Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Reflections of this simple nature were inclined to crowd out all other impressions during another of my cross-country jaunts in Shantung, this time northward to an ancient city still popularly called Loa-An. For the way led through Lin-tze, also walled, aged, and dreaming of the past, which in the days of Confucius was in the heart of the kingdom of Chi, as the home of the sage was in that of the neighboring one of Lu. For miles about it, therefore, the princes of Chi lie buried, not under the mere cones of earth of ordinary ancestors, but beneath hillocks and hills, and what sometimes seem across the floor-flat country to be almost mountains. Some are still so respected that the groves of mainly evergreen trees about them, beautifying the usual bare nudity of Chinese graves, have survived to this day, and one or two are guarded at a respectful distance by a standing stone giant who recalls those of Egypt or of the southern shores of Lake Titicaca. Then there are many lesser lights, such as always cluster about a court, and innumerable areas are sacred to other ancient families, the mounds graduated in size and state of repair from the principal one of the collection at the back to the small ones so far out in front that the peasants dare to cultivate close about them. Remnants of tissue-paper “money” donated to the dead all over China at the New Year still fluttered from the peak of many a mound, some of which dated so far back, perhaps, that live servants and domestic animals were buried in them, instead of the flimsy paper substitutes for these that are burned at modern funerals, along with papier-mâché automobiles containing a pair of painted chauffeurs and a concubine or two; but more than anything else, even of the sense of antiquity, one was impressed by the endlessness, the uncountability of the grave-mounds of all sizes.

Draft-animals, if only a cow or a donkey, or the two hitched together, were drawing crude but effective plows and what American farmers call a “drag,” on which the driver stands, raising clouds of dust behind him. But the dodging of graves seemed to be the most serious task of all, far as we rode northward, and one could fancy the undernourished peasants, suddenly struck with Western seeing in place of blind custom, deciding that it is high time these aged mounds are leveled off, or at least planted over. Possibly that miracle will some day come to pass, and China will by a turn of her hand increase her productive land by several provinces, without extending her boundaries or robbing her neighbors of an acre.

This time I used still another of Shantung’s many modes of locomotion,—a bicycle. It has its advantages in a flat country where the roads are often narrow paths, and where a vehicle that cannot be lifted about by hand now and then is limited in its range. But when it chances that a raging head wind blows both going and coming, and the contrivance between one’s aching legs emanates from a Chicago mail-order house, there are certain things to envy the traveler by wheelbarrow. In a way the season was poorly chosen, too, for though the day was cloudless and warm, plowing was on, and while the Chinese peasant leaves unmolested the graves that dot his little field, he often plows up the road. Thus a route which at best was an alternating between the bottom of a ditch deep in dust and a precariously narrow and by no means continuous path often on the sheer edge of it, frequently became a trackless field, plowed by draft-animals or chopped up with the clumsy, sledge-heavy adz-hoe still used in China. Rye and barley, and above all peanuts, were to be the principal crops wherever winter wheat was not already showing its tender green. One does not at first thought closely associate the two, but peanuts and missionaries are likely to lie side by side on the floor of the Chinese coolie’s mental granary. The Chinese had a peanut before the missionaries came, and still cultivate it to a certain extent. But it is so tiny and dry that it looks more like the end of a pea-pod, with a pea or two left in it, that has survived several winters in a very dry place—and the taste does not dispel this illusion. American missionaries brought the much more profitable variety from Georgia in an effort to improve the conditions of Shantung, and to-day the American peanuts grown in China probably run into millions of bushels, dotting every market-place and producing oil enough to supply the world with peanut-butter.

Loa-An is no longer officially known by that name, and thereby hangs a typically Chinese tale. Soon after the establishment of what passes in the outside world for a republic, it was decreed that deeds of land-holdings must be registered again, though this had been done quite recently under the Manchus. The registry fee was to be a dollar and twenty cents, of which 70 per cent was to go to the Government and the rest to the local magistrate. Now, a dollar and twenty cents, even in “Mex,” is a lot of money to a Shantung peasant, with the tiny parcel of land which the custom of dividing among the sons of each generation has left him, and a decade ago it was still more so. Moreover, the magistrate should have known that in China government decrees are not necessarily meant to be carried out, at least beyond the point of individual discretion. But he was of the aggressive type of official, sadly needed perhaps but not always successful in China, and his insistence on having the order obeyed to the letter reached the point where he helped to carry it out in person. The wrath of the country-side increased. One day when the magistrate was some forty li out of town in the interest of thorough collections and an honest return of them from his constables, a band of peasants fell upon him and chopped him to death with their hoe-hooks.

Soldiers were hurried to Loa-An, where they oppressed the population for months in the time-honored Chinese way, and finally lopped off eight heads. None of these had been the leading spirits in the assassination, nor perhaps had any real part in it at all, but they had been the easiest to catch; and, their duty ended, according to Chinese lights, the soldiers withdrew. But the Government saw fit to inflict a heinous punishment on the city of Loa-An itself, for the crime of permitting such a crime within its district. Loa-An means “Rejoicing and Peace,” as nearly as it can be translated; it was ordered henceforth to call itself Gwang-Rao. Does this mean “Bunch of Rascals,” or something of the sort, as we of the West might suppose? It does not; it means FarReaching Forgiveness, for, as I have already had occasion to remark, the Chinese mind may have been originally built on the same specifications as our own, but its manner of functioning has grown quite different during the many centuries that separate us. For one thing, it refuses to jar itself by sudden readjustments, and Gwang-Rao is still spoken of as Lao-An in ninety cases out of a hundred.

As is so often the case throughout China, much of the population and the business of Lao-An have gathered outside the city walls, where there are certain advantages which the American suburbanite will understand. Inside, there is that atmosphere of an old ladies’ home which one feels in an aged New England village off the trail of modern progress—though certainly in outward appearance there are no two things more dissimilar than a New England village and a Chinese walled town. An immense pond or lake takes up a whole corner of the enclosure, licking away at the inner base of the crumbling wall. In its prime this was almost majestic, higher than anything within it, broad enough for a “Peking cart” to drive comfortably upon it, the crenelated parapets armed with small cannon of curious casting which now lie rusting away wherever chance has rolled them. There are other open spaces within the walls, some cultivated, some merely idle, but the town itself is compact enough, with one long trough of dust or mud as a main street, lined by baked-earth houses of one form or another, enlivened only by an occasional hawker marking his leisurely progress by some Chinese species of noise, or a long unlaundered family group enjoying the brilliant sunshine of early spring.

Outside it is different,—movement, crowding, an uproar of wide-open shops and transient venders, all noisily contending for patronage, dwellings that are almost imposing in their milieu, and, in the outskirts, a large Presbyterian school and mission under an unusually trusted Chinese pastor. His board beds may not have been the last word in comfort, but they were many times nearer that than a passing guest could have found in all the rest of the district. The auditing, counseling, and moral sustenance for which the white-haired missionary I had accompanied made his annual visit to Lao-An, with a brief service by the honored visitor and a few moments in the unheated school-rooms, where full outdoor garb was in order, left us time to go to prison before we faced the head wind again. It was typical probably of most local limbos in Shantung, unless the weekly services which the pastor had been allowed to give there for a year now had remodeled the moral outlook of the prisoners as completely as he believed: cells that were larger than the average inmate had at home, and not overcrowded, by Chinese standards, tolerable food and plenty of sunshine, a certain semi-freedom at times in the yards, and in contrast iron fetters about the neck, waist, and ankles in most cases, with clanking chains connecting them. The prisoners got five coppers a day to feed themselves—more than a whole American cent! Yet they lived well, according to the pastor, and could save money. Three coppers paid for a catty (a pound and a third) of millet, and the grain hong saw to it that they got good measure. What average Shantung countryman is sure of a catty of millet a day? Besides, they were paid for their work. The young and spry could earn as much as ten coppers daily making hair-nets, and the older ones, with their more clumsy fingers, half as much weaving dee-tze—girdles, I suppose we would call them, though the Chinese use twice as many of them about their ankles as around their waists. Then Loa-An gets great quantities of a rush the size of a lead-pencil from nearer the mouth of the Yellow River, and from these are fashioned baskets and scoops, and shallow basins for the feeding of animals, buckets for use at wells, winnowing pans, and, strangest of all, a thick winter shoe that looks like an infant Roman galley.

All the romance of hair-nets is not limited to the tresses they confine. Shantung, and to a lesser degree some neighboring provinces, has known some of it. Until Europe went mad, hair-nets were made mainly in France. America, callous upstart, continued to demand them even though the guns were thundering. Some of the materials had always come from China, though the French were much given to the use of horsehair; now it occurred to some genius that the Chinese might be taught to make them on the spot. A small town in Shantung became the center of the new industry; later it gravitated naturally to Chefoo. Every one took to turning discarded cues and combings into nets; children learned to tie them; coolies forced their clumsy fingers to it when nothing else offered; in mission churches women pinned the things to one another’s backs and went on tying the little knots while they listened to the sermon. The making of hair-nets kept many from starvation in famine days, even though the wholesalers took advantage of the situation and paid the hungry toilers as little as possible. Even in the best of times the workers make no fortune. They are paid by the gross of nets; women and children working at odd times can earn from five to ten coppers a day; those who are skilled and put in all their time at it make from thirty-five to fifty coppers—ten to thirteen cents gold—when the nets are selling at their highest, five to seven dollars “Mex” a gross. Just now they were down to half that, and with a great oversupply of nets on the market and fashion turning toward the double-strand net, the makers were getting hardly three American cents a dozen.

Many wholesalers, on the other hand, have quickly gotten rich out of hair-nets. There is a barber, for instance, who is known to have laid up ten thousand dollars in three or four years, a great fortune in China even to men far above the lowly barber caste. But the newly rich are not so kindly treated where class lines are still rather sharply drawn and precedent especially tenacious. His envious neighbors overwhelmed their former hair-cutter with lawsuits, the most common and effective form of Chinese community persecution; though he turned his money into land he can neither live on nor rent it, so virulent is the prejudice against him. With the coming of hair-nets the bicycle trade boomed. This was the only quick way of getting about the country, and the buyers could carry thousands of nets back with them. The Germans of Tsingtao had good Fahrräder to offer at reasonable prices, and made the most of their opportunity. Then came a slump in the trade, hints of the reasons for which in time reached the wholesalers, if not the makers. American girls had taken to bobbing their hair! But this fad had begun to die out again, and already the people of overcrowded Shantung were feeling the effect of this in fuller bowls of rice.

In wandering about Shantung I was constantly coming across coolies who had been to France. One could generally tell them at a glance, from some remnant of uniform, or their way of wearing what they had chosen when that wore out, perhaps by a certain air of something that was not exactly what we popularly dub “freshness,” yet which was more or less distantly related to it. Besides, they seldom waited long on the chance of recognition, but greeted the foreigner with the self-confidence of familiarity and proceeded to impress their fellow-countrymen who had been denied their advantages, and who never failed to gather about in as great a circle as the community afforded.