Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The Mongols of Urga dispose of their dead by throwing the bodies out on the hillsides, where they are quickly devoured by the savage black dogs that roam everywhere

Mongol women in full war-paint

Though it was still only September, our return from Urga was not unlike a polar expedition

Every American is his own diplomat in Urga, where no nation except Russia has official representatives, so that most of our dealings were with cabinet members, especially with the minister of foreign affairs. He was a typical high-class Mongol, with greasy cue and soiled silk gown, whose qualifications for his office were that he spoke Chinese, though those who know Urga politics say he is a man of ability and the most powerful of the Mongols in the present Government. The prime minister, though a lama and a saint not many degrees below Bogda-Han himself, resembled all the others in appearance, except of course for his missing cue and certain details of dress. All the yamens were much like that of justice, to which we had the first introduction. Scores of booted and quilt-robed functionaries squatted on the cushioned platforms about the rooms of frame buildings that would be described as European, though they were built by the Chinese. An honest day’s work for any one of them seemed to be the scratching full of upright words with a weazel-hair brush of a two-foot strip of flimsy tissue-paper, the more careful copying of which would constitute their next daily contribution. The fastening of a portrait on the flimsiest of passports known to diplomatic circles, by sewing it in with pink silk thread and securing the knot with a wax seal many times heavier than all the rest of the document, left the man who accomplished it a sensation similar to that of the famous village smithy on his way to his night’s repose. The filing of a corresponding caricature of the applicant in the national archives was usually turned over to another functionary, in order to equalize the arduous toil. Then, too, no member of the staff wished to miss anything of interest. Every scrap of letter or document which we presented must be carefully examined by the whole yamen force; if it was in Mongolian, each one, from the assistant minister who would eventually take it in to his chief down to the youth who prepared the sealing-wax and wore over his eyes the black, bandit-like horsehair bandage which is the Mongol substitute for eye-glasses, must read it from end to end, which meant that we were forced to listen to the same meaningless song a score of times, for the Mongol cannot read without singing the words aloud. In my efforts to convince the Government of the harmlessness of the snap-shotting I should do about town if they would be so kind as to return my apparatus, I ran across some copies of the most photographic of our monthly magazines, and carried them to the yamens. These created unrivaled interest. All other work, slight as it always was, invariably was abandoned forthwith, and the combined force took to studying and discussing the pictures, their capped heads crowded closely together. When, hours after our arrival, it came time for the minister to give us his attention, he, too, must spend half the afternoon looking at the magazines, and end by telling us to come to-morrow when he could find time to make a decision. The advertisements won fully as much and quite as serious attention as the genuine photographs in the letter-press, which proved another cause for delay. For I challenge any one to explain in English turned into Russian and finally into Mongolian that there is really no curious race of dwarfs in America in spite of the picture of a merry tot barely exceeding in height the can of soup beside which he has stood for years in so many of our national publications.

However, we came to know official Mongolia well, and to find some of these functionaries pleasant and almost lovable fellows underneath their curious garb and their atrophied sense of the value of time. Eventually, too, we got results from our endless squatting about the yamens. Exactly a week after our arrival, when we had seen almost every one in ostensible authority in Mongolia except Bogda-Han himself, a soldier came to summon us to the Okhrana, and before the afternoon was gone our guns and cartridges were actually returned to us. True, the strap had been stolen from my companion’s rifle, and we were “squeezed” again in veritable Chinese fashion in the payment of the fees involved, as with our passports, by being forced to pay in “Mex” dollars instead of the legal rubles and copecks; but we had long since lost any inclination to trouble over trifles. Besides, the lumps of silver in which Mongol government employees are intermittently paid do not constitute large salaries. Permission to shoot lead, however, was not the chief motive of my yamen-chasing; I wished to turn my kodak on some of the curious types of Urga. The foreign minister having at length given me verbal permission to do so, I spent a morning in the office of the military staff—a dismal pair of little rooms occupied by a dozen gloomy and shoddy-clad Russian men and women dawdling over maps and translations—and finally interviewed the chief of staff himself. He was a tall, aristocratic-looking Russian who had been a major under the czar, but who held, of course, no rank in the “Red” scheme of things, though a kind of Cossack uniform flapped about his emaciated form and he occupied a position which in other lands would have called for at least a colonel. My hopes rose high, for here at last was a man with human intelligence enough to know that my simple request did not mean treason to the state. When the new supplication I was asked to write had been turned into Russian, he took it personally to the war minister. The interview was long, and though I was not invited to it myself, I knew that my case was being thoroughly discussed, for the minister spent some time in staring at me out of the window. Then the chief of staff returned my request with an annotation by his ostensible superior that the war department was quite willing to grant me the requested permission—if the minister of foreign affairs would also do so! I thought the struggle was won at last and that it was merely a question of awaiting the final papers with Mongolian patience; for had not the foreign minister already given such permission, if only by word of mouth? I no longer took with a grain of salt, however, the statement of my host that he had made twenty-one visits to the yamens for the simple purpose of getting a permit to ship some of his own horses out of the country.

Two days after this appeal to the chief of staff a soldier met me in the street and handed me a Mongol document. Every one having promised me permission to use my kodak again, I called at once at the Okhrana and asked that it be returned to me. The surly, slouch-hatted churl at the head of that institution, after letting me stand the usual half-hour without deigning to acknowledge my existence, looked at me in a queer way and grumbled something about “to-morrow.” Perhaps the document in my hand was not what I fancied it to be. I went out to have it translated.

It is only by the exercise of the sternest self-control that I refrain from quoting that remarkable paper in its entirety. Not that it ranks high as a literary production, nor that it is intrinsically of any particular interest; but there are probably few better specimens of that frankness in diplomatic relations between nations which has been of late so loudly demanded. Written on the usual long strip of tissue-paper folded crosswise and opening like an accordion, it proved to contain a yard or more of perpendicular Mongol script, authenticated at both ends by the big square red stamp of an official seal. A lengthy preamble led up to the statement that, “inasmuch as an individual named S——, calling himself an American consul,” had during a visit to Urga some months before been in conversation with those members of a conspiracy against the People’s Government of Mongolia who had since been executed for treason, he “had made to perish the good name of the great American nation,” and therefore said Government could no longer believe any American, verbally or in writing, wherefore permission was refused me ... and so on, to the length of a treaty of peace. However, a little résumé of recent Mongolian history and politics is essential to the full understanding of this tidbit of amateur diplomacy; for such it was, for all its ostensibly private nature, since it was plain that it had been written in the hope that I would bring it to the attention of our Government, with whom Outer Mongolia had no regular means of communicating.

Soon after the revolution that made China nominally a republic, Outer Mongolia broke the ties which had bound it rather loosely for centuries to the Chinese Empire. The new Chinese Government had other problems on its hands, and for several years nothing serious was done to regain the allegiance of this vast territory, which had declared its independence without being very strict in such matters as completely expelling all Chinese officials. In 1917 there was organized in China under Japanese instructors an army-corps of twenty thousand Chinese, who were to take the enemy ships interned in Shanghai, sail for France, and win the war. But the armistice overtook these preparations and left the question of what to do with the troops on which so much training had been spent. Some genius at length suggested that they be made a “Northeastern Defense Corps,” and half the twenty thousand were sent to Urga under command of a general popularly known in China as “Little Hsu,” one of those choice morsels of humanity who had to his credit such actions as having a rival assassinated in his garden after inviting him to luncheon. All testimony seems agreed that these Chinese troops played havoc in Urga and vicinity, particularly after China had deprived Russians of their extraterritorial rights and after the “little worm” of a Russian consul who had been instrumental in having the expedition sent had departed. They began boldly looting and killing Russians as well as Mongols, and it was but a slight shift from that to attacking foreigners still entitled to extraterritorial privileges. Before matters grew serious enough to prod the powers to action, however, word came that a White Russian force was moving on Urga. “Little Hsu” ran away, leaving General Chu in command. The latter planned to kill all the foreigners left, according to his own assertion, then lost his nerve as the Russians drew near, and fled before his army; and when next seen by any of his intended victims he was basking in the hero-admiring smiles of foreign ladies and their escorts at a dance in the principal hotel of Peking.