Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

One of the countless beggar women who squat in the center of the stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every pilgrim to drop at least a “cash” into each basket

Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan, capital of Shantung

A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most sacred of the five holy peaks of China

With the example of decent dwellings and habits in plain sight about them in as well as outside the walls, this plodding through filthy streets between dismal mud dens seems to remain wholly satisfactory even to those visibly able to improve their conditions if they chose. Rows of modern two-story stone houses of the missionaries stand on two sides of the city, and with all the efforts of these enigmatical men and women from across the Pacific to jounce China out of her old ruts, it would have been curious to find how slight effect such patent examples have on the daily living of those in constant contact with them, even to the extent of a little increased effort for cleanliness and convenience—if one had not already seen China elsewhere. Just around the corner from the well equipped hospital manned by Americans and English, the Chinese medicine-shops continue to sell powdered fossils for curing diseased eyes, dried frog’s liver for kidney troubles, deer horns ground up into remedies for other ailments, and to send inquirers to native medicine-men who know the hundred and some spots on the human body where sickness can be let out by puncturing with a needle. The mission university with its big campus backed by a splendid landscape and reached by a hole cut specially for it in the main city wall continues to look utterly incongruous in its setting of ignorance and filth. The turnstile of a mission museum filled with graphic illustrations of China’s errors and the simple cures for them records hundreds of thousands of visitors from all the surrounding region and beyond during the pilgrim season alone, yet the callers seem to carry nothing home with them except the honor of having climbed the sacred mountain and worshiped at the shrine of the famous sage a little farther southward. Graphic proofs that deforestation has brought in its train devastating floods, that it contributes to the aridity of the soil on which even the snow, for lack of shade, evaporates before it sinks in, that it is mainly responsible for the locusts which birds might make way with if there were trees for birds to live in, has barely caused the planting of a few shrubs here and there on the mountains that roll up at the edge of the plain on which Tzinan is built—and these will be hacked down and carried off for fuel at the first good opportunity. The people of Shantung’s capital seem to regard as their chief civic asset the big spring that boils up in three mounds of water in the heart of the city and forms a great lake within the walls, through the reedy channels of which they are poled on pleasure-barges, set with tables for their favorite sport of eating, out to island temples where gaudy gods still gaze down upon worshipers unable to recognize the sardonic smirks on their color-daubed wooden faces.

South of Tzinan there are low mountains or high hills, bare except for temples and patches of snow that glistened in the moonlight. These culminate in fame, if not in height, in Tai-shan, most sacred of the holy peaks of China, two hours below the provincial capital. I had purposely timed my journey to Shantung so that I could climb Tai-shan with the pilgrims who flock to it during the fortnight following the Chinese New Year. Though he might have been extremely nasty at that season, the weather god evidently approved my plans, for it would be impossible to picture more perfect conditions for making this far-famed excursion than that brilliant first day of March according to our Western calendar.

Even in Peking those who should have been better informed had led me to expect strenuous opposition to my refusal of chair-bearers. There was nothing of the kind, though I seemed to feel an atmosphere of mingled surprise and prophecy that I should deeply regret it before the day was done, when I asked merely for a coolie to carry my odds and ends. The ability of almost any foreigner in China to afford servants for all his menial tasks gives the great mass of the Chinese the impression that he has no physical endurance of his own, but only untold riches. The coolie who set off with me at sunrise was well chosen, for not only was he all that a coolie and a guide and “boy” combined should be, but he was so quick-witted and so free from the worst crudities of the Shantung dialect that we conversed almost freely on almost any subject in spite of the scantiness of my Mandarin vocabulary.

The way lay first across a stony plain sloping gently upward, with the compact mass of rocky mountains so close in the cloudless atmosphere that one might easily have been deceived about the exertions that lay ahead, had not common fame more than corrected any such error. Pilgrims were already converging from both directions upon the partly stone-paved route leading out of the north gate of Taianfu, surrounded by its time-blackened walls, and within an hour we were all passing in a single stream through the first great archway. I-T’ien-Men—“First Heaven Gate”—the Chinese call it, and over it hangs an inscription announcing in the brevity of Chinese characters that Confucius took this path when he climbed Tai-shan—enough to make it the accepted one even if there were other feasible ascents. Stone steps soon begin to hint at the obstacle race ahead, though this early they are merely in isolated half-dozens scattered up the gradually more sloping road floored with big irregular stones worn smooth by uncounted millions of feet. Already the beggars who decorate the entire ascent were raising their insistent clamor, and shops and temples and tea-houses and itinerant venders formed an almost unbroken wall on either side. Higher up there were increasingly open stretches looking off across the steep tumbled gorge we were climbing, to the swift rocky mountain-sides that shut us in. Here and there a cluster of rugged, misshapen pines gave as dainty a retreat as if we had been in Japan, but the general lack of cleanliness alone distinctly informed us that we were not. These clumps were rare, too, even on China’s most sacred mountain, otherwise almost entirely of stone, with hardly a patch of earth big enough for the planting of a flower-bed.

This did not make it infertile for its inhabitants, however; rather the contrary. My coolie companion, to whom the ascent was an old, old story, put the number of beggars that lined it at one thousand; but that certainly was over-modest. Surely there were several times that number from bottom to top, and just as many from top to bottom. They sat in the center of the great stairs, so that chair-bearers passed one on either side of them, and those who were carried up passed directly over their heads. The top of each little cluster of stairs seemed to be the exclusive territory of one mendicant, or, in the great majority of cases, of one whole family of them, and not one did I see poaching even for an instant on his fellows’ preserves. Just as often as the half-dozen steps were surmounted a beggar was certain to be found squatting in the middle of the topmost, his woven-reed scoop lying invitingly beside him. Where the merely sloping stretches between these steps were more than ten or twelve feet long other beggars were regularly spaced along them; and higher up, where the ascent was all stairs, there was one, or a family group, about every sixth step.