All up and down the province the happy results of good rule are apparent. Village girls, like the boys who come to the various barrack-institutions in the capital, are taught what they are really likely to need in the life that in all probability lies before them, not the often useless stuff of an ideal but imaginary life, to which even American mission schools are somewhat prone. There are still such adversities as famine in Shansi Province, and numbers of its men migrate northward to Mongolia and Manchuria in search of the livelihood their ancestral homes deny them. But even a civil and military governor combined cannot make rain fall. More than one Tuchun of other provinces still thinks he can, and leads his people in processions to the temples of the god of rain, or helps them to plant that delinquent deity, in a brand-new coat of paint as a counter-inducement, out in the blazing sunshine, in the hope that he will think better of the cruel neglect of his duties. One suspects, however, that Governor Yen’s more up-to-date methods are likelier in the end to bring real results. But, alas! safety and modern improvements are not what most beguile the random wanderer with a strong penchant for the picturesque, and a longer stay in the “model province” promised little to make up for the exciting things that might still be in store for me in other parts of the country.
CHAPTER XV
RAMBLES IN THE PROVINCE OF CONFUCIUS
The chief impression of the long all-day journey from Peking to Tzinan in early spring is of graves. All sizes of them, from mere haycocks to veritable haystacks, take up almost more of the fields than they leave to cultivation, so that the deadly flat landscape, drearily dry brown at this season, looks as if it were broken out with smallpox. In Chihli Province there had been no real snow all winter; but from about the time we entered Shantung onward the shrinking remnants of a recent modest fall of it varied slightly the bare yellowish monotony spread out under a cloudless sky.
The old walled city of Teh-chow was the first place of importance over the boundary, and there was nothing visibly different about that from a hundred other walled cities of China. At one end of the long graveled station platform sat an old coffin, and lying on top of it was the stone that had marked its first grave and was needed now for the new one somewhere else. The Chinese are coming to be more easily persuaded by the clink of silver that their ancestors will endure removal, when a railway or a growing mission station or an industrial plant finds it imperative to have more room. A policeman quite as up to date as those of Peking was driving up and down the platform two men who seemed to have known some prosperity before this misfortune overtook them. Ropes tied to their outside arms furnished the driver his reins, and about their necks hung by cords big wooden placards detailing their crimes. The officer saw to it that they forced their way into every group, so that there could be no excuse for any one, in or outside the long crowded train, not to recognize them as rascals, before he drove them back to wherever they waited until the next train called them forth again. It was an anachronism, this ancient mode of punishment amid such modern surroundings; but what would be the effect if our own absconding bankers and sneak-thieves were similarly paraded from suburbs to railroad station, pausing for any one who cared to read? It would at least make their faces more familiar to those who might benefit in future by such knowledge. But on second thought our press serves us the same purpose, without physical exertion to criminals or policemen.
At Teh-chow the ancient and the modern means of transportation between the Yang Tse and Peking part company. All the way from Tientsin, the railroad which, about a decade back, brought Shanghai within thirty-six hours of the capital is within rifle-shot of the Grand Canal that Kublai Khan merely reconstructed six hundred and fifty years ago. Before we realized that maps and modern conditions are not counterparts in the China of to-day, we had a pleasant dream of houseboating from Peking to the Yang Tse, when it came time for us to move southward. Intuition should have sufficed, but we only learned from inquiry that, since the tribute grain which once came yearly to Peking by hundreds of junks could now come by other means, if any one still gave Peking tribute, the Grand Canal has silted up for long distances, to say nothing of the bandit nests through which it runs in these days of the self-styled republic. Once the railroad meets and crosses it again, at the southern boundary of the province; otherwise the two routes are never in agreement below Teh-chow.
The capital of Shantung Province announces itself by its smokestacks about the time the rumbling of the long German-built bridge across the Yellow River awakens the traveler to the fact that the day’s ordeal is over. Flour-mills account for most of these spirals of smoke where ten or fifteen years ago little more than graves grew. Tzinan is an exception to the general rule of Chinese treaty-ports, in that it was opened to foreign trade in 1906 by desire from within rather than pressure from without. The Germans, and after them the Japanese, have built up a fore-city of broad, almost-paved streets, lined by modern buildings that here and there approach the imposing, on the space turned over to the growth of foreign enterprise by the Chinese themselves. Japanese hospitals and schools, buildings that carry the thoughts back to the bridge-heads on the Rhine, here and there a contribution by some other nationality, give quite a manly air to this modern section of Shang-Pu, with its railway stations. But if one’s mind has that queer and no doubt reprehensible quirk which makes the picturesque more interesting than standardized efficiency, the wheelbarrows are strong competitors for the attention. In Peking and the north these are less used, and not at all for passengers. In Tzinan they carry a much larger proportion of the population than do the rickshaws. For while the latter are numerous also, their capacity is limited, and there seems to be no exact high-water mark to the number of persons a barrow-man can crowd upon the two cushions flanking his high wooden wheel, with its guards doing duty as seat-backs. Especially when the factory workers are going to or from their mud huts, eight or ten, and even twelve, pairs of little misshapen feet hang over the sides of these patient vehicles, still barely bending the sturdy back of the human packhorse in the shafts. Men ride in them, too, sometimes a pair or a group of coolies whom it would be impossible to distinguish from the man whom they are, one must assume, paying to do their walking for them. A wheelbarrow trip costs but a half or two thirds as much as the same journey by rickshaw; the mere matter of greater speed or comfort is not, of course, of any importance to the rank-and-file Chinese; and the invariable ungreased squeaking of the conveyance, which announces its coming as far off as could a trolley-bell, may easily be soothing music to a people who enter Chinese theaters without compulsion.
The main stream of squeaks ambles its way into the old native city, doubly surrounded by two rambling walls. There the recent snow had left what passes for streets ankle-deep in mud, except perhaps for a few short stretches paved centuries ago with huge slabs of stone so rounded off now that a rickshaw can scarcely make wheelbarrow speed over them, and which at best are only somewhat less thickly covered with paste-like slime. Foreigners who have lived there half a century say they can see improvements in the native life of old Tzinan, but the new-comer will have to take most of this on faith, and is not likely to carry off many impressions essentially different from those he has had or will have inside the walls of any well populated Chinese city. Merchants in black lounge in skullcaps in constantly repeated little booth-shops on either hand, outwardly indifferent to custom as they sip their tea from handleless cups, smoke their tiny pipes with the often yard-long stems, play chess, checkers, cards, or dice, all of an Oriental kind. Immediate attention comes, however, when a possible client pauses in what would be the doorway if there were a front wall, quadrupled, quintupled if the pauser is astonishingly a foreigner. Here and there several people stand before a counter, and two or three times as many behind it. Street venders paddle through the mud, stridently announcing themselves. Roofless shops on the corners, and everywhere else that there is a bit of space to crowd in, sell steaming balls of dough, bowls of watery chopped-up meat, China’s kind of macaroni, served with worn chop-sticks and accompanied, perhaps, by a constant refrain designed to draw, rather than to drive off, more customers. Beggars in costumes which could not have possibly reached such a state without deliberate aid splash along beside the stranger’s rickshaw at a speed to prove health and strength, crying incessantly, “Ta Lao Yea! Ta Lao Yea!” “Great Old Excellency!” in the vain hope that the Chinese compliment of granting old age where it is still not physically due will bring perhaps even silver from the outside barbarian who is in reality still disgustingly youthful. Glimpses at irregular intervals down side streets that are merely poorer examples of the same thing, with more makeshift booths and fewer large shops, more strident venders and fewer hopeful beggars. Once or twice the big weather-beaten gateway to a yamen, with coolies made into soldiers by the superimposing of a faded uniform padded with cotton leaning on their rifles and eying the passing throng with the air of bad boys who are far too seldom spanked. Less shopkeeping and more miserable dwelling farther out, women and girls standing or hobbling about in the mud on their little deformed feet, everywhere a plethora of boys, nowhere a person who could be called clean, almost everything and every one dirty as a pigsty. Then the street shifts a block before it passes out the farther gate—for evil spirits would make short shrift of a city with a straight passage clear through it—and the stranger finds himself in the outskirts, between the great and the outer wall, with a picturesque glimpse along the former of women washing clothes in the tree-lined moat, and ragged boys are pushing his rickshaw from behind over a bridging hump in the stone and mud-slough road in the hope of being tossed a copper.
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
