Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

One stepped out of the big post-office compound where most English-speaking foreigners find hospitality, upon that surprisingly broad main street, to find it paved with something that has long since lost the smoothness essential to comfortable rickshaw riding, and lined for much of its length with houses unusual in northern China, being of two stories. Along this one may come upon wood-turners quite like those of Damascus in their methods—a little shallow, frontless shop, a kind of Indian bow with a loose string for lathe, a sometimes toe-supported chisel. Perhaps a householder would find more interesting the long rows of wheelbarrows, filled with huge chunks of that splendid anthracite so abundant and so cheap in northwestern China, backed up against the curb and patiently awaiting purchasers. But at the big bell-tower marking the center of the city this broad street contracts to squeeze its way through the resounding, dungeon-like arch, and never again regains its lost breath. Here the paving is of big flagstones, worn so convex that riding is not merely uncomfortable but well nigh impossible, except to those who are inured by generations of such experiences, or to whom the loss of “face” would be fatal. Others, at least new-comers, may rather welcome this unspoken invitation to dismount and stroll. For though there may be nothing in it not to be seen in a hundred other places in China, “sights” are as compact in this busiest street of Sian-fu as if they had purposely been gathered together here as into a museum.

This main thoroughfare, and the one crossing it at right angles beneath the bell-tower, cut the Shensi capital into its definite quarters. The one on the right hand, as one comes in from the east, is, or rather was, the Manchu city, given over now largely to great open spaces; for here hundreds of the then ruling class jumped into wells or otherwise violently did away with themselves, or were violently done away with, to a number popularly estimated at more than five thousand, when China last threw off an alien yoke and announced itself a republic. Mere mud walls, with the brick or stone facings gone to serve in some other capacity, mark most of the compounds of what were perhaps for centuries Manchu palaces. Of the palaces themselves there are few traces; dust and bare earth are much more in evidence, though trees have survived to an extent almost suggestive of Peking. Beyond this, filling the northwest quarter, is the Mohammedan section, much more crowded and with few open spaces—with none, perhaps, except they be public or private courtyards. There are towns in western China where Moslems must live outside the walls; but Sian-fu has been more charitable toward her unabsorbable minority, and even during the great rebellion they retained their intramural quarter, suffering little more than constant surveillance, and no doubt occasional reviling. Whether or not they would be driven back into it again if the worshipers of Allah chose to live in some other part of town matters not, for custom is as strong a bond with them as with their fellow-Chinese, and whatever is Moslem about Sian-fu will be found in this quarter, at least when bedtime comes. Here are all the mosques; here are women who have scarcely stepped outside their compounds in a generation, not even with covered faces; from here set forth each morning the water-carriers, the muleteers, the common porters who profess the faith of Medina. Outwardly the stroller through this quarter may find it scarcely at all different from that Chinese half of the city which lies to the south of its main thoroughfare. He may note that the skullcaps of men and boys are more likely to be white than black, that he sees only the most poverty-stricken class of women, and not many of those, that many of the passers-by have liquid black eyes and a very trifle more self-assertion, a slightly less lamb-like expression than the common run of Chinese. Possibly it will occur to him, too, that more of the little mutton-shop restaurants wide-opening on the pulsating main street are on the north side of it, and that the men who tend and patronize them also favor white skullcaps and have something intangibly redolent of the Near East in features and manners. But his eye is likely to be caught by more conspicuous things along the stone-hard thoroughfare,—big whitish loaves of bread nearly two feet in diameter and only two or three inches thick, the splashes of color of myriad heaps of ripe persimmons, an occasional woman with natural feet, relics not of Mohammedan but of Manchu custom. There live half a million people within the city walls and as many more in the environs, say unofficial guessers, and about one in ten of these are Moslems and a bare two thousand Manchus, the latter now mainly servants and recognizable to the others by their Peking dialect and the somewhat different dress of the women.

I picked up a man of standing in the Moslem faith one morning and strolled out to the chief mosque. Outwardly there was nothing to distinguish it from any Chinese compound, enclosing perhaps a temple, to judge by the typical tile roofs and the tree-tops rising above it. Indeed, the courtyard itself, beautiful with its old trees and buildings, filled with the twitter of birds, which seemed to make it a kind of sanctuary, restful and peace-loving in atmosphere, would not easily have been recognized as containing anything but the usual promiscuous mixture of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs. There were the same wooden tablets bearing two or three big Chinese characters leaning out from under the eaves; the same curious little figures adorned the upturned gables; there had been a genuinely Chinese indifference about cleaning up after the birds. But closer inspection brought out the underlying Mohammedanism. Not far from the entrance stood a big stone tablet, purely Chinese in form, even to the top-heavy dragon carvings; but the text that covered it was not Chinese but Arabic. Here and there were other stone-cut bits of that same tongue; “Yalabi” the not inhospitable group that had gathered about me called it, though one or two murmured something sounding like “Toorkee.” The beautiful little three-story tower of pillar-borne roofs turned out to be the minaret from which a Chinese muezzin singsongs the faithful to prayer. Certainly it was leaving Chinese custom behind to be required, however courteously, to leave my shoes at the door of the mosque itself before I could step through the cloth-hung opening of a building which up to that moment might have been anywhere in China. But inside we had at last left China entirely behind. Not a suggestion was to be seen of those myriad fantastic and demoniacal figures which clutter up the interior of Chinese temples; the Koran’s prohibition of graven images had been obeyed to the letter, and the final sanctuary itself, where the men of Sian-fu’s northwest quarter gather each Friday to turn their faces westward toward Mecca and pray, was as severely beautiful in its Arabic style as if it had been directly copied from the Alhambra.

The Islamites of China, or at least of Sian-fu, seem to have lost that fierce inhospitality toward the unbeliever which makes it impossible for those not of the faith even to enter many a famous mosque farther west. Centuries of dwelling among them has given even the intolerant Mussulmans much of the tolerance, or at least of the easy-going, almost indifferent attitude, toward their religious paraphernalia, which is so characteristic of the Chinese. There was no objection, so long as I removed my shoes, to my wandering at will in every part of the mosque, to stepping within the niche in the west wall which takes on much of the sanctity of Mecca, not even to my photographing it. The Chinese Moslems, indeed, seem never to have heard of the Prophet’s implied injunction against permitting one’s likeness to be transferred to paper; any refusal to stand before my kodak among the group that trailed me about the compound was probably due to mere Chinese superstitions, coupled with that dread of giving their fellow-men the faintest opening for ridicule which is one of the strongest traits in the Chinese character. For these fellows were essentially Chinese, for all their religion, their swarthier complexions and more Semitic noses; even the few among them whose features would not have been conspicuous in a throng of Turks or Arabs had all the little mannerisms, and to all appearances the identical point of view, except in their alien faith, of their fellow-countrymen.

Though there is no intermarriage between the Chinese Mohammedans and their neighbors, the blood that runs in their veins is largely the same. When the militant faith of Islam swept in upon China from the west, at the time when it was spreading in all directions, and was halted in our own only by the activity of Charles Martel in France, the surest way of escaping the sword was to embrace the new faith; and no one moves more quickly under the inspiration of fear than the Chinese. Then, too, the conquerors needed wives, or at least women, and took them from among the conquered. Perhaps its greatest gains were during the inflow of trade following the victories of Kublai Khan. For a long time it was, and probably still is, the custom to adopt Chinese children into Mohammedan homes. Thus the Turkish or Arabic features of the invaders have been greatly modified, and even the few who have a trace of these left seem to be greatly outnumbered by the purely Chinese descendants of those who embraced the faith under compulsion, so that even within a mosque compound it is often only by inference, or the catching of some slight detail of custom or costume, that the stranger can recognize a “Hwei-Hwei.” Foreigners resident where the Mohammedans are numerous claim to be able to tell one at sight, if only by a faintly more stiff-necked attitude toward the rest of the world, a drawing of the line, beyond which he refuses to be imposed upon, just a trifle closer to his own rights than do his pacific Chinese fellows. Step into a temple at any time, and you will receive nothing but profound courtesies from the Chinese, however unwelcome you may be at that moment, say these experienced Westerners; enter a mosque when a service is in progress, however, and while the customary outward politenesses may not be lacking, the atmosphere will be charged with something that says as distinctly as a placard, “This is not the time to call.” I had a little hint of this myself just before taking my departure. A high dignitary, what we might call a bishop, wearing a strange blue costume and supported as he tottered along by two lesser officials, issued from an inner court on his way to perform some ceremony in a private family. My request to photograph him was declined, not discourteously, but very definitely and very promptly, as if, being a hadji who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, he was well aware of the ban which the Prophet put on the making of likenesses, whatever might be the general ignorance of it about him; and something gave me the feeling that if I had attempted to act contrary to his wishes the smiling group of his coreligionists about me would have found some unviolent Chinese way of preventing me.

The non-believers among whom they live have, of course, other terms than “Hwei-Hwei” for the Moslem minority, some of them so far from complimentary as to be out of usage in any but the lowest society. One of the less unkindly ones is “Pu-chih-jew-roe-ren,” the don’t-eat-meat people. The Mohammedans have a name or two for themselves and their religion so respectful and self-complacent that their fellows decline to use them, so that the middle ground of “Hwei-Hwei” is the one on which the two sections of the community commonly meet. This term means something roughly corresponding to “the associated people,” the single character for hwei meaning, approximately, “association.” The Y. M. C. A. which functioned—under a boyhood friend of the major, from Maine, it turned out—in the quarter of Sian-fu opposite to that of the mosques was known as the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” which is quite the same as our own abbreviation, except that our third letter, with all that it stands for, is left out. This does not of course mean that the religious element is lacking in the organization as it exists in Sian-fu—quite the contrary seemed to be the case; but to stroll into the purely Chinese compound, with its Chinese buildings, its board placards covered with only Chinese characters, was also not to realize at once that one had entered the precincts of another alien religion. The “Hwei-Hwei” establishments looked outwardly pure Chinese partly because of the fear of persecution in the past; the “Ching-Nien-Hwei,” I believe I am safe in saying, did so mainly because it had been forced to house itself in such quarters as it found attainable.

It would, by the way, be unfair to the score of men and women, a few of them our fellow-countrymen, who are giving their best efforts to educational, medical, and, not disproportionately, I trust, to denominational matters in the several Christian missions scattered in and about the Shensi capital, not to make mention of them, even though they may not vie, in the minds of those of us from the West, in picturesqueness and local color with the mutton-sellers in the market-place. They live unmolested, even befriended now by most of the rank and file and by nearly all the higher officials, and in a comfort befitting modest human beings; but the time is not so far distant as to be by any means forgotten when they came nearly all to being martyrs to their cause. The man who stood all night to his neck in a pond, holding his baby girl in his arms while the rest of his family was murdered by the mob that circled for hours around him, is still there at his post, with a new family to certify that he still has faith in those to whom he has chosen to give his life’s work. Lest neither side forget entirely, however, there is a modern brick Memorial School in the western suburbs, with its bronze tablet in memory of the victims,—one mother, one young man, and six children ranging from eight to fifteen. It was no antiforeign feeling, in the accepted use of that phrase, which gave the missionaries of Sian-fu their most dreadful experience; that is, they were not attacked either as missionaries or as Westerners. The revolution that was to bring the republic had come; the hated Manchus were fair prey at last; and while some of the rougher element no doubt took full advantage of their sudden brief opportunity, there was honestly no distinction in the minds of the uneducated masses between Manchus and any other “outside-country people.”

The temple of Confucius out near the south wall was as peaceful, as soothing a spot as could have been come upon within sound of human voices, with that aloofness from the world so befitting the philosophy of the great sage. But here, too, there was something beneath the surface not inherent in the ancient architecture or the rook-encircled tree-tops. A modern touch had been introduced; one suspected the hand, or at least the influence, of Feng Yü Hsiang, the “Christian General,” who had only lately ceased to be Tuchun of Shensi to become that of Honan. Feng’s penchant for anything, ancient or ultra-modern, which will bring the results he seeks is well known. The Confucian Hall had several walls covered with very up-to-date placards in colors, ranging all the way from illustrations of the awful depredations of the fly—it was hard to imagine the Chinese worrying about a little thing like that—to the graphically pictured assassination of Cæsar and such scenes as the Nativity; for Confucius, of course, has nothing of the intolerance conspicuous in Christianity or Mohammedanism. In another section there were portraits of many famous foreigners, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin being the only Americans among some forty. There is surely nothing reprehensible, though something more than incongruous, in trying to make Confucius a modern teacher and his temple a place of propaganda against the merely physical ills.

So near the temple of Confucius as to be dully audible from it all day long is the famous “Forest of Monuments.” Centuries ago, you will remember, a Chinese emperor ordered all the classical books to be burned. In order that such a catastrophe should never be possible again, all the important texts in those classics, gathered together from odd volumes that had escaped the flames, or from the memories of old scholars, were carved on scores of stone monuments—hundreds, I believe one might safely say, after wandering through the several long temple-sheds or shed-temples in which they stand close together in long rows. There all day long, from the end of the New Year’s debauch of loafing until the New Year comes around again, stand dozens of men taking rubbings of the famous texts. The head-high monuments are covered over with big sheets of what is almost tissue-paper, and coolies and boys, perhaps not one among whom can read a single character of the many thousands about them, pound and pound with wooden mallets until copies, covered with a kind of lamp-black except where the indented characters have left them white, are ready to be added to the stock of shopkeepers near the entrance to the grounds. The consumption of these flimsy facsimiles throughout the Far East is evidently enormous, for the dullish rap-a-rap of many mallets is seldom if ever silent from sun to sun.

Off by itself in a conspicuous spot stands the Nestorian Tablet, most famous of them all, at least to those from the Western world. For on it is carved the story of the first coming of Christianity to China, long before even the Jesuits included that land in their field of operations. To the ignorant Occidental eye it looks quite like any other turtle-borne stone carved with upright rows of intricate characters, except that above them there is cut a well defined Greek cross. The Nestorian Tablet, I believe, was not considered much of a find when it was first dug up out of a field in the neighborhood of Sian-fu; but the fame of that jet-black slab has since grown so great that the not over-distinct characters are likely to become even less so with the constant taking of rubbings.