The British and, to some extent, the French, took large numbers of coolies overseas for work behind the lines, mainly from Shantung and southern China. Some three hundred thousand went from this northern province, at first slowly and with misgivings, then more eagerly, as propaganda and the reports of those who had gone ahead filtered out through the villages. The French made some arrangement whereby their recruits seem to have been much lower paid, yet to have come home more contented, than those with the British. The latter offered them ten Chinese dollars a month in France and an equal amount to their families at home, with of course transportation, food, and clothing. This was so high that at first the coolies would not believe it; these wily foreigners must have something else up their sleeves, they told one another, putting them out in front of the soldiers perhaps, for it was a rare coolie who had ever earned half the amount so glibly offered. But the incredible turned out to be true. Several towns were designated as district headquarters; foreign residents, usually missionaries, were asked to take charge in them, and once a month the nearest of kin of the absent workmen came in and got their ten dollars, in coin. At Weihsien ninety thousand were paid monthly for several years, for the coolies of the labor battalions were not returned until 1920, after the carrying of troops had been completed. Up to that time the Chinese with the British had been quite satisfied. But when they came to draw what they had saved during their years abroad there was an uproar. In the contract made with them “Mex” dollars were specified; there was no mention of francs. But in France they were of course paid in the money of the country, and the amounts they chose to lay aside were credited to them in francs. By the time they came to draw their savings the franc had crashed. Being from China they should have been wiser on the vagaries of exchange than the American “doughboy”; but they insisted that the British had promised to pay them in the dollars of their home-land, and raised such a hullabaloo that the matter reached the honor of being discussed in Parliament, though that was its loftiest attainment. The resentment at what was considered a raw deal by tricky foreigners has somewhat died out in Shantung now, and many a man would willingly go abroad for the British again; but the few wise or lucky coolies who turned their francs back into dollars as they saved them, and then meddled with the exchange in those glorious days when the gold dollar went down to about eighty cents “Mex,” are still the envy of their comrades. In an almost entirely illiterate throng, thousands of miles from home and all its exchange-shops and customs, and filled from childhood with suspicion of their fellow-men, it is easy to guess about how many took advantage of this opportunity.
One suspects that it was from the highest point of honor attained by this painful subject that there originated an attempt to soften the resentment that only resulted in increasing it. Legislative bodies the world over have a reputation for bone-headedness. One day word was sent out over Shantung and beyond that if coolies who had been to France for the British would report back to the centers where they had been discharged and paid they would learn something to their advantage. Aha, ting hao! they are going to give us all the money they promised after all, said the coolies, and began to flock in from all directions, often from considerable distances. Some came overland all the way from Tientsin, not being able to afford the railroad. When they arrived they were each given a nice brass medal to hang about their necks, with a likeness of their grateful ex-employer, King Georgie, on one side and words of similar sentiment on the other. Any one with thirty cents’ worth of understanding of the psychology of the Chinese coolie could have told the thoughtful originators of this idea that an extra cumshaw of a dollar or two would have won his everlasting gratitude far more than a medal graced with the vapid faces of all the kings of Christendom—and probably have cost less money. But textbooks on psychology, particularly of far-off “heathen” lands, are not required in a politician’s education. At first some of the coolies thought the things were gold, and raced to the exchange-shops accordingly. When these reported that the gaudy gifts were not even coin at all, men drifted out to mission compounds to inquire what they were good for.... “Is it worth anything?” “Well, I’ll give it to you for fifteen coppers.”
Coppers, by the way, are the general medium of exchange in Shantung. Silver dollars pass, though silver fractions of them do not, and bank-notes even of the province have only a limited acceptance. Except in large towns or transactions, every one pays in coppers, the division being the diao. In olden days this meant a thousand “cash” on a string. Now it means forty-nine coppers in most regions. How this decided change came about is only another of the queer stories with which monetary matters bristle in China. One day the Manchu dynasty decided it could get plenty of money to pay its grumbling troops merely by decreeing that thenceforth a diao would be five hundred, not a thousand, “cash.” Every one would be compelled to accept the new rating, on penalty of severe punishment, and the surplus five hundred “cash” would accrue to the Government. As late as the beginning of the present century the brass “cash” was the only money used in the interior of Shantung; in those days my missionary friends had taken an extra wheelbarrow with them to carry their change. Then in 1902 the copper began to be minted. Ten “cash” make a copper; fifty coppers therefore should make a modern diao; but in most places one of them goes to some one, identity unknown but strongly suspected, as the inevitable “squeeze” of all Chinese transactions.
Probably a majority of the third-class tickets sold on the Tientsin-Pukow line in Shantung are paid for from clothfuls of coppers handed in at the window, the cloth and any excess coins being returned with the ticket. The foreigner who produces a silver dollar when only a few cents are needed will be deluged with a shower of huge coppers sufficient to fill an overcoat pocket. The general run of prices and wages in Shantung is suggested by some of those paid by my missionary companion. Master masons were receiving fifty-four coppers a day, their helpers thirty-six—a copper being approximately half a farthing or the fourth of an American cent. In the good old days of a decade or more back they were satisfied with fifteen and ten respectively, though the copper was then worth 50 per cent more than at present. Country pastors are paid twenty Chinese dollars a month, those in towns all the way from that to forty, “Bible women” eight dollars, “evangelists” (unordained preachers who also work on their farms) receive eleven, teachers from eighteen to forty, and native doctors fifty.
At Weihsien “Peking carts” are the almost exclusive means of transportation, though forty miles west a similar town has only wheelbarrows. This important half-way station between Tzinan and Tsingtao lies in the heart of what was thirty centuries ago the kingdom of Wei, and the landscape on either side of it is littered with monuments and graves. Shantung is much given to elaborately carved stone p’ai-lous, or p’ai-fangs, as they are more often called in that province, and these imposing memorial arches to virtuous widows or officials more or less willingly honored naturally outlast the mainly wooden ones in Peking and vicinity. Stone horses completely saddled and bridled, stirrups hanging ready for instant use, stood with other less familiar animals before some of the graves, awaiting their riders these many centuries; and groves of evergreens, some of them overtopped by the four reddish upright poles bearing a kind of ship’s crow’s-nest which means that the principal deceased of the group some time in the bygone ages passed the examinations for the highest rank of Chinese scholar, were a little more frequent about them than is general in northern China, though there were still far too many of the one and too few of the other.
Weihsien is really two distinct cities, each surrounded by a massive stone wall, with a sandy-bedded river between them. But the farther one was not walled until the days of the Taiping Rebellion, and it is still regarded as a suburb of the other. Thanks to spring rain and water-carriers, the streets of both were rivers of mud in which a mule-cart was almost indispensable even for the shortest distance, and an ordeal into the bargain. Weihsien had indeed recently imported her first rickshaws, but all three of them were without rubber tires or experienced runners, which made the first jaunts in them by a few of the town dandies an experience to be remembered rather than to be repeated or recommended, and the fear was expressed that these evidences of modern progress would be withdrawn for lack of appreciation. However, the new autobus line to Chefoo starts from Weihsien, and motor-cars have become almost familiar sights to those who have come out to see them at the edge of the suburb, beyond which they cannot penetrate. There should long since have been a branch railway to Chefoo. Ocean communication with that important silk and hair-net center is irregular and uncertain—except from Dairen over in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. But so long as they held the Shantung Railway the Japanese would not permit this extension, lest Chefoo become a serious rival to their beloved Dairen. So the usual raised dirt highway has been built, with frequent guarded barriers to keep others off it, and along this the few still movable contrivances of all sizes and makes which were bought second-hand from the Japanese before they evacuated Shantung stagger in a daily service scheduled to make the journey in a day and a half, with the brick bed of a Chinese inn to break it. The line is under railway management, but one glimpse of the once gasolene-driven wrecks that litter the yard at Weihsien should convince the most foolhardy that to ride behind a Chinese chauffeur is more risky than behind the worst locomotive driver in the Orient. Chefoo, by the way, is unknown to the Chinese; they call it Yentai. Just what misunderstanding on the part of early sailors led to the name by which it is known to all foreigners, including the Japanese, seems never to have been fully cleared up.
When Tzinan was voluntarily opened to trade in 1906, Weihsien, as well as Choutsun farther west, was also designated as a “port”; but though the Chinese laid out “foreign settlements” in them no one came to settle. A stray German or two is all that the city has to offer in this line, except the missionaries. The Catholics have an imposing church building just outside the walls, and there is an important mission school established by one of the pioneers among American Presbyterians in China, far outside the town, where the bitter hostility of those earlier days drove him. When the school was first founded, pupils had to be paid to attend; to-day there are waiting lists at fifty-eight dollars a year—a great deal of money, let it be kept in mind, in Shantung—of which twenty-five dollars pays a year’s board. Millet or kaoliang in a kind of gruel seemed to be the chief diet. Then there was the pickled tuber resembling a turnip that is constantly munched all over Shantung, and which does away with any desire to salt the other food. There were flocks of timid high-school girls in their neat trousers, though missionary influence tends to introduce the skirt, which is surely mistaken zeal for mere change. The trousers are more convenient, more becoming, and certainly many times more modest than the unstable garb of our modern maidens of the West. Formerly many Shantung women of the better class, influenced perhaps by the Manchus, who once had walled towns of bannermen in all this region, wore a skirt over their trousers when they appeared in public, and older missionary ladies can still remember the polite greeting when they reached the home of a Chinese hostess: “Well, take off your skirt and stay a while.”
The large church of the Weihsien mission was well filled at Thursday evening prayer-meeting and packed at the principal Sunday service. Chinese pastors officiated on both occasions. Though the weather was still distinctly cold, no provision for heating the building was made, and one could only guess what it must be in midwinter. Gradually the stone floor congealed the feet and removed them completely from the realms of sensation, but the Chinese, in their full outdoor garb, caps and all, seemed to be as comfortable as they ever have any need to be. Uncovering the head had become so nearly a dead letter that even the two or three American missionaries in their overcoats usually kept their hats on, even when they rose to pray in fluent Chinese. The feminine portion of the congregation occupied the back part of the church, the boys the front and center, graduating back to youths and men behind and on either side; when prayers were offered all rose to their feet instead of kneeling, and the less said of the bold and stentorian “singing” of hymns the better.
A few weeks before my visit the Shantung Railway had been turned over to the Chinese, in accordance with the agreement reached at the Washington Conference. But to go back to the beginning: you will recall that two German missionaries were killed in Shantung in 1897 and that Germany quickly made this a pretext for demanding the lease of Kiaochow Bay, and the concession for a railroad from there to the capital of the province. Though it was a generation since the Chinese Government had been able to still popular uproar against such diabolic contrivances only by buying out the first railway in China, running a few miles out of Shanghai, and shipping it over to Formosa, there was bitter opposition to this one, ostensibly from the superstitious masses, though it is known now that officials and some of the gentry urged the people on. In fact, the building of the Shantung Railway was very largely responsible for the “Boxer” uprising, which had its beginning, as I have said before, in mountainous southern Shantung. The exasperation was partly due to pure superstition, partly to real grievances which the Germans unwittingly perpetrated. They cut through the hill south of Weihsien which had brought the town all its good luck for centuries, and thereby destroyed its beneficence. This matter of feng-shui, of placating the spirits of wind and water, is of the highest importance, and there seems to be no fixed rule in dealing with them. For instance, there is another peak, west of Weihsien, through the top of which a slot quite like a railway cutting was gashed centuries ago at great labor, in order to neutralize the bad luck it brought the town. When they first came the Germans had to depend upon interpreters, and these of course were true Chinese. They would stroll out when they were off duty, or when no one was watching, and drive a survey stake in the top of a grave, perhaps miles from the projected route of the railroad; and a day or two later they would offer to get the stake removed and leave the grave unmolested if the descendants could raise money enough to “bribe the Germans.” When a railroad is surveyed its proposed turns are marked as sharp angles first and the curve is traced inside this later. The interpreters collected handsomely also from farmers for getting the Germans to remove stakes on the points of these angles—where the railroad had never thought of trespassing. In spite of both passive and active opposition the Germans pushed the line rapidly inland; many Chinese Christians free from the popular superstitions or sustained by the missionaries took contracts to prepare the way by sections, and early in the present century locomotives snorted into Tzinanfu.
The line still bears many marks of its original nationality. It is a direct descendant of the railways of Germany—excellently built, with stone ballast in exact military alignment along flanking paths of exactly such a width, iron ties of the reversed trough shape, light rails and fourteen-ton bridges—European rolling stock is not heavy by our standards—well-built stations, service buildings, and grade-markers, still here and there bearing a German name, in spite of eight years of Japanese occupancy, the whole railway still lined for much of its length by the quick-growing acacia-trees which the Germans expected to furnish supports for their mines. Now that the Chinese have returned, one frequently runs across a station-master who speaks German but no English.