The best way back to Peking would have been to float down the Lwan Ho, with its striking cliffs and gorges, to the railway, well north of Tientsin. But low waters made this trip uncertain, and boatmen were too busy with grain to give a lone traveler much attention. I turned regretfully back, therefore, along the direct main route, worn with centuries of travel, by the feet of man and his beasts, though never aided by his hands. The scent of lilacs, white and of the more usual color, filled the air as we left the city. Inconspicuous on the white donkey or on foot beside the troopers astride good horses and beneath their big straw hats, I scarcely caught the eye of travelers drowsing in the mule-litters that passed so often, to say nothing of attracting bandits out of the north. We crossed two passes and forded the Lwan Ho on the first day and on the morning of the second sighted a high cragged range stretching from infinity to infinity across the horizon ahead, with little unnatural-looking promontories, like knobs on a casting, dotting it at frequent intervals. They were the towers of the Great Wall, it turned out, climbing like a chamois from one lofty peak to another, but it was blazing noon before we passed through it at the much-walled town of Kupehkow. Coolies carrying down to Jehol brushwood and even roots had passed us all the first day; naked children were everywhere; men, and once or twice, unless my eyes deceived me, women, stripped to the waist toiled in the dry fields, sometimes waded knee-deep in the liquid mud of little patches that in another month would be pale green with rice. Graves grew numerous again inside the Great Wall; half-ruined yentai, “smoke-platforms” from the tops of which news was sent from the capital in olden days, towered above us at regular intervals; the peddlers of fluffy chicks and coolies carrying green onions to market once more appeared; and the caricature of a road became almost a procession of travelers in both directions.
It was an atrocious road nearly all the way, plodding along sandy, stony river-beds except where it clambered laboriously over another mountain ridge, the sun beating ruthlessly down upon us from its rising to its setting. Babies with shaved heads apparently impervious to its rays rooted in the dirt with the black pigs, or stood on sturdy legs suckling even more soil-incrusted mothers. There ought to be very few weeds in China; the whole family is incessantly after them, just as every usable form of filth is promptly gathered. The most common sight in China is of men and boys, sometimes women and girls, wandering the roads and trails with a fork or shovel with which to toss the droppings of animals into a basket over their shoulders, whence it will later be spread on the fields. Each night we put into an inn-yard, where the best available room was quickly assigned me; my cot and a foot-high table were set on the oiled cloth with which I covered the k’ang, and after as nearly a bath as can be had in a basin of hot water there was nothing left to do but to wait patiently for whatever supper my not too adaptable “boy” chose to serve me. The escort had reduced itself to one soldier at the first relief, and at noon on the third day it disappeared entirely. At length the stony sand changed to the fertile plain of Peking, though the road was nothing to boast of up to the last, and while rain and two splittings of my little party at forks of the route all but spoiled my schedule, the afternoon of the fourth day saw us filing through one of the eastern gates of the Tartar City.
CHAPTER XIV
A JAUNT INTO PEACEFUL SHANSI
It is a simple matter to visit Hsi Ling, the Western Tomb, where all the Manchu emperors not at Tung Ling are buried. A short branch of the Peking-Hankow line sets the traveler down, four leisurely hours from the capital, within strolling distance of the newest of them, housing the remains of the hapless Kuang Hsü. This is quite as extensive and sumptuous as if the imprisoned puppet had been a real ruler, but it is still glaringly new, the trees that will some day form a forest about it barely head-high, for it is only fifteen years since this effigy of an emperor and the powerful Dowager who manipulated him simultaneously made way for the present occupant of the Forbidden City. No doubt he is glad to be so far away from the oppressive old lady at last.
Bare hills lie between the older tombs, their roofs of imperial yellow hidden in venerable evergreen forests that seem to know nothing of bustling modern times. Yung Cheng, third Manchu emperor of China, sent men to choose this spot for him in 1730. When his successor, Ch’ien Lung, came to die, however, he expressed a preference for the Eastern Tombs, saying that if he, too, were buried in the west it might become a habit and the first two emperors of the dynasty would remain in gloomy solitude. He instructed his successors to alternate between the two places, and all of them did so except Tao Kuang, who refused to be separated from his father even in death. Five emperors, three dowager-empresses, many fei, or imperial concubines—whose tombs are blue rather than yellow, because they never had royal title—and a host of princesses in clusters within single tombs, lie scattered through the forests of Hsi Ling. Like all royal burial-places in China the site backs up against the mountains, here the Hsi Shan, the Western Hills, which stretch far to the north and south in rugged, clear-cut ranges close behind the tombs. Delightful paths wander through the evergreen woods, where here and there ill fed Manchus forage for firewood to keep the kettles boiling in their dilapidated caretakers’ villages. There are crowds of loafers guarding each tomb, as at Tung Ling, quick enough to offer a visitor the ceremonious cup of tea under conditions, invisible to them, which force him to decline it, but too lazy to open all the doors even when their unsoaped palms are crossed with silver, to say nothing of lifting a hand to repair the ravages of time or to cut the weeds and grass that grow everywhere between the flagstones. After all, it is better that way; any suggestion of real care would be out of keeping with the pastoral Chinese setting, and there are sheep and goats enough to keep the places from becoming impassable jungles.
One may spend all day roaming from forest-buried tomb to mountain-backed mausoleum; the most mammoth solid stone monuments on turtle bases I have ever seen in China stand side by side in the main entrance pavilion—the exit of most visitors; and the other sides of this square are formed by three p’ai-lous, any of which is almost the equal of the famous single one at the Ming Tombs. But I prefer Tung Ling to its more accessible alternative, if only because its caretakers see too few tourists to acquire the manner of street-urchins.
I stopped off at Paoting, long the capital of Chihli Province and recently the unofficial capital of North China, to see Tsao Kun. But his secretary brought word that the problems of China had given him a headache which had sent him to bed—it was at the height of one of the bandit outrages against foreigners. Those who know this illiterate sword-shaker and how much he cares about China as distinguished from his own gains, will appreciate the unconscious humor of the answer. Before his yamen stood viceregal poles, of cement instead of wood, a hint perhaps of the fancied permanence of his position. Besides this manipulator of the puppets of Peking there is nothing especially worth seeing in Paoting. A few superficial improvements, such as a new garden for the town to stroll and gamble in, to impress the people with their lord’s importance and his love for them, are all that distinguish this from any large old Chinese walled city.
The chief impression of the broad flatlands of Chihli in May is the windlassing of water for irrigation out of wells dotting the landscape everywhere, by a man or two with bare brown torso or by a blindfolded mule. The railway cuts ruthlessly across graveyards, perhaps because if it did not it could find no place to run at all; old sunken roads have been turned into gardens, and new ones are wearing themselves down into the pulverous soil. The narrow-gage line that strikes westward from Shihkiachuang into Shansi climbs all morning the bed of a clear little river harnessed for work in many little straw-built mills on the banks or astride the channels into which the crowded people have divided it. There is plenty of stone here. Whole towns are made entirely of it; little fields that can produce at most a peck of wheat are held up by stone walls at least as extensive as they. Crows and other destructive birds are as numerous and ravenous as the human population, who paint scarecrows crudely on the stone walls of the terraces, and hang up straw ones that look ludicrously like Taoist priests. Perhaps these are more effective over such evil spirits than laymen scarecrows. In the mountains well-sweeps instead of windlasses aid the irrigators. Seen on a level these terraced hills looked horribly dry and arid, a dreary yellow and brown. But that is the face of the terraces; from above, the fields are countless patches of spring green, so that the effect from the constantly rising train was like those street-signs that change face completely when they are seen at a new angle.
No longer ago than the time of the Mings, history says, the mountains between Chihli and Shansi were so covered with trees that “birds could not fly through them.” To-day there is not a sprig of wood left, and the patient peasants till every terraced peak to the very top. Faintly the passenger can make out to the north, through occasional openings in the ranges close at hand, one of the five sacred mountains of China, the Wu-t’ai-shan. The whole cluster is shaped like a maple-leaf and resembles the Diamond Mountains of Korea, if not in scenic splendors at least in the temples and monasteries scattered among them. For many centuries that region has been a Buddhist sanctuary, both of the black-robed Chinese monks and the yellow-robed lamas, even the latter more often natives of Chihli or Shansi than Mongols or Tibetans. Emperors used to come to Wu-t’ai-shan, and the Dalai Lama himself was once there.
Beyond the summit of the line, one of the famous passes of China, the narrow but efficient train snaked its way downward through many tunnels, past busy villages and towns of stone, between long irregular rows of cave-dwellings dug in the porous hills, with many a striking view up terraced gorges which unwooded centuries have given fantastic formations. On the whole it was a dreary landscape, but the train was good. These side-lines are better than the principal railroads of China because they are still under foreign management. Frenchmen and Belgians operate this one to the Shansi capital, not merely by giving orders from a central office but by riding the trains to see that these orders are obeyed. No dead-heads escaped the sharp eyes of the European inspectors who examined tickets at frequent intervals; the Chinese employees took care not to honor the rules in the breach instead of in the observance. One third-class coach had a compartment marked “Dames seules.” On the main lines this would have been filled with anything but members of the sex for which it was reserved; here the man who dared sit down in it was speedily invited to move on.