In the end, apparently, they were given a certain sum of money and more or less official standing, as is the custom in China, the land of compromise. But by the time I reached Tsingtao they had been moved to Fangtze, far outside the former leasehold, and the city was well policed by the men in black uniforms and white leggings with which Peking is so familiar. Hand-picked and trained by a European, these constitute one of the best bodies in China, and they had been scattered along the entire line of the Shantung Railway, poorly equipped at first, but armed now, one and all, with brand-new rifles from China’s government arsenals. The ordinary cotton-clad, ill disciplined Chinese soldier was very little in evidence. Now and then a group of them try to board the trains without tickets to the great detriment of this line also; but station-masters have a way of appealing to their good nature, if not to their patriotism, with the strong argument that unless the line pays for itself within five years the Japanese will come back, and then....
Bismarck Strasse became Ryojun Machi and in its turn will no doubt be this or that Ta Chieh, perhaps without even the concession of naming it in Roman letters which the Japanese granted to the West. The contrast between the blue sea and the clean red roofs may grow more and more dim under slack Chinese rule, and Tsingtao may sink back into the slough from which Germany rescued it. But it is not likely, for the Chinese are on their metal. True, there is already the curse of useless politicians and military pressure in the highest offices, but a Yale graduate in forestry is in charge of continuing the good work of the Germans and the Japanese in spreading the gospel of reforestation, and other branches of the new Government are in equally competent and progressive hands. There is great need in China for officials to take up economics as a part of government, especially to establish some continuity of plan which will carry on in spite of the disruptions of political changes; and ready-made Tsingtao is an excellent place for them to begin to practise. The people may reassert their centuries of training and pilfer all the trees, as some were already beginning to carry off the brushwood contrary to rules, as they cut even the trees about their graves when hard pressed, for only their Confucianism stands guard over the few groves that are left in the land. Or they may, as some of the enthusiastic young officials of the former leased territory announce, make Tsingtao more important than either Tientsin or Shanghai, by pushing new railways back into the interior beyond Tzinan and draining even the Yang Tze of its natural carrying-power. More likely the future will be somewhere between these two extremes, with a certain Chinese indifference to small comforts and strict cleanliness somewhat marring in the eyes of the West a port which in the main will retain much that it has learned during its quarter of a century of sterner foreign tutelage.
CHAPTER XVIII
IN BANDIT-RIDDEN HONAN
One of our military attachés at Peking purposed to see China’s Far West before the cycle of duties called him home to a regiment, and he consented to have company. At least if it chanced to please the bandits who were just then using that means to coerce the incoherent Government to add us to their growing collection of foreign hostages, there would be some advantage in companionship.
The major had business in Honan before I could leave Peking, and took the newly captured cook with him, leaving the “boy,” Chang, who maltreated considerable English and was to be our most important link with the outside world, to wait with me for the next biweekly express. Below the junction for Shansi, where daylight overtook us, the landscape was still as flat as about Peking; but there were more trees, bushy as the mango, though thinner of foliage, many trees, indeed, for China. Though it was already late October, the leaves had hardly begun to turn, and that brilliant sunshine and utter cloudlessness which is one of the greatest charms of dry, denuded North China so many days each year made it seem still almost midsummer. The broad, fenceless fields swarmed with people, mainly engaged, as far as a passing glimpse could tell, in picking cotton and threshing peanuts. The cotton was in some places so thin that even the frugal Chinese apparently did not find it worth gathering, while the best of it, on plants scarcely knee-high, was nothing to exhibit at a fair. Women gone cotton-picking had the advantage of trousers, but this was more than offset by the bound feet on which they hobbled from bush to bush. In contrast to those long two-bushel bags the negroes drag behind them through the fertile cotton-fields of our South, a kind of newsboy’s sack at the waist, or a pocketed apron, seemed to be quite large enough here.
It was hard to distinguish the many heaps of peanuts from the still more numerous graves. With enough of this baseball and circus delicacy within one sweep of the eye to satisfy a ravenous city on the Fourth of July, there came back to mind the touching story of the fond American mother who sent her dear son in China a box of peanuts for Christmas, so that he might for a little while be reminded of home. Even small children were helping to pull them, and to pile the nuts in grave-like mounds of careless cone shape. Of the graves themselves there was literally no end, until the landscape for long stretches seemed to grow nothing else. Yet the land was a veritable market-garden, so great is the individual care of Chinese fields in all their processes. Here and there, in place of the far more common tilling by hand, was a plow, drawn by two or three mules; but naturally you cannot plow to advantage if you must dodge grandfather’s grave every trip across a short field, after that great-grandfather’s, and then that of the father before him, back to more than remote generations. If only the old gentlemen would consent to lie in a row, or even in a companionable cluster, or to be laid away in a real graveyard where the little cones of earth might perhaps be kept green even in China, instead of being rare, rain-gashed heaps of dried mud as hallowed as a pile of peanuts!
Yet sometimes there is a hint of reverence, rather than of mere superstition, about a collection of half a dozen of these untended mounds drifting through the centuries with no other evidence of care than the slender shade of a single tree bent over them, like some faithful old servant still respectfully waiting to do their bidding. A suggestion of this comes now and then even to the disapproving foreigner, aghast at the wicked wastefulness of China’s burial methods; and certainly the peasant himself, the only one after all whom it greatly concerns, develops no spirit of criticism, no thought of revolt. A plow being in most cases inconvenient among his ancestral mounds, he digs away about them by hand year after year, generation after generation, as those same ancestors did century after century. Naked to the waist even in these late autumn days, his body burned to the hue of old polished mahogany, he never disturbs them, and rarely if ever mends them.
There were still reminders of the summer’s crops,—sweet potatoes, onions, lettuce, cabbages, carrots; but there was little if any evidence of the house-high kaoliang that stretches for unbroken miles across more northern China, all the north, indeed, of this province of Chihli. Country-women hobbling slowly and painfully about on their crippled feet were everywhere, even the most ugly, weather-beaten, and work-worn of them boasting this fancied form of beauty. Blindfolded donkeys and mules marched patiently round and round hither and yon across the landscape, some about ancient well-curbs, lifting by great wooden wheels water for the irrigation ditches that are so widely needed in this deforested, rain-stingy land, others rotating big stone rollers for the hulling or grinding of wheat. Brick-kilns, which the Chinese seal up for long periods with their contents, stood forth like rudely chiseled monuments or artificial hillocks. The earth was worn away around everything, walls, trees, roadsides, monuments, those great slabs of stone, top-heavy with carved dragons, that may be seen anywhere; for great portions of China are half-desert, dry as dust, of a moistureless brown soil ready to wash or blow away at the least provocation, and slavishly dependent upon irrigation. Chinese farming methods, too, increase this erosion. Everywhere men were cutting off the top layer of soil and screening the earth into many little mounds that stretched in long rows across the sunken fields. Later they “spread this between the wheat,” if I understood Chang’s laborious explanation; that is, they use it as a kind of fertilizer, sometimes mixed with the droppings of animals gleaned along the roads, as well as for the building of the many little low field-dikes.
Barely over the boundary of Honan, where it thrusts itself in a point that recalls the “gerrymandering” of the West into the two provinces bounding it on the north, is Changte, burial-place of Yuan Shih-kai. A tomb evidently rivaling those of the most powerful emperors, certainly larger and more sumptuous than that of Mencius not far east of here in Shantung, rises among great trees within easy sight from the train. But it is not covered in imperial yellow, for the new dynasty that the occupant hoped to found, and which, if numerous examples in Chinese history still mean anything, would have been the more natural development, failed to materialize, less because of wide-spread republican sentiment, one suspects, than for lack of tact, among the virtues of political sagacity, in the make-up of what might have been the founder.
Yuan Shih-kai is the father, so to speak, of the curse of swarming soldiers that now overrun China. For it was he who first saw in Korea, when he was a mere officer of the Manchus, the first Western-style soldiers, and who coaxed the Government to start what has become the present military misfortune of China. There were “soldiers” everywhere now—in China one must use the word with a grain of salt, for to put a simple country youth or a mere coolie into a faded gray cotton uniform and hand him something resembling a weapon does not make a real warrior, as the sight of rows of men standing at “present arms” and at the same time staring back over their shoulders at a strolling foreigner suggested. These artless, slouch-shouldered fellows lounged with fixed bayonets along the graveled platform of every station; they packed the trains to overflowing; they were drilling in companies and battalions, once or twice, it seemed, in whole regiments, on bare, dusty fields along the way. Had the half of them been genuine soldiers there should not have been a bandit within a month’s march in any direction.