Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

At Chengchow next morning the head of a man, his long hair carefully wrapped about it, as if that were much more precious than what had been his neck, lay a yard from his trunk, hands and feet rudely tied with ropes, out on the bare space before the station. Perhaps he had really deserved this frequent, casual Chinese fate, and was not the simple coolie substituted for influential or unattainable criminals which his appearance somehow suggested. The curious strolled over to see him, but the eating-stalls just in front lost none of their custom or their cheerfulness; by noon the body was gone, and dogs had licked up the great patch of blood that had spread between head and trunk.

The major had already gone westward, and it was not until months later that I visited Kaifeng, capital of Honan, long after the “Christian General” had been transferred from there to Peking. Fu Hsi lived there a little matter of 4775 years ago and not only ruled the Chinese but, if we are to believe all we hear, taught them to fish with nets—the Yellow River being but a supernatural stone’s throw away—to rear domestic animals, to use the lute and lyre, in a way, one suspects, that has not changed since, and spent the leisure time left him in instituting laws of marriage and inventing a system of writing by using pictures as symbols. No doubt he played some antediluvian species of golf and lectured on the necessity of large families also, but early history is often careless in preserving “human interest” details. What we do know is that Kaifeng was the capital of China under the Sung dynasty, from 960 A.D. until the court was captured by the Kins nearly two centuries later, a brother of the emperor escaping to Nanking and setting himself up in his place, and remained a kind of capital of the Kins until they were finally overthrown by their fellow-Tartars, the Mongols. Since then the city has apparently been content with its provincial status.

Its wall encloses a mammoth space, much greater than that of Taiyüan, for instance, but with great open spaces within it. Lakes before the “dragon throne” in the center of the enclosure, though in the West they would more probably be called ponds, give the site mildly a suggestion of Peking. In a far corner the tieh-tah, or “iron pagoda,” is worth coming to see, though the only iron visible about it is the Buddhas in relief peering out of each opening up its thirteen stories. Of a beautiful glazed color of reddish brown with imperial yellow specking it, one might also call it the world’s largest porcelain. The keeper insisted that it was two thousand years old, but I fear tradition uncorrected by the printed page had deceived him as to the date of the Buddhist invasion of China, to which her pagodas are due.

There was a busy, almost a pleasant atmosphere about Kaifeng, with its moderately wide streets, and rickshaw-men almost as fast as those of Peking; though squeaking wheelbarrows for all manner of freight, with women on tiny feet sometimes straining in front of them, were numerous. Feng Yü-hsiang, China’s far-famed Methodist, cleaned up Kaifeng in the Christian sense during the six months he was ruler of Honan there. He drove out prostitutes; the extraordinary sight of soldiers sprinkling chloride of lime with their own fair hands wherever it was needed was but one of many such during his days. The only scandal that seemed to hover about his memory was an inordinate love for ice-cream, which reduced him to the point of sending a soldier for his share on those Sundays when he could not dine with the American missionaries in person. But Feng was evidently too good a Tuchun of Honan to suit his master Wu Pei-fu. The fellow who has taken his place has merely the outward honors of the office; Wu gives him his orders in everything of importance, and has his own auditors on the spot. Meanwhile the figurehead enjoys his opium, his singsong-girls, and his prestige, while the city slips back into the habits of which Feng attempted to cure it, and soldiers now and then run amuck in it. A thousand mere boys drill a month or two in compounds recently walled for them in the very outskirt where the missionaries built in the hope of an un-Chinese bit of quiet now and then, and pass on into the ever-swelling armies to make room for as many of their fellows. Bugles blare seven days a week long before the June hour of dawn, and all day long the recruits do their worst to sing scraps of Western music as they march.

The chief interest in Kaifeng to the traveler in quest of the unusual, however, is its Jews. The Chinese call them “Yu-t’ai,” which undoubtedly is derived from “Judea,” though whether by word of mouth or merely geographically is not clear. They came many generations ago, just when or why neither their neighbors nor they themselves seem to know. To-day they consist of “seven names and eight families”; that is, there are eight Jewish families who have between them seven family names, every one, as I have mentioned before, being compelled by circumstances over which he has no control to adopt one of the hundred and some Chinese surnames when he settles in China. Some doubt whether there are a hundred individuals left; the present head of the clan put the number at “one or two hundred.” They seem to have lost every vestige of Jewish identity, except the name they are all known by, which persistently survives. All those I saw looked less Jewish than do some of the Chinese; certainly their features would not definitely distinguish them from their neighbors, though the “head Jew” boasts that several persons have come to take his photograph “because he has such a big nose.” I ran this man Chao to earth for a somewhat similar purpose, and found him and his son keeping a little shop in a slovenly part of town, stripped to the waist and otherwise conducting themselves quite like Chinese a bit above the coolie class. Their home behind had not an un-Chinese hint about it—unless it was a large photograph of the father and son with a very Russian Jew from New York between them, which occupied a conspicuous place. But they were if anything more friendly, more bubbling over with excitement at a visit from a foreigner and the awe this inspired among their crowding neighbors, than pure Chinese of their class would have been. The merry little father, it seems, has twice been in jail charged with murder, if that really means anything concerning a man’s character in China; the fact that he had gotten out again suggested that there could scarcely have been much evidence against him, for the Jews of Kaifeng are not wealthy.

They intermarry with the Chinese, and some have even taken up Chinese idol-worship; the rite most insisted upon by orthodox Jewry has not been practised for generations. Formerly they had what they called a synagogue, but about fifty years ago this was completely destroyed, and does not seem to have been kept in repair even until then. There has been no attempt to restore it, and a stone tablet that stood within it is all that is left. On this last relic is engraved a sketch of Hebrew history and the names of the patriarchs. Once it bore also the names of the principal Jewish families in Kaifeng, but these were obliterated in order to throw off the scent those who tried some decades ago to persecute them. This tablet, by the way, is now in the compound of the Kaifeng mission of the Canadian Episcopal Church. No one in Kaifeng, as far as is known, can read Hebrew, and the clan seems long ago to have lost any interest in Judaism. Several portions of Hebrew scriptures have been found on the streets for sale, evidently as mere curios. The chief Jew proposed one day, in a talkative mood, that he order all the Jews to become Christian and join the church of the American missionary with whom he was speaking—because he had had a quarrel with the pastor of the other church.

The father of two likely-looking Jewish lads who attend the American mission school is a silversmith and has some means, but as a group the Jews of Kaifeng have not yet developed any Chinese Rothschilds or Guggenheims; nor is the wealth of the city in their control. In other words they seem to have become completely “un-Jewed,” if the expression be allowed, which is their chief claim to interest. For the Chinese, I believe, are the only people in the world who have completely broken the racial tradition of the Jews for remaining a distinct race. The slow and patient sons of Han have blotted out the marks that have identified the sons of Abraham for thousands of years, as they have pacifically assimilated race after race that has come into close contact with them, and it should occasion no great surprise if the Jewish colony of Kaifeng were entirely lost within another generation.

Soldiers were particularly numerous on the “Lunghai” line west from Chengchow, for this led to the headquarters of China’s just then most powerful general, Wu Pei-fu. Chang and I fell to talking with some of them in the crowded third-class coach. They were all volunteers—except perhaps as hunger and its allies coerce—enlisted for three years, new soldiers drawing, in theory, six “Mex” dollars a month, old ones, for what our own call a “second hitch,” eight. But in practice none of those with whom we spoke had ever been paid more than three such dollars during a single “moon,” at least, as they put it, “in time of peace.” It would be no great wonder if some of those off now on a furlough to their homes with only that amount to their names should be cogitating some violent means of improving that penurious condition of affairs.

One might become an officer within a year, they said, if one proved to be a good soldier, particularly if one were a friend of some friend of the general, or had money to scatter in the right quarter. Company officers seemed to receive about as much as our enlisted men do, with the privilege of buying their own food and clothing; but there are, as every one who has passed a bit of time in present-day China knows, other means by which they, and to a large extent the soldiers under them, often appreciably increase their official stipend.