Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

A little spill would have served the riders right anyway, for most of them were larger and better nourished than the coolies who bore them, needed in fact just such reducing exercises as walking up Tai-shan; and any really two-legged mortal can make the ascent considerably sooner on foot than by chair. On this day at least the carried were decidedly the aristocratic minority, for there was by no means one of them to each hundred of the foot-travelers who shuttled past in two often long unbroken lines. To win full merit for the pilgrimage, evidently, it should be made under the pilgrim’s own steam, though there seems to be no harm in getting a little assistance by the way. Thus most of the women who were painfully toiling upward on their bound feet had each a coolie walking beside her to sustain her faltering steps and give her a boost every now and then by the hand in one of her armpits.

One by one we came to “Flying Clouds Hall,” to the “Ten Thousand Genii Hall,” where the Emperor Kao-Tsu paused to receive homage during his ascent in 595 A.D., to the “Horse Stopping Place,” and finally to Hui-Ma-Ling, the “Horse Turning Back Peak,” where even an emperor was forced to dismount and resort to some other means of locomotion. All these “halls” were Chinese temples, quite commonplace except for their location, filled with dusty, gaudy wooden gods before whom pilgrims burned joss-sticks by the bundle, heaping the big iron urns with ashes, and with the clamor of begging priests, beating gongs, shrieking their demands, calling upon all passers-by to try their fortune-telling or invest in their tissue-paper prayers. In the courtyards of many of them, too, and on the landing outside all, were venders of tea and dough-balls and other delicacies of the Chinese cuisine, some having permanent establishments with home-made tables and sawhorse benches, most of them men who carried their stock in trade on a pole over their shoulders. The general stoniness of the mountain broke out here and there in mighty boulders and rock-faced cliffs, on which inscriptions had been carved centuries ago in characters sometimes the height of a man. There were fixed resting-places at which not only chair-coolies but my own companion insisted on stopping, though his load was next to nothing. It had only been a lunch-basket and some extra clothing to begin with, and at the bottom of the first cluster of stairs he had hired a boy to carry most of that. At Ch’ung T’ien Men, for instance, approximately half-way up, as its name suggests, there were two or three temples and as many tea-houses, a terrace from which one could gloat over the ascent that already lay below, and a view of the flat plain stretching away interminably from the foot of the mountain; and my failure to stop there for refreshments caused as great astonishment among the custom-shackled throng as did my strange Western garb.

At this point the road descends rather sharply for a furlong or more through a ravine, across which the rest of the climb stands in plainest sight, like a stairway to the sky, a ladder rather, for it seems almost perpendicular, and disappearing high above through the archway of a big red structure famed throughout China as the Nan-T’ien-Men—the “South Gate of Heaven.” This furlong is a relief, not only from incessant climbing but from beggars, none of whom are so needy as to choose a station on this damp and shaded slope. They soon began again, however, interminable and insistent as before, at the bottom of the remaining ascent. Some one with more taste for statistics than for scenery has computed that there are six thousand steps on this final stairway to Tai-shan, and no one who has made this upper half of the journey by his own exertions will accuse him of exaggeration. But it is not, as common repute would have it, impossible on foot, either because of the steepness of the stairs, the precarious steps, or the danger that beggars or carriers will push one off into space for not contributing the orthodox amount—all of which one may hear from the lips of educated Chinese as well as foreigners even in Peking. The stone steps are uneven, from six inches to a foot wide, the average perhaps eight inches, and some of them are worn to a distinct slope. When they are wet with melting snow, as many things were that day on the upper part of the mountain, only the foolish would set their feet down carelessly upon them, but that could not constitute a worthy reason for intrusting one’s health to a pair of panting coolies who would double the time of the ascent. The beggars, I had gravely been told by a Chinese lady who had lived abroad in several embassies, would simply not allow me to pass if I did not contribute, and as a last resort they would take my offerings by force, so commanding do they become on the mountain at New Year’s time. They were certainly numerous and sturdy enough to have named their own contributions, and there was no visible force that might have curbed them. But they were Chinese—in other words, timid, passive, submissive, in spite of their blustering manner. In regular succession as often as half a dozen steps were surmounted they raised their voices in what might have been mistaken for demands that could not be refused; but just as often their seeming ferocity oozed quickly away into a meek and helpless, and withal a cheerful, resignation as soon as I passed without contributing. One or two, who were women, snatched at my coat-tail or legs, but the hint of a menacing gesture quickly freed me from their noisome attentions, and most of them seemed to be too well fed and contented to rise and run beside me, wailing the “Great Old Excellency!” so familiar in Peking and most other cities of the North. From the plain to the Gate of Heaven the adult mendicants at least seemed to think it exertion enough to squat beside the little fire almost every group had built in the center of its step, and depend on voice and manner—and of course, most valuable of all, ancient custom—for their gleanings. Indeed, one wise old fellow had resorted to absent treatment, remaining in his kennel across the rocky ravine nearly a hundred yards from his scoop on the stairway, beating a gong and shouting to attract attention, and no doubt strolling over now and then to carry home the wealth that rained upon him, which his colleagues made no attempt to appropriate.

The “Clouds Stepping Bridge” was the last break in the sheer ascent, which thereafter marched straight up to the southern Gate of Heaven, dense blue from top to bottom with cautious coolies picking their way up or down. Sometimes there was a very old man, half carried by his sons; now and then a limp, white-faced fellow whose exertions had been too much for him came down in the chair he had scorned to take, or could not afford, when he set out. Even on this upper stretch of the journey the stairway was broken by landings, and on these even the sturdiest paused for breath more and more frequently as the red archway slowly descended to meet us. Youths loitered about the steepest places and lent a hand to those who looked likely to reward their efforts, unless one drove them off with scornful gestures. Near the top a great iron chain was set in the rock as a kind of hand-rail but was hardly needed by any whose legs had not deserted them. When at last, a trifle more than four hours after setting out from the railway station, I marched in through the archway, it occurred to me that, beggars, pilgrims, and stairs aside, the climb had been very similar to that up the steeper side of Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, both in the amount of exertion required and the rockiness of the landscape.

A cold wind swept across the summit, in disconcerting contrast to the burning sunshine below the gateway, calling instantly for all the garments my two carriers had brought for me. The climbing was not yet done; in fact it is a good half-mile from the Nan-T’ien-Men to the Taoist temple which crowns the mountain. But this is by a winding, leisurely road passing through several temples in which pilgrims were performing the feats for which they had come. The courtyards of these, neglected by the sun, were littered with heaps of dirty snow, with the ashes of myriad sticks of incense, with the débris of firecrackers and tissue-paper prayers, and as temples they were nothing out of the ordinary, duplicated by hundreds all over China, but famous for their location and the special potencies their gods derive from it. Coolies and peasants made up at least three fourths of the throng kowtowing here, faces touching the ground, burning incense there, lighting big bunches of firecrackers for the edification of some sleepy-eyed god over yonder, rubbing a glass-smooth stone monument from which some form of blessing seems to be extracted by friction; but there were many men of the well-to-do and the ostensibly educated classes among them. The scarcity of women and children made each temple compound seem a congress of adult males, and the mixture of Fourth of July boyishness and fishwife credulity with which these men solemnly carried out their superstitious antics would have seemed even more out of place but for their girlish cues and their generally simple, almost childlike manners.

Out on the rock knoll before the highest temple, marked with a stone shaft here and there and swept now by wintry winds out of keeping with the unbroken brilliancy of the day, a few stone-cut characters announce that “Confucius stood here and felt the smallness of the world below.” A wide expanse unfolds on every side, with only the heavens above. One can make out Tzinan, and faintly the Hoang Ho, then a lake of considerable size, and the railway stretching like a hair on the glass into infinity in either direction—a brown world rolling away in a myriad of peaks and knobs and salients of what looks like a boiling landscape suddenly struck solid. I have nowhere been able to find why Tai-shan is a sacred mountain, but it was already so twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era began; perhaps its great sanctity had its start among the largely plain-dwelling Chinese simply because of the comprehensive view of the world below from its summit when there is nowhere the hint of a rag of cloud and only the haziness of great distances limits the power of the eye.

There was a surprising change in the human element of the scene when I descended early in the afternoon. Where there had been crowd after crowd two hours before, in every temple courtyard, in every refreshment-shop, where the great stairway had seemed carpeted from top to bottom with shimmering dark-blue, there were now only scattered individuals, and most of these were lolling or squatting inside the buildings. What had become of the vast throng so suddenly was a mystery; as nearly as I could make out from my guide’s answer they had gone home again. Taoist priests in their black bonnet-caps were enjoying siestas along the stone verandas on the sunny side of their courtyards; worshipers, in so far as they remained at all, were sipping tea and wielding chop-sticks, or doing nothing whatever, in the den-like places where their patronage had been so vociferously solicited in the morning. The completest change of all had come over the beggars. Their shallow baskets, barely sprinkled now with “cash,” lay in constant succession in the center of the stairway as before, but in the whole descent I doubt whether as many as a dozen mendicants were there in person to make a vocal appeal. Perhaps the rules of their union forbade labor at this hour—which reminds me that the medical mission school in Tzinan can rarely get the bodies of beggars for dissection, numerous as they are in life, because the beggars’ gild insists on giving them honorable burial—and the corpses of criminals, readily furnished by the Government, are useless in the study of the brain, because the modern substitute for the headsman’s sword in China is an officer who steps up and blows the back of the culprit’s head off with a revolver. The general desertion of their stations looked, however, more like the contented retirement of craftsmen whose wants were amply satisfied by a part-day’s exertion. They sat off the trail against sunny rocks or beneath an occasional evergreen, or about the mouths of their huts and caves, gossiping, quarreling, scratching, and otherwise heartily enjoying themselves, especially sleeping in their grass-floored nests, scorning to exert themselves even to the extent of a pleading word or glance at likely passers-by. Their untended baskets were plea enough, if charity was still abroad—and evidently honor is no less among beggars than among thieves, for no one seemed in the least concerned lest some one else appropriate the coins meant for him.

We passed now and then a few descending pedestrians, and two or three going down in chairs. Those who have tried it say that there is the exhilaration of dancing in the descent of Tai-shan in these misnamed contrivances, especially down this upper half of it. For though the stairway is continuous here, it is frequently and regularly broken by landings, and the technique of the chair-bearers, handed down perhaps from remote antiquity, is to trot down each cluster of stairs, then saunter slowly across the landing, perhaps shifting shoulders upon it, before jogging suddenly down the next flight. So the descent is like a rhythmic dropping through space, something suggestive of waltzing by airplane, soothing or terrifying, according to the nerve adjustment of the rider. A few belated pilgrims, mainly women on their pitiful feet, were still laboring upward; but the way was almost clear, and two hours below the summit found us strolling away down the last gentle slope between old cypresses. Once, before we entered the square-walled town of Taian, my companion dragged me aside into a temple to “see something good see,” and one of those mixtures of rowdy and beggar which so many Chinese priests become unlocked a kind of chapel containing an ugly gilded statue that pretended to have human arms and legs, the latter crossed in Buddhist repose. The story has it that a monk sat on this table until he starved himself to death as a short cut to Nirvana, but the thing was a mere dressed-up mummified corpse arranged to mulct credulous coolies of their precious coppers. It was an outbreak of barbarism worthy the Catholicism of Latin America and many times more surprising in a land which, whatever else it has to be ashamed of, is not particularly given to this form of savagery.

Inside the walled city, too, I came upon the first deliberate obscenities I had so far seen in the Middle Kingdom. A great fair was in full swing in the grounds of a temple, and among the large colored photographs which several story-tellers inserted in the double-panel screens they had set up to illustrate their chanted tales, were quite a number depicting such things as women nude to the waist. A slight breach indeed in many another land; but in China, where the subject of sex so rarely receives public recognition, it meant almost an open parading of immorality. But New Year’s season seems to bring a relaxation even of morals, and especially does gambling, quite publicly and without distinction as to age or sex, rage throughout China during that fortnight, as it did not at scores of places within these temple grounds. They were vast, and shaded by magnificent old trees, with a wall as mighty as that of the city itself surrounding them, and still with room to spare, though all the hawkers, traders, and money-changers for many li roundabout seemed to be gathered there. At one end stood a mighty hall, famed for its four colossal wooden statues, which still did not reach the lofty beams of the roof nor seem cramped within the walls on which ancient frescos were still moderately well preserved. Here, as everywhere that a wooden god is housed in this holy land of China, stood begging priests and a receptacle heaped with “cash” and coppers flung at it by passing pilgrims. The latter are no doubt the principal source of income of Taianfu, yet prosperity seemed more at home there than in the great majority of China’s smaller cities. Time was when the people knew prosperity would depart at the building of the American Methodist Mission just outside the walls, but both the mission and the prosperity seem to increase rather than to languish.

When the Germans, something more than a decade ago, built that portion of the Tientsin-Pukow Railway which runs through Shantung, they naturally planned to have it touch Chufou, sacred to Confucius. But their surveyors insisted that the line must cut across the long cypress avenue between his temple and his grave, and rather than permit such a desecration Chufou did without the railroad. Perhaps it is fitting, anyway, that those who come to honor the great sage should bump by “Peking cart” the twenty li between the station, a short two hours south of Tai-shan, and the town; for did not Confucius himself suffer in some such contraption while vainly hawking his wisdom to and fro through the land we now know as China? At least, sinologues assure us that the cart antedates Confucius, and certainly there has been no notable improvement in it since its first appearance, for that would be un-Chinese. Tucked away inside by a solicitous seeker after gratuities who had furnished several pillows by the simple method of stripping a few hotel beds, one expects a “Peking cart” to ride rather well—until the first jolt disabuses him. There may be roads smooth enough to make such traveling comfortable, but they do not grow in China. How many times one side or the other of the vehicle deliberately reached over and severely thumped me here, there, or elsewhere during that six miles across a fertile sea-flat plain which should have been as easy-riding as the labyrinthian road should have been direct I have no means of computing. I do recall, however, wishing a thousand times that the mule who tossed with me would be a little less deliberate and have it over with, only to thank fortune a second later when something, anything brought him to a momentary halt.