Those who are wise make the outward journey by way of Tung Ling, the Eastern Tombs, thereby doubling the reward. This means that the first stage is to Tungchow, by train or almost any known form of transportation, twelve miles east of the capital, of which it was for centuries the “port.” For it lies on the river that joins the Grand Canal at Tientsin, and the tribute grain from the south was transferred here to narrower canals that brought it to the imperial granaries now falling into ruin almost within a stone’s throw of our Peking home. I might have been disappointed to find the donkeys that had been engaged for me unavailable until next morning if it had not been my good fortune to spend the intervening time with the venerable author of “Chinese Characteristics” and “Village Life in China.” Tungchow itself has nothing unusual to show the visitor of to-day, unless it is that rounded corner of its half-ruined wall. This is a sign of infamy, for it means that some one within was once guilty of the, particularly in China, unpardonable crime of patricide. The city which merits four such corners was by imperial law razed to the ground.
Long before dawn, early as that is on the first day of May, the three donkeys reported for duty. They were smaller and leaner than I had hoped, of course, but their owner and driver, deeply pock-marked and already showing the cataract that will in time blind his remaining eye, turned out to be all that a much more exacting traveler could have asked, and a real companion to boot. I wish I could say as much for the “boy” I brought with me from Peking; truth must prevail, however, at all costs. My journey to Jehol was made at a later date than those longer ones subsequently to be chronicled; I had already been eight months in China, entertaining a teacher an hour a day during nearly half that period, and it seemed high time to depend on my own meager knowledge of Mandarin, to make this a kind of test for similar, but more extensive, experiences to come. I had deliberately refused those applicants with a smattering of English, therefore, and hired this single servant for his alleged familiarity with foreign ways, particularly of the kitchen. He might have known even less of what we understand by the word “cleanliness,” for the depths of ignorance in that respect are bottomless in China, and his familiarity was rather of the sort which too indulgent missionaries produce among Chinese of his class. Were the trip to be repeated I would depend upon k’an-lü-di, my companionable “watch-donkey-er” from Tungchow, to do the swearing and bring me boiled water at the inns, and do the rest myself. But at least the “boy” spoke only the tongue of Peking, and from Tungchow back to the capital I had the advantage of hearing not a word of any other except from the two British families in Jehol itself.
We were crossing the river by chaotic poled ferry by the time the sun was fully up, and jogging away across a floor-flat, fertile plain, intensely cultivated yet almost desert brown, like so much of northern China except at the height of summer, before the first of the many towns along the way was fully astir. It was manure strewing time, and the season when the peasants of Chihli patiently break up the too dry clods of earth covering their little fields by beating them with the back of a Homeric hoe or dragging a stone roller over them by boy-, man-, or donkey-power. Others were hoeing the winter wheat, growing in rows two feet apart, but with kaoliang already sprouting like beans or radishes between them, which it was hard to realize would be above a horseman’s head by August. Green onions enough to have fed a modern army went balancing by from the shoulder-poles of coolies passing in both directions. It is as incomprehensible to the mere Westerner why identical produce must change places all over China as it was to understand why onions grown at least to boy’s estate would not be better in a perpetually hungry land than these tiny bulbless ones. But the scent of young onions was seldom absent during our first two days, on which we ran the gauntlet every few hours of a market-town green from end to end with them. Next in number were the coolies carrying two low flat baskets with open-work covers through which could be seen hundreds of fluffy, peeping chicks being peddled about the country. The rare trees were decked out in new leaves; far as the eye could strain itself the brown, sea-flat earth was being prodded to do its best for countless, already sun-browned tillers.
At the unprepossessing country town where we spent the night my “boy” came in with a horrified look on his face to report that the innkeeper wanted sixty coppers, which is fully fifteen cents in real money, for the two good-sized rooms, new and well papered, extraordinarily clean for China, which the three of us occupied. A chicken, too, cost a hundred coppers, whereas in Peking it was only seventy! I gave outward evidence of horror at this incredible state of affairs, lest the opposite bring the impression that the customary “squeeze” might be doubled with impunity, and then advised payment rather than a dispute on this, our first day out. Perhaps it was the painful price of chickens that made the town willing to consume some of the things it does, though I believe the same omnivorous tendency prevails throughout this overpeopled country. The squeamish, by the way, should skip the next few lines; but one cannot always be nice and still tell the truth about China.
A camel bound to Peking with a train of his fellows had died just in front of our inn. The townsman to whom the carcass had evidently been sold made a deep cut in the throat and then with his several helpers proceeded to dismember it. When I stepped out into the street again soon after dark everything except the head, the tail, and the four great padded feet, cut off at the knees, had been sold as food to the villagers. The hide and these odds and ends were evidently to yield their portion of nourishment also, for they were carried into a neighboring kitchen, while two other men went on disentangling the heaped-up intestines, carefully preserving their contents as fertilizer and to all appearances planning to use the entrails themselves as food.
There was double excitement in the town that evening, triple, counting the foreigner, a date to be long remembered. Down the road a little way from the disgusting front of the inn there was a theatrical performance, not of flesh-and-blood actors, but what might be called a shadow-show. Stage “music” in the Chinese sense was drawing the whole town, less the camel carvers, thither; women hurried slowly through the dust on their crippled feet; the younger generation, with the usual Chinese redundancy of boys, swarmed; staid old men took their own chairs—that is, wooden saw-horses six inches wide—with them. The theater, which had been thrown up that afternoon in a corner of the highway, was little more than a crude platform on poles, partly walled and roofed with pieces of cloth. But it was a complete stage, almost better than a real one, in fact, for there was about it a certain hazy atmosphere of romance that is impossible in the matter-of-fact presence of mere human actors. There were even actual fights on horseback, which the real stage can only pretend by symbols to give; thrones, city gates, battles, petitioners, men shaking their spears and themselves with rage at one another, all the scenes with which the theater-goer in Peking is familiar, and more, were there. Nor was speech lacking; these shadowy personages expressed themselves in the same classical falsetto as do Mei Lan-fang and his colleagues.
When I had mingled for a time with the audience that crowded a whole section of the moon-flooded roadway, interspersed with the inevitable hawkers of everything consumable under the circumstances, I went around behind the scenes to see how these results were achieved with such slight apparatus. You can always look behind the scenes in China without arousing a protest, though you may not be any the wiser for doing so. A flock of boys were hanging about on the pole structure, wholly open at the back, the three showmen appearing to be quite unconscious of them so long as they did not physically cramp their elbows. These men produced their results with a black curtain, three kerosene lamps a foot or more back of it, and a confusion of little colored figures hanging on either side in what might be called the wings. Wearing as bored an expression as any property-man on a real Chinese stage, the showmen picked these figures down as they were needed and flourished them along between the lights and the curtain. To each figure was attached a handle long enough to keep the hand of the holder out of sight from the audience, and as the gaudy, flimsy little manikins dashed and pranced and waddled to and fro, according to their individual temperaments and their momentary emotions, the bored manipulators poured forth the story in the awful voice of the Chinese actor. That was all; yet the whole town stood or sat enthralled by the performance, and I could hear the falsetto far away in the moonlight until I fell asleep.
Beyond Manchow next afternoon cultivation thinned out and bare mountains grew up on the horizon, while round stones of all sizes became incessant underfoot. Walking had really been easier than bestriding my little white donkey, but I had soon found it sympathy wasted to try to make life easier for him. Your Chinese donkeyteer does not believe in letting his animals grow fat with ease, and never did I look around a moment after slipping off the padded back of my hip-high mount that his owner was not already swinging his toes along one or the other side of him. The other two donkeys, bearing our belongings and my “boy” respectively, had, of course, even less respite. Incredible little beasts! Subsisting on a little of nothing and still able to jog incessantly and indefinitely on under loads of almost their own weight, they are the true helpmeets of the industrious, ill fed Chinese countryman.
The usual time from Tungchow to Malanyü is three days, but we had gotten an excellent start each morning and a bit of pressure induced the k’an-lü-di to push on past what most travelers to the Eastern Tombs make their second stopping-place. A gate in the mountains that might almost have been cut by hand rather than by the river that even in this dry season filled all of it except a stony bank, crowded now with cattle and flocks of goats making their way westward, let us out at sunset upon an enormous plain completely enclosed in an amphitheater of high hills. Across this, through the evergreen trees that thickened farther on into an immense forest, we saw far ahead the first tomb of Tung Ling, a golden-yellow roof standing well above the highest tree-tops. For nearly two hours we plodded on among venerable pines that in China at least were thick enough to merit the name of forest, amid scents that are all too rare in that denuded land, foot-travelers to and from the various tomb-guarding villages growing numerous and then thinning out again before we sighted at last the dim lights and aroused the barking dogs of Malanyü. The yard of its best inn was noisy with eating animals, tinkling mule-bells, and the drivers, dogs, and roosters that always make night hideous in such a place, while the best room facing it would hardly be mistaken in any Western land for a human habitation. But that is what the traveler in China expects in almost any town off the railroads where there are no foreigners to offer him hospitality. At least, if accommodations are not princely, neither are the charges.
While the donkeys drowsed through a well earned but unexpected holiday, I spent half the morning, with the “boy” trailing me, chasing the man who could open the tomb doors for me. Even with two tissue-paper documents daubed with red characters from men of standing in Peking local permission was not easily forthcoming. First there was a hot and dusty ten-li walk to the little garrison town of Malanchen on the very edge of intramural China, where the commander commonly reputed to be stationed in Malanyü read and retained my letters, offered tea, and at length sent a soldier back to the city with us with orders to run to earth the chief keeper of the tombs. He was not easily found and he in turn had to run to earth several subordinates, each of whom lived far up labyrinthian alleyways in the utmost corners of town, and when at length we shook off the throng that kicks up the dust at the heels of any foreigner so bold as to step off the beaten path of his fellows in China, there was still an hour’s tramp back through the thin evergreen forest to the tombs themselves.