Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Off on an “itinerating” trip with an American missionary in Shantung, by a conveyance long in vogue there. Behind, one of the towers by which messages were sent, by smoke or fire, to all corners of the old Celestial Empire

In the good old days, only a few years ago, in fact, the usual wages for a barrow-man in rural Shantung were five cents a day—and he saved money on that. Now things have reached a pretty pass, for each man may expect as much as thirty cents, though actually to demand that would almost rank him among the profiteers, the radicals, the undesirable element of the working-classes, and to pitch one’s demands too high in China is likely apt to result in losing one’s job to the three hundred and sixty-five other men who are eagerly waiting to snatch it. To be sure, these wages are not so dreadful as they seem, for they are in “Mex,” and nowadays the use of the wheelbarrow is included.

Perhaps it was because we generously paid this highest price that our two men bowled along as rapidly as a “Peking cart,” and many times more smoothly, so evenly in spite of the broken foot-path along the pretense of a road we followed that one could read as easily as on any train. But their best possible speed seems to be a characteristic of most of the barrow-men of Shantung, as does a constant cheerfulness that is always breaking out in broad smiles or laughter at the slightest provocation, as if their joy at having another chance to exercise their magnificent calling could not be contained. Unless the passenger is so inexperienced and squeamish that the gasping of his human draft-animal just behind him prickles his conscience, the wheelbarrow of the country variety comes close to being China’s most comfortable form of land travel. It has little of the cruel bumping and vicious jolting of a two-wheeled cart; there is far less labor involved in reclining on an improvised divan than in bestriding an animal; even a rubber-tired rickshaw is given to sudden protests at the inequalities of the surface of China. Besides, two rickshaws can rarely travel side by side, whereas the men stretched out on either flank of a barrow-wheel may discuss religion, philosophy, and the natural equality of man without once straining the ears or losing a word. One might go further and praise the exclusiveness, the sense of Cleopatran luxury, the freedom of route which makes the barrow so much preferable to a train packed with undisciplined soldiers and as many of the common, ticket-buying variety of unbathed Celestials as can crowd into the space these putative defenders of the country graciously leave unoccupied. The train makes more speed, perhaps; but what is so out of keeping with the spirit of China as haste? The minor circumstance that there must be mutual agreement between the two passengers on a wheelbarrow as to when to ride and when to walk might conceivably be a disadvantage, but there is no reason it should be if the one more given to walking will bear in mind the plumpness of his companion and its proper preservation. From the distance of the Western world the impression may arise that the barrow-men must consider these fellows, whom they wheel about like the latest pair of twins, rather weak and sorry members of the human family. But this is merely another way of saying that the Occidental can quickly lose his way in the labyrinth of the Chinese mind. The reaction of the sweating coolies seemed to be, not, “I wish this overfed pair of loafers would get off and walk a while,” but a kind of pride at being associated with men of such wealth and standing, mingled with the feeling, built up through many generations, that naturally persons of finer clay should not bemean themselves by tramping like a coolie, and topped off with the impression that if the gentlemen call a halt and take to their feet it is because the wheeling is not entirely satisfactory, which quickly brings in its train the dread that one of those three hundred and sixty-five other men eagerly waiting for such a job will get it next time.

We passed two of the “telegraph” towers of old-time China that afternoon, square-cut stone and mud structures large as a two-story house, from the now crumbling and grass-grown tops of which news and orders were sent from end to end of the Middle Kingdom. Fires were the signals by night and a dense black column of smoke from burning wolf’s dung by day. Particularly were they used when more troops were needed at the capital, and the story runs that one emperor who flashed forth the call for a general mobilization just because his favorite concubine wished to see the discomfiture on the faces of the exasperated soldiers shortly afterward found his rôle in the hands of one of the eager understudies. Cues are still no abnormality in China as a whole, but one is struck by their almost universal retention in Shantung. The Manchus, it is said, ordered cues to be worn not so much because they had worn them for centuries themselves as in order to be able to tell a man from a woman, if some of their rather effeminate new subjects chose to disguise themselves, for both sexes had long hair up to that time. It seems that when orders were given, after the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty, that this badge of Manchu servitude be removed, the execution depended largely upon the provincial and local authorities. In some places men were given the choice between losing their pigtails or their heads, and they had less difficulty in deciding upon the relative value of these two adornments than might have been the case had the question been left to an impartial committee. But the military ruler of Shantung during the first years of the republic was a monarchist who had no use for this new republican stuff, and who did what he could to return the emperor to the throne; therefore the people under him dared in few cases to remove what amounted to a badge of loyalty. Now that a decade has passed and the making of hair-nets has become one of the principal industries of the province, when even the boy “emperor” in Peking has adopted the Western hair-cut, one would think that the masculine braid would disappear. But personal beauty is a matter of taste, and the Chinese mind is famous for the number of cogs in that section of it devoted to the preserving of established customs—as China goes, the wearing of a cue can scarcely be called an old one—and on the subject of barbering the country seems at present to be about at a status quo.

It was the sixteenth day of the first moon, our March 3, the last big holiday of the Chinese New Year’s season. Thus, though we had seen endless streams of people, the men as nearly spotless as they would ever be during this Year of the Pig, the women in their gayest garments, which in most cases meant blue or red silk jackets above bright red trousers tapering down to tiny white baby-shoes, ears and glossy oiled hair adorned with their most precious trinkets, the children dolled up like the principal actors in a Chinese drama—though, I say, we had seen many thousand of these pouring into Tenghsien for one of the chief celebrations of the year, there were no people whatever working in the fields, which this far south were quite ready for the first spring tilling. Besides, much of the land in this region is given over to winter wheat, planted in October and now just beginning to tinge with green the vast yellowish brown of the typical North China landscape. When at length we had been wheeled, like a load of bricks, to the gateway of Chung-Hsin-Tien, we paused and dismounted, for it is a gross breach of Chinese etiquette to ride into or through a town where you have friends—or to speak from a vehicle or the back of an animal to a friend on foot. A remnant of this point of view, members of the A.E.F. will recall, survives in American army regulations.

“Middle-Heart-Inn” was for centuries a place of great importance, being the half-way stopping-place of all travel on the old Peking-to-Shanghai route. Then the railroad came, a decade ago, passing it by without even naming a station in its honor, and it sank to the large miserable village within a long, rambling, broken mud wall which we found it. Moreover, it had been struck by hail the autumn before and the crops just outside its wall had suffered more severely than anywhere else in the devastated area. One was in luck, I gathered, not to have been caught out in that storm without an umbrella. The country people of all that region solemnly assert that the hailstones were as large as tea-pots, and American missionaries bravely run the risk of being charged with perjury by asserting that they saw with their own eyes some as big as grape-fruit. One of the stork-heron birds from the compound of Mencius was struck dead, and several severe injuries to people were reported.

My companion still had left a few hundred dollars from what had been given him for distribution among famine sufferers, and our first act after installing ourselves in the mud hut that served as a mission station and partaking of the heavy repast which a few of the faithful had insisted on providing—and on clashing chop-sticks with us over—was to set out on a visiting tour among those pointed out by the chief local Christians as in urgent need of assistance. I was struck with the thoroughness with which my companion prepared for the coming distribution. He refused to give any aid whatever to cases which he could not personally inspect, and he had lived in China long enough to know most of the tricks of the unworthy. Anywhere in the United States, not even excluding the “poor white” and negro communities of the South, the entire population of Chung-Hsin-Tien would have seemed at a glance to need the assistance of charity. But in China one must be ragged and dirty and possessionless and hungry-looking indeed to stand out visibly from the millions always more or less in the same predicament. Hut after hut we entered to find not a Mexican dollar’s worth of anything within it. A bit of crumpled straw or a few rags of what had once been cotton-padded garments served in most cases as bed, sometimes on a small k’ang that could be heated—had there been anything to heat it with—more often on the earth floor itself. Then there might be from two to half a dozen mud-ware jars and shallow baskets in which the family habitually kept its possessions, and possibly one or two peasant’s tools. That was all, in sight at least; and the people had had no warning that a benefactor was coming. It seemed to be taken for granted that my companion would consider every one a deceptive rascal until he had personally proved himself to the contrary, and not only were there no protests against our entering every hovel, but invitations to do so, in spite of the breach in Chinese domestic customs involved.

We felt into every jar and basket, prodded into every corner and nest of rags, to make sure that the family did not have more than the handful of grain they admitted. In no case, I believe, was any deception discovered, but my conscientious companion not only continued until darkness fell that Saturday evening, but violated his religious scruples by spending much of the Sabbath afternoon at the same task. Sometimes it was an old man living alone, with literally nothing but a few handfuls of chaff and the hulls of beans to feed upon. More often there was a wife and several children to share such splendid provisions. Not a few lived in yin-tse instead of huts,—holes cut in the ground and roofed over with sticks, straw, and mud, with a crude ladder or notched pole by which we descended through a small opening to the dark interior. The missionary was particularly scrupulous in entering all of these, for they often serve as the rendezvous of gamblers, and he trusted to his experienced eyes to make fairly sure that a cave was not this, but actually a poor man’s dwelling. There was a similar hole in the ground, though uncovered and with earth steps leading down to it, in the yard of the local “mission,” for in the winter it is more comfortable to hold school or gossip in such a place, out of reach of the wind, yet in the sunshine, than in the dreary, unheated mud huts.

Sometimes only the woman and the children were at home, and the only decent way to inquire of her about her husband, according to Chinese etiquette, was to refer to him indirectly as her wai-tou or nan-ren, her “outside” or her “male person.” Perhaps he had gone to Manchuria, with the millions of coolies who set out for there soon after the Chinese New Year, their belongings in a soiled quilt roll. Compared with densely populated Shantung, where ten villages within five square miles is nothing unusual, the “Eastern Three Provinces” are sparsely peopled and wages are correspondingly high. From Chefoo to Dairen the poorest steamers cross in a day, and the railroads offer reduced rates to migrating coolies—furnishing them open freight-cars for their journeys. But there is more snow than work in Manchuria during the winter; moreover, any Chinese with a proper respect for his ancestors will return to his home among their graves at least for the beginning of the new year, so that much time and some wages are lost in traveling to and fro. Sometimes the “outside” was working in another part of the province. There is, of course, no slavery in China; so long-civilized a land would not tolerate such an institution. But many of the “gentry” and landowners of Shantung, and of other provinces, no doubt, profit by the excess of population by paying a man five “Mex” dollars a year and his food for his labor, and making no provision whatever for his family.