Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

That night, in the mission-owned mud hut of another unlaundered town, my companion preached a long sermon full of energy to a congregation of five, one of whom was part-witted, two often asleep, and another merely one of our barrow-men. Only the village “doctor,” whose training consisted of a year as coolie in a mission hospital, kept his attention strictly on the business in hand, as should be expected of the chief, even though somewhat fragile, pillar of Christendom in the region. There had been an audience of goodly size for such a locality in the early part of the evening. Not only was the hut crowded with the score it would hold, but at least twice as many more blocked the open door or flattened their noses against the single dirty window. But a few rifle-shots had suddenly sounded somewhere off toward the hills. Bandits had raided, looted, and kidnapped in this town several times during the year just over; and though there was no sudden exodus—for the Chinese must “save face” under all circumstances—the audience melted steadily away until only the five remained. The itinerating missionary, however, must never let outside influences affect even the tone of the message he is ever seeking to deliver. Whatever his benefits to the field he is cultivating—and a wide experience is needed to acquire any certain knowledge on this subject—he at least still has some of the hardships of early missionary days, which his thousands of well housed colleagues, even in China, only know by hearsay.

Tenghsien seemed to be far enough south to be tinged with the problems and customs of southern China. Its dialect was audibly at variance with that of Peking, even to an ear of slight Chinese training. On the wall of the vault-like passage through the southern city gate hung several time-blackened wooden crates containing the shoes of former magistrates. It is one of the politenesses of the region to stop a departing magistrate at the gate and remove his footwear, as a way of saying, “We hate so badly to see you leave that we will do everything within our power to prevent your going.” How careful such an official may be to make sure that the ceremony is not omitted in his case, even though he has to detail the shoe-pilferers, or whether or not he slips on the oldest footwear in his possession that morning, are of course unauthorized peeps behind the scenery such as tend to take all the poetry out of life. We dropped in at the local pawnshop, with which my host was on good terms rather out of policy than necessity, but it was nothing now but a huge compound of empty buildings, crowded together in almost labyrinthian turmoil. The pawnshop is one of the most important institutions in any Chinese community, with many curious little idiosyncrasies unknown to our own displayers of the golden balls, but it can scarcely be expected to continue to function where, between grasping officials and bandits frequently sweeping in from the hills, neither the ticketed articles nor the cash on hand can be kept from disappearing.

The throwing out of sick babies seemed to be a fixed habit in Tenghsien, though one seldom hears of such cases farther north. Millions of Chinese parents believe that if a child dies before the age of six or seven it is because it was really no child at all, but only an evil spirit masquerading as one; and unless it is gotten rid of in time, woe betide the other children of the family, already born or to come. It is preferable apparently that it be eaten by dogs, but above all it must not die in the house. The missionaries of Tenghsien have grown to take this custom as a matter of course. If in their movements about town they came upon a discarded baby still alive, they did what they could to relieve its sufferings, but they did not “register” surprise. The Chinese merely passed by on the farther side of the street. To touch an abandoned child would be to invite the evil spirit to your own house, unless it proved, by getting well, to be merely a sick child, and no Chinese is brave enough to run any such risk as that. Not long before my arrival, the mission “Bible woman” had found a girl of two thrown out on a pile of filth, and even she had dared do nothing more than sit and fan the flies off it, until it died. The missionaries, however, have come to be looked upon as immune from these evil spirits. More than one garbage-heap baby graces the mission kindergarten, and a man of some standing now in the town carries on his face the teeth-marks of the dog to which he was abandoned. It is not all mere superstition either, the missionaries assert, but dread of responsibility, hatred of initiative, often mere selfishness, masquerading as such. Many Chinese may actually fear that the river spirit will get them if they save a drowning person, but many others are merely afraid of wetting their clothes.

The Western and the Chinese mind may be similar in construction, but they certainly do not work alike. Let the missionaries take a girl for a year’s training, for instance, or for the temporary relief of her parents, and they are sure to be informed when the period is over that it is their duty to care for her the rest of her life. As it is contrary to the Chinese idea of politeness to mind one’s own business, so their gratitude seems to be of a different brand from ours. Something akin to that feeling is no doubt now and then felt, in otherwise unoccupied moments, for the men and women from overseas who spend their lives trying to instil into Chinese youth such wisdom and right living as they themselves possess; yet rarely does the passing visitor get a hint of anything more than superficial politeness toward the benefactors, and the assumption that they are somehow making a fine thing, financially or materially, out of their labors—otherwise why would they continue them?

Sometimes Tenghsien buries its children, like those of its paupers who do not belong to the beggars’ gild, in such shallow, careless graves that the dogs habitually dig them up again. These surly brutes sat licking their chops here and there on the outskirts of town, among discolored rags of what had once been cotton-padded clothing scattered about little mussed-up holes in the ground. Lepers were treated with a similar policy of abandonment, or “let the foreigners do something about it if they must.” The same American woman who had the highest record for rescuing babies from the garbage-heap had built the only leper-home in Shantung, if not in northwest China, a mile or two outside Tenghsien. As far as the Chinese are concerned lepers run about the country as freely as any one else. They may not be exactly popular—for the people know the horrors of the disease and easily recognize its symptoms—but they can scarcely be avoided. The thirty or more men and boys, who had been gathered together in a two-story brick building many times more splendid than the homes any of them had known before, had that same cheerful, seldom complaining, easily smiling demeanor of the Chinese coolie under any misfortune. Only a few were bedridden, for the greater resistance to disease for which the Chinese are famous seems to spare them some of the more horrible ravages of leprosy. But on one point they were losing their cheery patience. For months they had submitted weekly to injections of chaulmugra oil without any visible signs of improvement. The treatment is painful; they all admitted it, and one fat-faced boy of fourteen was pointed out as “tearing the walls apart with his screams” when it was administered to him. But his quick retort to the charge seemed to be the consensus of opinion: “Oh, please let us live without the needle and go to heaven in peace when our time comes!” Such efforts were being made to build a similar refuge for women—who of course always come second in China—that even the men sufferers were asked to contribute the few coppers they could live without—and when it is finally built, through missionary effort, it will pay taxes to the local authorities, like many other mission institutions.

Under more auspicious circumstances I should have struck off into that labyrinth of mountains occupying the southeastern part of Shantung. But it might have meant a very much longer stay than I cared to make. For years now the mountainous parts of the province have been overrun more or less continuously by what we call bandits. The Chinese call them “hung-hu-tze” (“red beards,” a term evidently originating in Manchuria, where bearded men from the north seem to have been the first raiders, and to have suggested a clever disguise for native rascals) or “tu-fei” (which means something like “local badness coming out of the ground”). But under any name they are a thorn in the side of their fellow-men. In Peking, where the so-called Central Government still decorates foreign passports with separate visés for each province, five at a time, even though the provincial authorities rarely look at them, conditions were admitted with a frankness which other Governments might copy to advantage. I had been given permission to travel freely in Shantung—“except in the areas of Tungchowfu, Linchengchow, Tsaochowfu, Yenchowfu, and the regions controlled by the Kiao Taoyin.” In other words, one could go anywhere, so long as one kept within sprinting distance of the two railway lines. As a matter of fact, much of the information of the Central Government was out of date; places it excepted were now peaceful, and others it did not mention were infested with brigands. Yenchowfu, for instance, showed no more ominous signs when I passed through it than any other sleepy old walled town; and the world at large knows how safe the railways themselves were just about this season. Had there been any good reason to run the risk, the chances are that I could have gone anywhere in Shantung without anything serious happening to me; on the other hand, I might have been carried off before I got well into the foot-hills.

The mountainous sections in which the brigands were operating most freely are merely poorer, less populous parts of the crowded province, where there is little to be seen except smaller editions of what may be found within easier reach elsewhere. Now and then they had entered Tenghsien, the station of my “itinerating” companion; only recently they had posted a warning on the mission gate in Yihsien, reached by a branch-line a little farther south, that unless some large sum of cash was forthcoming within a hundred days the place would be burned. The women and children had been sent to safer stations, and outposts of agricultural and evangelistic work had been temporarily abandoned. It was near Lincheng, the very junction of the Yihsien line, and the next large town south of Tenghsien, that a score of foreign passengers were to be taken from the most important express in China a few weeks later and carried off into these same hills. The brigands, in fact, hard pressed for a way out of their difficulties, debated the wisdom of taking the missionaries of Tenghsien and neighboring stations as the lever they needed against the authorities. It is more in keeping with justice that they finally decided to hold up the express instead and be sure of hostages with wealth and influence enough to assure the world’s taking notice of them, for the missionaries have lived for years in constant danger of such a raid, while most of the passengers were well fed individuals who had left home mainly in quest of experience.

When Tenghsien came to be altogether too closely pressed by bandits, the authorities fell back upon a scheme to drive them away without bloodshed. The Boxers, it will be recalled, had their origin in southern Shantung, and the method by which they fancied they made themselves immune to injury by their foes is still widely believed there. The authorities therefore, or private individuals with the initiative needed, called in some countrymen with stout faith in the efficacy of this form of protection and paid magicians two dollars each to make them “immune.” This is accomplished by various forms of hocus-pocus, in which the swallowing of bits of paper with certain characters written on them, and the wearing of similar charms, are the chief features. Not only did the countrymen believe that this made them proof against bullets, swords, and bayonets, but, what made the investment really useful, the brigands also believe it. When care had been taken to have word of the ceremonies reach the bandit camps, the “immune” persons were placed in front of the government troops, who moved slowly but steadily out into the hills. The outlaws knew the futility of wasting precious ammunition on men whom it would be impossible to injure; hence they gracefully retreated as far from town as the authorities chose to drive them. There was, of course, the slight danger that some skeptic among the bandits would doubt the efficacy of the charm. But the Chinese are much more given to swallowing their popular beliefs whole than to investigating their worth, and in the case of an unforeseen accident the evidence would be plain, not that the hocus-pocus is ineffectual, but that it was badly performed.

Not far below Tenghsien the railway crosses the old bed of the Yellow River, that greatest of Chinese vagrants. As far back as history is recorded this has changed its mind every few centuries and decided to go somewhere else. It is not a believer in the old adage that as you make your bed so you should lie in it, for the Hoang Ho has the custom, not usual even among rivers, of piling up its course until it flows some twenty feet above the surrounding country, puny mankind meanwhile striving feverishly to confine it by dikes which cannot in the end keep pace with the growth of silt between them. No Chinese can be expected to be comfortable on so elevated a bed, much less a river, and when things become altogether too unbearable the Hoang Ho suddenly abandons its course and makes a new one overnight. The last great change of this kind was in the middle of the past century, when, swinging on a pivot near Kaifeng, one of China’s many old-time capitals, it struck northeastward across Shantung to the gulf of Chihli, though it had formerly emptied into the Yellow Sea hundreds of miles farther south, barely touching Shantung at all. Shantung did not want it, but it had no choice in the matter. The provinces which had been so suddenly relieved of so violent an enemy, and at the same time presented with a large strip of land where land is so badly needed, certainly were not going to help, nor even permit, if it could be avoided, restoration to the old bed. Besides, there are both historical and visible evidences that Shantung had harbored the unwelcome visitor more than once before, that the two mountainous parts of the province were probably once islands, and that the Yellow River, washing back and forth between them, has built up the level and more fertile parts of the country. Similar things happened in many parts of the world, but in most cases the job was finished before man appeared, whereas in China it is still going on. The result is that man finds himself very much in the way during the process.