Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

A large town of cave-dwellers in the loess country, and the terraced fields which support it

Samson and Delilah? This blind boy, grinding grain all day long, marches round and round his stone mill with the same high lifted feet and bobbing head of the late Caruso in the opera of that name

There was a certain satisfaction in seeing Nemesis, in the form of our staggering, stuttering truck and the regular bus we sometimes passed, sometimes dropped behind, overtake these lawbreakers whom neither authority nor public opinion was able to curb. There are few automobiles in Shensi Province, probably never more than ten, and few of the throng along even its most nearly modern road are in a frame of mind to meet one without what the “movie” world calls “registering astonishment.” Most of them register a very exaggerated form of it, which not only affects all the muscles of the body but often manifests itself even in their domestic animals. With their creaking wheelbarrows and a heavy head wind to hamper their hearing, many permitted us almost to step on their heels before they showed any inclination to give us the right of way; but this selfish attitude was more than offset by the alacrity with which they did so when once their minds were made up. At times the road immediately ahead was so crowded with coolies and mule-drivers fleeing wild-eyed at cross-purposes that we were forced to pause and even to halt until the atmosphere had cleared itself sufficiently to make out the ruts again. The conventional line of action was to abandon wheelbarrow, animals, or pole-slung burdens at once and to go, quite irrespective of destination. The road being from six to ten feet above the surrounding country, barely wide enough in most places for one car to run comfortably, with sheer sides and often a deep trench on either hand, the punishment which overtook many of the trespassers almost fitted the crime.

The coolies invariably grinned broadly or laughed aloud at their own discomfiture, with that quick and genuine sense of humor which transforms their rude, comfortless lives into a kind of perpetual game and makes them, for all their many less agreeable qualities, almost lovable. The few travelers of the haughtier classes, however, strove to preserve the dignified deportment due their high standing, even in the face of this ridiculous contrivance of inhuman speed from the barbarous outside world. But they did not always succeed in upholding all the precepts of Confucius. Among scores, probably hundreds, who performed extraordinary feats of agility for our beguilement during that day, the prize should be awarded to a man we passed less than two hours out of Tungkwan. He was unusually well dressed, as if of the wealthier merchant class, and was also bound westward, seated high above his stout mule on the pile of bedding and baggage in cloth saddle-bags which the well-to-do Chinese long-distance traveler carries between himself and his saddle. The mule under him was jogging comfortably along on the edge of his own side of the road—which in most of China is the left—though not on his own road, leaving us room to pass without more than the hazard to which the brink-loving chauffeur habitually put us. The animal showed every evidence of self-control and the ability to handle the situation without mishap, but he reckoned without his merely human master. We were perhaps ten yards behind them when the man’s ears and brain coördinated and he looked around. His first impulse was evidently to snatch the reins and attempt to better the already perfect behavior of his mount, but the un-Confucian speed with which we were lessening the already slight distance between us confirmed him in the impression that it would be safer to dismount with all seemly haste and leave the animal to its own fate. Without losing an iota of his poise or dignity, or even his position for that matter, the haughty gentleman calmly slipped off his high seat on the ostensibly safe side, still in the right-angled attitude of a sitting person—and admirably maintained that pose until he disappeared, seat first, into a cross between a swamp and a lake which unfortunately bordered the road at that particular place. The chauffeur and I had the exclusive benefit of this portion of the performance; the rest was reserved for those bouncing on our baggage in the truck itself. When the major first became aware of the existence of the haughty trespasser, it was in the form of a mere head, topped by a dripping Chinese skull-cap, protruding from the body of water alongside, and his last view of him as he receded into the horizon was of a water-gushing figure clinging to the edge of the road and shaking his open hand after the disappearing truck in the gesture which the Chinese substitute for shaking the fist, while the mule stood just where he had been abandoned, patiently awaiting the good will of his temperamental master.

With the end of October it had turned distinctly colder, which was fortunate; for the heat of Honan would have made the exertions often required of us much less of a pastime than they were. Though it had been smilingly new when it reached the province three months before, our poor old truck resembled some maltreated, ill fed donkey which even its heartless Chinese owner must soon turn out to die, yet which faithfully toiled on to the very best of its ability. So long as it hobbled along beneath him, the alleged chauffeur had not a worry in the world; but whenever the slightest hill or sand a bit deeper than usual brought us to a halt he was as helpless as a Hottentot with an airplane. Having roared the engine almost out from under its hood, as the only antidote suggesting itself to him, he sat supinely back in his seat, at the end of his resources, and waited for some one else to do something about it. Luckily there are always plenty of coolies within call on any important route in China; but their natural timidity increased in the presence of the strange snorting monster that most of them had only seen hastily from a distance, and it required the force of example to get them to approach and exert themselves. Thus it came about that, though we had paid rather generously for the transporting of our expedition from the boundary to the capital of the province, we furnished the motive-power ourselves for a considerable fraction of the journey.

For one short distance there were a few rocks and trees; but we were soon in swirling loess again, dust so thick that it covered our faces as with a white mask. Now and again we passed a high-walled town, usually through the inevitable extramural suburb, a long line of ramshackle mud huts, with men crowded together under the thatch awnings, eating all manner of strange and unsavory-looking native dishes. Even in the rare cases when we entered the city itself there was nothing much more imposing. All morning long Hwa-shan, second only to Tai-shan among the five sacred mountains of China, walled off the southern horizon with its series of jagged ranges, shaped not unlike a mammoth sleeping elephant, their sunless northern slopes like a great perpendicular wall of beautiful blue-gray color, topped by a wonderfully fantastic sky-line. About 2200 B.C. an early emperor of what was China in those days, with this region as a nucleus, used to go to Hwa-shan to offer sacrifices and to give audiences to his subjects, and the range has been sacred in Chinese eyes ever since.

One might have fancied that a world war was on again, so often were we held up by endless east-bound trains of soldiers, most of them lounging in straw-roofed carts of two wheels, red banners with white characters flying. It was noticeable that no one but the soldiers had horses, of which most of China has been drained by her swarming, autonomous militarists. Companies, even battalions, were busily drilling here and there; two or three times we passed large military camps in tents of wigwam shape, with a modernity about them that looked incongruous against such backgrounds as a great medieval, anachronistic city wall blackened by the centuries. Twice we passed mule-carts laboring east or westward with the mails; all day long a distorted line of telegraph-poles bearing a sagging wire or two stretched haphazard into the distance.

The country grew a bit more rolling, with even less suggestion of loess, as we neared Sian-fu. For miles the way was lined with countless graves, ranging from dilapidated little cones of mud to immense mounds. Bygone glories lay all over the landscape, monument upon turtle-borne monument, so much more important from the Chinese point of view than passable roads. At length the great east gate of Shensi’s capital rose above the horizon, like some huge isolated apartment-house, and just as the last daylight of October flickered out we roared our jerky way up its broad main street to our destination.

To say that I was disappointed in Sian-fu would be somewhat overstating the case. But as nearly as I can recall the preconceived picture, always so swiftly melting away in the glaring sunshine of reality, I expected something more “wild and woolly,” something a bit less like an abridged edition of Peking. Surely the city that was for centuries the chief Manchu stronghold of the west, almost their second capital, which had welcomed the cantankerous old dowager fleeing before the justifiable wrath of the Western world, which had seen such cruel and unnecessary bloodshed during the birth of the republic, which had so often been the outpost on the edge of a great Mohammedan rebellion, might at least have had some faint thrill, some little hint of hidden danger, left to cheer up the jaded wanderer. Instead, there was the same flat, placid city partly within and partly without a mighty stone wall, swarming with the harmless pullulations of petty traders, cheerfully enduring all the time-honored discomforts of China, quite like those which lie scattered like unto the sands of the sea in number over all the vast land that so long gave Peking its undivided allegiance.