[80]
A common sight in Harbin,—a Russian refugee, in this case a blind boy, begging in the street of passing Chinese	[81]
A Russian in Harbin—evidently not a Bolshevik or he would be living in affluence in Russia	[81]
The grain of the kaoliang, one of the most important crops of North China. It grows from ten to fifteen feet high and makes the finest of hiding-places for bandits	[96]
A daily sight in Vladivostok,—a group of youths suspected of opinions contrary to those of the Government, rounded up and trotted off to prison	[96]
A refugee Russian priest, of whom there were many in Harbin	[97]
Types of this kind swarm along the Chinese Eastern Railway of Manchuria, many of them volunteers in the Chinese army or railway police	[97]
One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray, with green domes and golden crosses, with much gaudy trimming	[100]
A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down upon	[100]
Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks in the “thieves” market of Harbin—when they catch any one who can afford to be blacked	[101]
Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok, selling second-hand hardware of every description, suggest why the factories and trains of Bolshevik Russia have difficulty in running	[101]
The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil ten or more hours a day for twenty coppers, about six cents in our money	[108]
Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no automobile can climb to the great Mongolian plateau unassisted	[108]
Some of the camel caravans we passed on the Gobi seemed endless. This one had thirty dozen loaded camels and more than a dozen outriders	[109]
But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing home-made two-wheeled carts, often with a flag, sometimes the Stars and Stripes, flying at the head	[109]
The Mongol would not be himself without his horse, though to us this would usually seem only a pony	[112]
Mongol authorities examining our papers, which Vilner is showing, at Ude. Robes blue, purple, dull red, etc. Biggest Chinaman on left	[113]
A group of Mongols and stray Chinese watching our arrival at the first yamen of Urga	[113]
The frontier post of Ude, fifty miles beyond the uninhabited frontier between Inner and Outer Mongolia, where Mongol authorities examine passports and very often turn travelers back	[128]
Chinese travelers on their way to Urga. It is unbelievable how many muffled Chinamen and their multifarious junk one “Dodge” will carry	[128]
The Mongol of the Gobi lives in a yourt made of heavy felt over a light wooden framework, which can be taken down and packed in less than an hour when the spirit of the nomad strikes him	[129]
Mongol women make the felt used as houses, mainly by pouring water on sheep’s wool	[129]
The upper town of Urga, entirely inhabited by lamas, has the temple of Ganden, containing a colossal standing Buddha, rising high above all else. It is in Tibetan style and much of its superstructure is covered with pure gold	[144]
Red lamas leaving the “school” in which hundreds of them squat tightly together all day long, droning through their litany. They are of all ages, equally filthy and heavily booted. Over the gateway of the typical Urga palisade is a text in Tibetan, and the cylinders at the upper corners are covered with gleaming gold	[144]
High class lamas, in their brilliant red or yellow robes, great ribbons streaming from their strange hats, are constantly riding in and out of Urga. Note the bent-knee style of horsemanship	[145]
A high lama dignitary on his travels, free from the gaze of the curious, and escorted by mounted lamas of the middle class	[145]
A youthful lama turning one of the myriad prayer-cylinders of Urga. Many written prayers are pasted inside, and each turn is equivalent to saying all of them	[152]
The market in front of Hansen’s house. The structure on the extreme left is not what it looks like, for they have no such in Urga, but it houses a prayer-cylinder	[152]
Women, whose crippled feet make going to the shops difficult, do much of their shopping from the two-boxes-on-a-pole type of merchant, constant processions of whom tramp the highways of China	[153]
An itinerant blacksmith-shop, with the box-bellows worked by a stick handle widely used by craftsmen and cooks in China	[153]
Pious Mongol men and women worshiping before the residence of the “Living Buddha” of Urga, some by throwing themselves down scores of times on the prostrating-boards placed for that purpose, one by making many circuits of the place, now and again measuring his length on the ground	[160]
The Mongols of Urga disposed of their dead by throwing the bodies out on the hillsides, where they are quickly devoured by the savage black dogs that roam everywhere	[160]
Mongol women in full war-paint	[161]
Though it was still only September, our return from Urga was not unlike a polar expedition	[161]
Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall of the Tartar City	[176]
The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists of (left to right) ama, rickshaw-man, “boy,” coolie, and cook	[176]
A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on the wall	[177]
Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our quarter	[177]
At Chinese New Year the streets of Peking were gay with all manner of things for sale, such as these brilliantly colored paintings of native artists	[192]
A rich man died in our street, and among other things burned at his grave, so that he would have them in after-life, were this “automobile” and two “chauffeurs”	[192]
A neighbor who gave his birds a daily airing	[193]
Just above us on the Tartar Wall were the ancient astronomical instruments looted by the Germans in 1900 and recently returned, in accordance with a clause in the Treaty of Versailles	[193]
Preparing for a devil dance at the lama temple in Peking	[208]
The devil dancers are usually Chinese street urchins hired for the occasion by the languid Mongol lamas of Peking	[208]
The street sprinklers of Peking work in pairs, with a bucket and a wooden dipper. This is the principal street of the Chinese City “outside Ch’ien-men”	[209]
The Forbidden City is for the most part no longer that, but open in more than half its extent to the ticket-buying public	[209]
In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven	[224]
Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like his father and grandfather before him, plays only female parts	[224]
Over the wall from our house boats plied on the moat separating us from the Chinese City	[225]
Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night soil of the city, brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as fertilizer	[225]
For three thousands miles the Great Wall clambers over the mountains between China and Mongolia	[240]
One of the mammoth stone figures flanking the road to the Ming Tombs of North China, each of a single piece of granite	[240]
Another glimpse of the Great Wall	[241]
The twin pagodas of Taiyüan, capital of Shansi Province	[241]
The three p’ai-lous of Hsi Ling, the Western Tombs	[248]
In Shansi four men often work at as many windlasses over a single well to irrigate the fields	[249]
Prisoners grinding grain in the “model prison” of Taiyüan	[249]
A few of the 508 Buddhas in one of the lama temples of Jehol	[256]
The youngest, but most important—since she has borne him a son—of the wives of a Manchu chief of one of the tomb-tending towns of Tung Ling	[256]
Interior of the notorious Empress Dowager’s tomb at Tung Ling, with her cloth-covered chair of state and colors to dazzle the stoutest eye	[257]
The Potalá of Jehol, said to be a copy, even in details, of that of Lhasa. The windows are false and the great building at the top is merely a roofless one enclosing the chief temple	[257]
Behind Tung Ling the great forest reserve which once “protected” the tombs from the evil spirits that always come from the north was recently opened to settlers, and frontier conditions long since forgotten in the rest of China prevail	[260]
Much of the plowing in the newly opened tract is done in this primitive fashion	[260]
The face of the mammoth Buddha of Jehol, forty-three feet high and with forty-two hands. It fills a four-story building, and is the largest in China proper, being identical, according to the lamas, with those of Urga and Lhasa	[261]
A Chinese inn, with its heated k’ang, may not be the last word in comfort, but it is many degrees in advance of the earth floors of Indian huts along the Andes	[261]
The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone stairway which ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,” here seen in the upper right-hand corner	[268]
One of the countless beggar women who squat in the center of the stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every pilgrim to drop at least a “cash” into each basket	[268]
Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan, capital of Shantung	[269]
A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most sacred of the five holy peaks of China	[269]
A priest of the Temple of Confucius	[272]
The grave of Confucius is noted for its simplicity	[272]
The sanctum of the Temple of Confucius, with the statue and spirit—tablet of the sage, before which millions of Chinese burn joss-sticks annually	[273]
Making two Chinese elders of a Shantung village over into Presbyterians	[288]
Messrs. Kung and Meng, two of the many descendants of Confucius in Shantung flanking one of those of Mencius	[288]
Some of the worst cases still out of bed in the American leper-home of Tenghsien, Shantung, were still full of laughter	[289]
Off on an “itinerating” trip with an American missionary in Shantung, by a conveyance long in vogue there. Behind, one of the towers by which messages were sent, by smoke or fire, to all corners of the old Celestial Empire	[289]
On the way home I changed places with one of our three wheelbarrow coolies, and found that the contrivance did not run so hard as I might otherwise have believed	[304]
The men who use the roads of China make no protest at their being dug up every spring and turned into fields	[304]
Sons are a great asset to the wheelbarrowing coolies of Shantung	[305]
A private carriage, Shantung style	[320]
Shackled prisoners of Lao-an making hair-nets for the American market	[320]
School-girls in the American mission school at Weihsien, Shantung	[321]
The governor’s mansion at Tsingtao, among hills carefully reforested by the Germans, followed by the Japanese, has now been returned to the Chinese after a quarter of a century of foreign rule	[321]
Chinese farming methods include a stone roller, drawn by man, boy, or beast, to break up the clods of dry earth	[336]
Kaifeng, capital of Honan Province, has among its population some two hundred Chinese Jews, descendants of immigrants of centuries ago	[336]
A cave-built blacksmith and carpenter-shop in Kwanyintang where the Lunghai railway ends at present in favor of more laborious means of transportation	[337]
An illustrated lecture in China takes place outdoors in a village street, two men pushing brightly colored pictures along a two-row panel while they chant some ancient story	[337]
In the Protestant Mission compound of Honanfu the missionaries had tied up this thief to stew in the sun for a few days, rather than turn him over to the authorities, who would have lopped off his head	[344]
Over a city gate in western Honan two crated heads of bandits were festering in the sun and feeding swarms of flies	[344]
A village in the loess country, which breaks up into fantastic formations as the stoneless soil is worn away by the rains and blown away by the winds	[345]
I take my turn at leading our procession of mule litters and let my companions swallow its dust for a while	[352]
The road down into Shensi. Once through the great arch-gate that marks the provincial boundary, the road sinks down into the loess again, and beggars line the way into Tungkwan	[352]
Hwa-shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China	[353]
An example of Chinese military transportation	[353]
Coal is plentiful and cheap in Shensi, and comes to market in Sian-fu in wheelbarrows, there to await purchasers	[360]
The holy of holies of the principal Sian-fu mosque has a simplicity in striking contrast to the demon-crowded interiors of purely Chinese temples	[360]
Our carts crossing a branch of the Yellow River fifty li west of the Shensi capital	[361]
Women and girls do much of the grinding of grain with the familiar stone roller of China, in spite of their bound feet	[361]
An old tablet in the compound of the chief mosque at Sian-fu, purely Chinese in form, except that the base has lost its likeness to a turtle and the writing is in Arabic	[368]
This famous old portrait of Confucius, cut on black stone, in Sian-fu is said to be the most authentic one in existence	[368]
A large town of cave-dwellers in the loess country, and the terraced fields which support it	[369]
Samson and Delilah. This blind boy, grinding grain all day long, marches round and round his stone mill with the same high lifted feet and bobbing head of the late Caruso in the opera of that name	[369]
The East Gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the capital of Shensi, rises like an apartment-house above the flat horizon	[384]
All manner of aids to the man behind the wheelbarrow are used in his long journey in bringing wheat to market, some of them not very economical	[384]
The Western Gate of Sian-fu, through which we continued our journey to Kansu	[385]
A “Hwei-Hwei,” or Chinese Mohammedan, keeper of an outdoor restaurant	[385]
In the Mohammedan section of Sian-fu there are men who, but for their Chinese garb and habits, might pass for Turks in Damascus or Constantinople	[400]
Our chief cartman eating dinner in his favorite posture, and holding in one hand the string of “cash,” one thousand strong and worth about an American quarter, which served him as money	[400]
A bit of cliff-dwelling town in the loess country, where any other color than a yellowish brown is extremely rare	[401]
A corner of a wayside village, topped by a temple	[401]
The Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed about once a month by the itinerant barber. This one is just in the act of adding a switch. Note the wooden comb at the back of the head	[408]
An old countryman having dinner at an outdoor restaurant in town on market day has his own way of using chairs or benches	[408]
A Chinese soldier and his mount, not to mention his worldly possessions	[409]
Mongol women on a joy-ride	[409]
Two blind minstrels entertaining a village by singsonging interminable national ballads and legends, to which they keep time by beating together resonant sticks of hard wood	[416]
The boys and girls of western China are “toughened” by wearing nothing below the waist and only one ragged garment above it, even in midwinter	[416]
The “fast mail” of interior China is carried by a pair of coolies, in relays of about twenty miles each, made at a jog-trot with about eighty pounds of mail apiece. They travel night and day and get five or six American dollars a month	[417]
A bit of the main street of Taing-Ning, showing the damage wrought by the earthquake of two years before to the “devil screen” in front of the local magistrate’s yamen	[417]
This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest	[436]
A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to escort us through the earthquake district, though whether for fear of bandits, out of mere respect for our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a few coppers which he could not give them himself, was not clear	[436]
Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old tree-lined highway. In places this was covered hundreds of feet deep for miles, in others it had been carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile or more away	[437]
In the earthquake district of western China whole terraced mountain-sides came down and covered whole villages. In the foreground is a typical Kansu farm	[437]
Kansu earlaps are very gaily embroidered in colored designs of birds, flowers, and the like. Pipes are smaller than their “ivory” mouthpieces	[444]
It is a common sight in some parts of Kansu to see men knitting, and still more so to meet little girls whose feet are already beginning to be bound	[444]
The village scholar displays his wisdom by reading where all can see him—through spectacles of pure plate-glass	[445]
A Kirghiz in the streets of Lanchow, where many races of Central Asia meet	[445]
An ahong, or Chinese Mohammedan mullah of Lanchow	[448]
Mohammedan school-girls, whose garments were a riot of color	[448]
A glimpse of Lanchow, capital of China’s westernmost province, from across the Yellow River	[449]
Looking down the valley of Lanchow, across several groups of temples at the base of the hills, to the four forts built against another Mohammedan rebellion	[449]
A Kansu vista near Lanchow, where the hills are no longer terraced, but where towns are numerous and much alike	[464]
This method of grinding up red peppers and the like is wide-spread in China. Both trough and wheel are of solid iron	[464]
Oil is floated down the Yellow River to Lanchow in whole ox-hides that quiver at a touch as if they were alive	[465]
The Yellow River at Lanchow, with a water-wheel and the American bridge which is the only one that crosses it in the west	[465]
The Chinese protect their boys from evil spirits (the girls do not matter) by having a chain and padlock put about their necks at some religious ceremony, which deceives the spirits into believing that they belong to the temple. Earlaps embroidered in gay colors are widely used in Kansu in winter	[480]
Many of the faces seen in Western China hardly seem Chinese	[480]
A dead man on the way to his ancestral home for burial, a trip that may last for weeks. Over the heavy unpainted wooden coffin were brown bags of fodder for the animals, surmounted by the inevitable rooster	[481]
Our party on the return from Lanchow,—the major and myself flanked by our “boys” and cook respectively, these in turn by the two cart-drivers, with our alleged mafu, or groom for our riding animals, at the right	[481]
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	[496]
The usual kitchen and heating-plant of a Chinese inn, and the kind on which our cook competed with hungry coolies in preparing our dinners	[496]
The midwinter third-class coach in which I returned to Peking	[497]
No wonder I was mistaken for a Bolshevik and caused family tears when I turned up in Peking from the west	[497]

The author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to Mr. Edwin S. Mills of Peking, China, for the use of the pictures of Urga.

WANDERING IN

NORTHERN CHINA

CHAPTER I
IN THE LAND WE CALL KOREA