Sleeker, fatter, more contented-looking beggars I cannot recall having seen anywhere on earth. Red-cheeked children, boys seeming to predominate, were the chief stock in trade, though there were a few adults who were visibly in sad states of health. During the pilgrim season, I was told, hundreds of peasants leave their little farms in charge of one member of the family and the rest establish themselves somewhere along the ascent to Tai-shan, until the spring grows so warm that their other occupation requires their presence at home again. On one side or the other of the climb, seldom more than a few feet from their squatting-place, each group had a makeshift dwelling,—a hut of rocks and grass-mats, sometimes a natural grotto covered over with whatever was available, generally only high enough for the adults on all fours, but carpeted with mountain hay and better than the average homes along Peking hutungs. Mountain water, magnificent air, a far-reaching view across the plain below, if that means anything to them, made the dismal mud dwellings of most Chinese, within the reeking gloom of city, town, or compound walls, nothing to be compared with this life of perfect leisure in such a vantage-place.
There might have been one serious drawback to all this,—like the “horrible example” of the temperance lecturer, the exhibits could not be kept in proper condition to make the best appeal. The whole mendicant army on Tai-shan, except the small minority that was really ailing, looked so well fed and well slept that only an unusually charitable or exceedingly unobserving Westerner would have yielded to their pleas. He might have been inclined instead to thump the well padded ribs of the woman who here and there, at his approach, stripped suddenly naked the plump youngster she held in her lap, hastily trying to hide its thick warm i-shang behind her—for there was still a distinct bite in the air even on this southern slope of the mountain with a brilliant sun beating down upon it. But the visible prosperity of the mendicants seemed to matter little, for the Chinese pilgrims who made up the now almost constant stream of humanity toiling skyward had evidently some superstition that their pilgrimage would not be effective if they did not succor all who needed it along the way, and most of them were taking no chances on passing by a deserving case merely because it looked better nourished and housed than they did themselves. Those who gave confined their gifts almost exclusively to brass “cash”; but there were many scoops an inch or two deep in these cheap coins, occasionally with a real copper standing conspicuously out among them, though the recipients sneaked off to their lairs now and then to hide their gleanings. A whole scoopful of “cash” would not resemble riches to an American “panhandler”; to Chinese of the lower class, however, the pickings of most of the mendicants on Tai-shan, if that day was an average, would seem almost an income of luxury.
About nine o’clock the descending peasants and coolies had also grown to a constant stream, so that rules of the road—or, more exactly by this time, of the stairway—had to be more or less strictly obeyed if progress was to be made either up or down. There were no pilgrim costumes, such as the Japanese climbing Koya-san, for instance, so commonly wear, though frequent groups of coolies carried triangular flags bearing a few characters, touches of color that livened somewhat the almost invariable blue of the every-day garments of the masses. Unfailingly good-natured, the coolie pilgrims had neither a suggestion of the rowdiness of our popular excursions nor of the rather belligerent self-complacency of their island neighbors to the east. Except for two little Japanese professors from Manchuria, who conversed with me in English and German respectively and with the Chinese by characters scrawled on scraps of paper, I was the only foreigner making the ascent that day. The sight of me on foot did not arouse more than the usual gaping to which any Westerner outside the restricted orbits of his kind is subject anywhere in China—until my coolie made one of his often repeated answers to the question as to what had become of my chair. Even the little Japanese climbed on foot for an hour or more, their chairs trailing behind them, and only a few of the haughtiest and fattest Chinese declined to get out and stretch their legs at all. But that a man not only ostensibly of the wealthy class, but a weak “outside barbarian” into the bargain, should be so foolish as to risk getting himself stranded by undertaking a journey which naturally he could not finish unassisted, changed the mere gaping to excitement. It was all very well, I gathered from such of their remarks and gestures as I could understand, for even a foreigner to win whatever merit was given such beings by making as much of the journey as he could on foot, but he most certainly should have brought along a chair to rescue him when he could no longer climb.
A priest of the Temple of Confucius
The grave of Confucius is noted for its simplicity
The sanctum of the Temple of Confucius, with the statue and spirit-tablet of the sage, before which millions of Chinese burn joss-sticks annually
The chairs, by the way, were really not worthy of that name. Instead of the sentry-box-like sedan used in many parts of China to this day, with a carrier or two, or even three, in front and as many behind, these were merely a kind of pole-and-rope hammock, mildly resembling a crude, low rustic arm-chair, in which the carried sat facing forward with his feet hanging over before him, grazing the heads of the incessant beggars in the middle of the ascent, while his rarely more than two carriers walked on either side of him, bearing the contrivance sidewise. Every little distance, when the straps over their outside shoulders became painful, they shifted simultaneously by swinging themselves and the chair around with a swift, almost automatic motion, and continued to toil upward. This was as near as the facts corresponded to the tales so often told of the breath-taking dangers of chairing it up Tai-shan, where, according to the most imaginative tellers, the carriers “just toss you off into space” whenever they change positions. Ever since I first heard this yarn I had pictured thousands of feet of sheer abyss directly beneath the trembling chair-rider, whereas I doubt if he would at any time have dropped more than six or eight feet, exclusive of what he might have rolled, in the unheard-of event of the bearers’ spilling him.