Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

I overtook the major at the headquarters of Wu Pei-fu, with whom he had been an observer during his struggle against the lord of Manchuria a few months before. It took an hour by rickshaw to reach the place from the station, along the most atrocious caricatures of roads I had yet seen, even in China. The route lay through the walled town of Honanfu, better known to history as Loyang. Kuang Wu Ti made Loyang his capital shortly before the Christian era, when rebels drove him out of its predecessor, Changan, in what is to-day Shansi. It is a neglected part of China that has not been the capital at one time or another. This one was still the real seat of power not only of Honan Province but of a large portion of the putative republic. Inconsistently it was more miserably unkempt, more overrun with visible human misery, than any Chinese city I had yet come across, possibly because it was thus far the most southerly. Dust and the beggars squatting and rolling in it were all but indistinguishable until the latter were cringing almost under the runner’s feet, beggars as covered with filth as any in India, exhibiting great open sores, men so diseased that they spent their unoccupied moments in picking themselves to pieces.

We came at length through clouds of swirling dust to a score of great modern barracks, housing the division with which its now powerful commander has served since his lieutenant days. A formidable series of sentries and functionaries admitted me gradually through a massive gate, across a much flower-bedecked courtyard, through a voluminous anteroom, and finally into the official waiting-room. Three foreigners, who happened all to be Americans, and a baker’s dozen of Chinese were waiting. The major and a politically-minded youth temporarily released from Harvard, who was to accompany us on the outward journey, had just returned from the manœuvers at which the general spends his days on horseback, riding off daily at seven and returning at five, without taking food during that time. But many of the Chinese had been in the waiting-room since morning; indeed, it would have been easy to suspect that callers sometimes have the privilege of waiting overnight, for in the four corners stood as many large beds, canopied, but wooden-floored in the hard Chinese style. A long table occupied the center of the room; several more or less easy-chairs leaned against the wall. Nothing is more discourteous in China than to fail to keep a caller supplied with tea, and several orderlies, taking the leaves out of a familiar tin can in a corner behind a bed and transferring them to the pot in hands that showed no visible signs of recent soaping, kept the little handleless cup before each of us constantly filled and steaming.

Toward sunset there was a stir among the retainers about the anteroom and court yard, half-whispers of “Ta-ren lai-la” (the great man has come) from the Chinese visitors, and a few moments later we foreigners were asked to lead the way across another flowery court to a somewhat more sumptuous apartment. A young man in a gown of beautifully figured gray silk, of handsome and strikingly alert features, and speaking almost perfect English, had taken charge of details with the air of an accomplished, yet exceedingly cautious, master of ceremony. At least a score of persons drifted in, all Chinese except the four of us, but from all points of the compass,—politicians down from Peking for a conference, or looking for a chance to get there; correspondents of half a dozen native papers and foreign news services, some widely traveled and speaking English or French fluently; one or two from far southern China who could only converse with their fellow-countrymen through an interpreter or a mutually familiar foreign tongue; and a scattering of men of purely Chinese manners to whom a polyglot gathering was evidently a new experience. The assemblage suggested a king’s levée, with the added touch of costumes ranging all the way from the entirely Occidental to the very Oriental.

While we chatted, Wu Pei Fu slipped in among us almost unnoticed—for an instant,—until the silence of respect of the Chinese for any one who has reached power fell with a suddenness that was startling. The general had laid off his uncomfortable uniform and leather footwear, and was dressed in the long silken gown and cloth shoes of his native land. Small almost to the point of being tiny, he had undoubtedly “personality”; there was something about his vivacious manner and quite evident mental alertness which quickly set him above many of the larger and more stately men in the room. Even the “peanut” shape of his close-cropped head, so frequent in China, seemed to be but an added touch of slenderness; the hands, ladylike yet with closely trimmed nails, were an index to his whole appearance, which might have been summed up in the words “dapper yet strong.” His face was unusually vivid for a Chinese of his type, perhaps because he spends so much time out in the sun, particularly because of the extraordinary brilliance of his eyes, which fairly radiated during the frequent smiles that disclosed a small fortune in gold. Nothing, unless it was the rather stringy black mustache that fell untrimmed over the corners of a firm and slightly sensuous mouth, resembled in the least the oily enigmatical Chinese of our popular fiction. Though we knew him to be fifty, he could more easily have passed for thirty-five, and he spoke with what even I could recognize as the rather slovenly Shantung accent.

At a slight wave of his hand the gathering sat down at two large round tables set for a Chinese meal, the general apologizing to us foreigners for not placing us at his table, with the explanation that he had serious business to talk over with other visitors, evidently the politicians down from Peking. Politics, say those who know Wu as well as an Occidental can know a Chinese, partly bore and partly perplex him; he feels wholly at home only in military matters, but the plane to which his success as a general has raised him makes escape from political affairs impossible. They may be right, or they may never have plumbed below the surface of an unquestionably clever Oriental. The meal progressed like any informal Chinese dinner. Flocks of servants in and out of uniform brought bowl after bowl of the favorite foods of China, from which we fished with our carved ivory chop-sticks in competition with the rest of the circle. As one of the favorite sports of Japanese and Russians, as well as of the Chinese, waxed stronger and left us from the West completely outdistanced, even the staid gentlemen from rural parts, quite evidently unaccustomed to “outside barbarians,” mellowed and grew chatty, in an improvised language made up of gestures, monosyllables, and occasional appeals to the correspondents who spoke English or French. That sport is known in China as gam-bay, and consists of nothing more than tossing off at a gulp, whenever the head of the table gives the signal for a toast, the little porcelain cupful of samshu, sake, or vodka, as the case may be, which servants constantly replenish, then showing the empty inverted cup to one’s fellow-guests about the table. It may be a simple little pastime for those whose gullet has been galvanized by suitable training. But, for a simple person who has never outgrown in some matters a rather puritanical boyhood, it is apt quickly to result in embarrassment at the impossibility of proving enjoyment of hospitality in a way that will be fully understood. From time to time, of course, wet hot towels were passed to the guests, and when appetites flagged at last there came the bowls of lukewarm water in which the Chinese all too audibly rinse their mouths after eating. Our declining both these forms of ablution caused more or less wonder among the swarming servants and orderlies, according to their previous acquaintance with Westerners. Low as most prices are in China, this presumably daily hospitality to his flocks of visitors must make an impression on the never too plentiful funds of any Chinese general in these penurious days. But nothing is so dear to the Chinese heart as food, nothing rated really genuine without a feast attached; and to fail in the first rule of deportment would be a proof of waning fortune and a serious loss of “face.”

It was out in the waiting-room again that we had anything like a personal chat with the general. His tenacious fellow-countrymen having been deftly shaken off one by one, he joined us four Americans about the long, green baize table on which so many hundred gallons of tea a year are impersonally dispensed. His manner was a mingled hint of relief at having at last reduced his callers to those who certainly could not have come to buttonhole him for political preferment, of that respectful cordiality which Chinese in high places usually show toward any and all Westerners, whatever they may really feel toward the West, and of a suggestion of expansiveness apparently due to that fondness for gam-bay-ing which his friends sometimes fear may eventually be his undoing. Through his polished and cautious young interpreter he explained that he had come to us last that he might give us more time and attention, and from this auspicious beginning the conversation ran on through the fixed cycle of Chinese courtesies, we assuring him that we had come expressly to pay him our respects, he replying something to the effect that America has always been China’s greatest and most sincere friend, and so on for many rounds. But there was never a moment in which it was not evident that the general took all this buncombe and froth no more seriously than we; he was not only “democratic” in the way that has become so widely the fashion of late years, but he was plainly supplied with a reasonable fund of common sense, even though it might have Oriental trimmings. Wu Pei Fu is a man of larger background than many of those who have forced their way to the front in modern China, being what corresponds there to a bachelor of arts, as well as a military graduate with a long practical experience in military service. But the powers of evasion inborn in all Chinese do not seem to have suffered seriously from these rude contacts. Though we chatted for some time, nothing really worth recalling issued from the general’s lips, parted through it all by a toothpick, except the astonishing statement that there will be no more civil war in China and that the country will probably be unified within three years, after which he expects to be sent to the United States as an official representative. It may easily be that he considered these remarks mere after-dinner chat and expected us to take them as such. As we bumped back to our lodgings on the other side of the walled city in an asthmatic Ford which the general insisted on furnishing us, I regretted that some of us had not had the courage to ask some direct questions on the subject which just then could not but have troubled his dreams.

Briefly, banditry had about reached its pinnacle in this very province where the super-Tuchun held forth—under his very nose, so to speak. Two nights before, a large force of outlaws had entered the walled city of Honanfu, barely two miles from the great barracks housing his division, and, after warning the four thousand soldiers in town not to attempt resistance, had killed one of the principal merchants, evidently because he had refused to pay them tribute, and then had thoroughly looted his establishment and calmly returned to their rendezvous. On the very day of our visit the Protestant missionaries living and working in a great compound outside the walls had received unofficial, indirect word from Wu that they must thenceforth live within the walled town, as he could not otherwise guarantee their safety.

But these were local matters. What was threatening the general with complete loss of “face,” throughout China and even abroad, was the kidnapping of foreigners from his very region of the country. The bandits seemed to show somewhat of a preference for missionaries, perhaps because they were most available, possibly, as one of them assured his worried friends, because the Lord was purposely offering the apostles this splendid opportunity to convert the wicked. There was no robbery involved, no demand for a money ransom, no more hardships for the captives than were naturally unavoidable in the circumstances. They were allowed to communicate frankly with their friends at frequent intervals; they were made as comfortable as the circumstances of being dragged from hiding-place to hiding-place permitted, though this did not spare them the acquisition of such ills as dysentery and pneumonia during their forced wanderings. The bandits presented one demand and one only,—that Wu Pei-fu, of the Central Government, should enlist them as a part of the army and give them a section of the country to garrison, and to tax! In other words, foreigners whom duty or pleasure took into the interior of China were to be made the pawns in a local political quarrel in which they had neither part nor interest. With all the grievances that exist between different factions in the troubled republic, there would be ample opportunity for every Occidental venturing beyond the sea-coast to get an intimate acquaintance with bandits and their lairs, particularly if this clever little scheme succeeded and won imitators.

There were strong suspicions that high officers of the Honan armies, if not Wu Pei-fu himself, were winking at the bandits and their activities, either because these paid in a share of their loot or for other reasons too intricate for the simple Western mind to follow. But this impression, while justly taking the super-Tuchun to task for not adopting a vigorous policy against the bandits, for using his influence to coerce Peking while failing lamentably to rule that portion of the country within gunshot of his barracks’ door, it did not, generally for lack of personal knowledge, take due account of the territory in which the brigands were operating. In the pell-mell, tumbled mountains of western Honan they might circle in and out while a whole modern army rarely caught a glimpse of them. Bombing airplanes might be an effective argument, but Chinese armies are poorly supplied with such modern luxuries, and there was the safety of the foreign captives to be considered. In other words, the bandits held the best hand, and about all even a virtual dictator to the Central Government could do was to enter into negotiations with them as if they were a legal and responsible opposing faction.

This, at last, is precisely what Wu did. Though it was not until weeks after our visit to his headquarters, the loss of “face” involved when nearly a dozen foreigners of half as many nationalities, including women and children, had been carried off in his own province, added to slow but moderately stern and concerted measures by the legations involved, not merely toward the fictional Central Government but against Wu Pei-fu himself, forced him at last into effective action. One of the main troubles is that Wu and all his ilk, thanks largely to the supineness of foreign governments which should impress the opposite point of view upon the hit-or-miss rulers of present-day China, have on hand a bigger game, too often of a personal nature, than the rescuing of a few foreigners serving the brigands as pawns in their own little schemes. A loud and certain voice from abroad, as was proved in this case, would probably greatly reduce banditry even in Honan, the centuries-old home of outlawry, and certainly would make the carrying off of innocent foreigners as hostages a less simple and commonplace matter. Government, however, even when it is not ludicrously misinformed on the simplest phases of the situation in China, seems to be much more interested in issuing ten-dollar passports and collecting income taxes from its nationals abroad than of lending them the protection these should involve.