Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Though it should be funereal, Tung Ling is one of the most delightful spots in North China, almost atoning for the wastefulness of its two hundred square miles given over to nine tombs. The soughing of the breeze and the singing of the few birds in the scattered but extensive evergreen forest were joys that one almost forgets in this bare land; for China there were comparatively few people within the enclosure, though trail-roads wandered away in all directions among the trees, with donkey-bells tinkling off into the distance; it was particularly a joy to leave even the trails and walk on grass again, strolling at random on and on, to climb the hills, though this is technically forbidden, since the living commonalty should not look down upon the illustrious dead. Whatever they may not have done for their subjects the Sons of Heaven were experts in choosing their last resting-places.

There was no roaming at will, however, until I had shaken off the procession of keepers and hangers-on whose duty, curiosity, or suspicion did not begin to flag until well on in the afternoon. It is a serious matter to protect an emperor and his consorts even centuries after their death. Every one of the nine tombs of Tung Ling has a walled town in which its guardians and their families, all Manchus, of course, live to the number certainly of several hundred each, if not of more than a thousand. Their support devolves upon the Chinese people, through the Government which guarantees, even though it does not fulfil its promises, the upkeep of the tombs, as well as of the survivors, of the Ch’ing dynasty. Before each tomb, which is no mere mausoleum in the Occidental sense but an enclosure many acres in extent, quite aside from the great wooded tract surrounding it, where half a dozen great buildings and a flock of small ones have ample elbow-room, stands a keepers’ lodge. From this, blackened with the smoke of generations of cooking and tea-brewing, emerge as many as a dozen idlers whose sole duty in life is to see that no unauthorized disturbance troubles the royal dead within. No one of these guards is intrusted with power enough to open the tomb alone; there are things inside that would bring pilferers several Chinese fortunes. When the authorized visitor—or, one very strongly suspects, any other capable of clinking silver—appears, shouts arise in the lodge and its vicinity until at length men enough are awakened from their perpetual siestas to make entrance possible. This requires from four to six, sometimes more, bunches of mammoth keys, each of which is in the personal keeping of a single individual or, since man must sleep, a pair of them. When at length the whole unshaven group is assembled, a pair of ordinary coolies is also needed to bring a step-ladder, since the tomb doors are trebly secured with enormous padlocks at top and bottom in addition to the great bolts operated through the ordinary keyholes. The keys of Chinese tombs, by the way, do not turn; they merely push open the crude yet complicated locks. There are often several such doors to be passed, so that the time required to gain admission is much more than the average visitor cares to spend inside.

Fortunately there is really nothing to be gained by having oneself let into more than two of the nine tombs of Tung Ling. The others are so much like these that a passing glimpse is enough. After all, it is the great wooded amphitheater itself, backed by the magnificent sky-line of mountains, and the exterior vista of the tombs, towering in imperial yellow high above not only the towns of their guardians but the enclosing forest itself, that is worth coming so far to see. Besides, by the time one has distributed fees among all the hangers-on of two tombs, and satisfied the flock of attendants who have insisted on coming all the way from town with him, there is another good reason for being content with the exteriors of the others.

The oldest and the newest are most worth admission, the beginning and the end of the Manchu dynasty as far as Lung Ling is concerned. K’ang Hsi, second of the Ch’ing line, has a fitting mausoleum, its approach flanked by mammoth stone figures not unlike those of the Mings, and the softening hand of time has added much, for it is just two centuries since the occupant went in quest of his ancestors. But the most magnificent of the Eastern Tombs, perhaps the finest one in all tomb-ridden China, is more than the world at large would have awarded the notorious old lady who lives within, for she is none other than Tsu Hsi or Tai Ho, known to the West as the Empress Dowager, moving spirit of the Boxer uprising and the greatest single cause of the downfall of the Manchu dynasty. Within the spirit chamber of K’ang Hsi there are five chairs draped in imperial yellow silk, for his four concubines stick by him even in death; but it is quite what one would expect to find the famous Dowager alone in all her glory. For while she had a husband once, who is also buried at Tung Ling, he was of small importance by the time she relieved China of her earthly presence, three years before the downfall of the Manchus, whatever he may have been as Emperor half a century before. Even starting as a mere concubine, Tsu Hsi needed no husband to make herself an empress in fact if not in name. An identical tomb, which the caretakers asserted is that of her sister, stands close beside that of Tai Ho, with a low wall between them; but in her magnificent throne-room there is no suggestion of rivalry. Of the richness of this interior, its walls and ceilings decorated in many colors with innumerable figures large and tiny of the most intricate form, great bronze dragons climbing the huge pillars; of a thousand details, artistic withal, which mean nothing to us of the West but much to the Chinese, words would give but little impression.

I had a note of introduction to the head-man of the Manchu village that watches over the Dowager’s tomb. Within its brick wall the populous hamlet was much like any other Chinese town of like size, rather overrun with pigs and children, crumbling away here and there with poverty or inattention, careless in sanitary matters. Few heads of many times greater cities of the Occident, however, could have received a chance visitor with the perfect grace, the prodigal-son cordiality quite devoid of any hint of dissimulation, of the Manchu with whom I was soon sitting at a little foot-high k’ang table laden with Chinese dainties, sipping tea and struggling to express in my scanty mandarin a few thoughts above the eating and sleeping level. As luck would have it the family, which with its ramifications seemed to number at least a hundred, with children for every month as far back as months go, was celebrating the birthday of the mother-in-law. In China only those who have reached a respectful old age commemorate their individual birthdays—and they receive many toys among their presents. Over the outer entrance to the rambling collection of houses hung two immense flags, not the dragon banner of the Manchus but the five-bar one of the Chinese Republic. Back in the innermost courtyard the old lady, of a charming yet authoritative manner which attested to long years of efficient rule over the household, was surrounded by all the female members of the family, decked out in their holiday best. The finest silks covered them from neck to ankles—trousers, like bound feet, are for Chinese women—the elaborate Manchu head-dress was made more so by immense and tiny flowers added to it in honor of the occasion, and the faces of the young women were painted with white and red, as formal occasions demand, until they looked like enameled masks. Several of these were evidently the wives of my polished host, and when I asked permission to photograph one of them alone for the details of the gala costume there was no hesitation as to which one it should be: though she was probably the youngest of them all, and for that reason almost obsequious toward the others, she had born her master a son, who must also be included in the picture. Women and men were constantly coming to bend the knee or kowtow to the lady of the occasion, according to their rank. The men with few exceptions wore the complete Manchu court costume, including the inverted-bowl straw hat covered with loose red cords, with various individual decorations. When I at last succeeded in taking my leave without causing a sense of discourtesy, my host insisted that my “boy” carry away for me, in honor of the felicitous occasion, a big box of dien-hsin, assorted Chinese cakes that lasted all three of us the rest of the outward journey.

There seems to be no ill feeling between the two peoples populating Tung Ling and the vicinity, if indeed they themselves recognize any real dividing-line. In large numbers congregated together one could see a difference between the Manchus and the Chinese; the keepers of the Eastern Tombs were slightly larger, stronger-looking men, a trifle less abject in their manner, than the people about them, a kind of half-way type between the Chinese and the Mongols. The older and poorer of them still wore their cues; the rest had sacrificed to the republic a badge of nationality the origin of which is lost in the prehistoric mists, as the subjected Chinese adopted it three centuries ago at the behest of their Manchu conquerors.

Early next morning we left the inn laboring under the impression that we were returning to Peking, skirted the garrison town by unfrequented paths, and were soon outside the Great Wall, one of the passes of which Malanchen straddles and guards. I had warned my companions not to mention the final goal of our journey, lest the newly promulgated order be cited as an excuse for turning me back, which would also mean the abrupt ending of their jobs. Apparently they succeeded in performing the un-Chinese feat of keeping their mouths shut, for no one came to interfere with my plans. The wall at Malanchen was grass-grown, smaller, and in greater disrepair than at Nankow Pass, where most foreigners see it, even less imposing than where it descends to the sea at Shanhaikwan. Geographically we had passed from China proper into Inner Mongolia, and as if to mark the change the soft level going turned almost instantly to stony uplands that became foot-hills, swelling into veritable mountains so suddenly that all six of us were panting for breath on all but perpendicular slopes scarcely an hour after setting out across the plain now far below. For centuries these mountain ranges behind Tung Ling were an imperial reserve, densely forested and inviolate, meant to preserve the feng-shui of the Eastern Tombs, to protect them from evil influences, which in China always come from the north. The republic, however, opened this great uninhabited region to settlers, with the result that here there may still be seen sights utterly unknown in the rest of China, pioneering conditions completely out of place in that densely populated, intensively cultivated land, and at the same time a demonstration of what must have happened many centuries ago on an infinitely larger scale to make North China the dust-blown, denuded area it is to-day.

Settlers poured in from the overpopulated country to the south as air rushes to fill a vacuum. An efficient Government would have seen that the windfall was exploited to the best advantage; in the absence of one it was ruthlessly looted. Precious as are trees and wood in China these great forests hardly a hundred miles from Peking were wiped out as wantonly as those of southern Brazil, as those of virgin Cuba lying in the path of advancing cane-fields. Half-burned trunks littered the hillsides; acres of fire-blackened stumps, wood that might have been turned into lumber enough to supply several provinces felled and left to rot or burn where it lay, men grubbing at slopes that had never before known the hoe were things that could not be reconciled with China. Alpine valleys filled with pink blossoms, of which cued coolies wore a cluster behind each ear, untainted mountain streams purling down across the trail, provided here and there with solid timber bridges instead of mats and branches sagging under their covering of loose earth, seemed as out of place in this part of the world as did the pungent scent of burning woodland that carried me back to a rural childhood. It was the most delightful day’s tramp in North China, and hardly once did I think of evicting my one-eyed companion from the white donkey.

But it was China after all, with many of its national characteristics. Streams of friendly, cheerful coolies climbed the defiles with their earthly possessions, consisting of a grub-ax and a few rags, ready for any task offered them, or in lieu of it prepared to gather a bundle of brush and carry it to a market many miles away; they realized that already this new land is so thickly peopled that it has no real openings for them. To see a line of men and boys, elbow to elbow, scratching one of these stony, thin-soiled, more than half-perpendicular hillsides, made the crowding of population a more living problem than a shelf of books could. There were a few pioneer shacks of split rails, but with unlimited logs and mighty boulders everywhere this imported generation of mountaineers built their huts mainly of mud, at best of unshaped stones and sticks. Burnt-log stockades surrounded many of these new homes, for you cannot break the Chinese of their habit of building walls merely by transplanting them to where walls are entirely unneeded. The Chinese birthright of the most laborious forms of labor still prevailed. Plows were home-made affairs drawn by a boy, a woman, or a donkey, and were so crude and small that the man who held them was bent double as he shuffled along. Thousands of roughly squared timbers nearly twice the size of a railroad-tie lay blackening and rotting along the trail, and every little while we met a man with two of these roped to his back picking his way down slopes rougher and steeper than any stairway disrupted by an earthquake. Goiter was more prevalent and reached more loathsome proportions in all this region than I have ever seen it elsewhere. New territory, new homes, new opportunities, all was as new as a new world, except the people, as soil- and custom-incrusted as if they had lived here a thousand years. The thought persisted that these beautiful mountains should have been left clothed in their magnificent forests instead of being enslaved to what can scarcely be called agriculture. At most they offer steep little strips of very stony patches, and the population these support is hardly worth the trees it has displaced. Human beings grubbing out an existence which hardly seems worth the effort may be seen anywhere in China; such primeval forests as have so recklessly been reduced to charred rubbish and clumps of trees only on the most inaccessible peaks and ridges behind Tung Ling are rare and precious there.