All manner of aids to the man behind the wheelbarrow are used in his long journey in bringing wheat to market, some of them not very economical
The western gate of Sian-fu, through which we continued our journey to Kansu
A “Hwei-Hwei,” or Chinese Mohammedan, keeper of an outdoor restaurant
The privacy of the military governor—and therefore usually the dictator—of a Chinese province must indeed be slight. When he has guests, swarms of soldiers and servants crowd every doorway and fill every window with staring faces, if, indeed, they do not flock into the room itself. Every joke, every slightest scrap of information picked up from the conversation is instantly, and often more or less audibly, passed out into the yard and relayed to the last coolie within the compound. Most Tuchuns have the reputation of double-dealing to feather their own nests; how on earth they ever succeed in privately arranging any of their little deals is a mystery, for there must surely always be some underling about to listen to the conversation. This is not eavesdropping but the frank presence of servants and the like, even of mere strangers struck with curiosity, in situations where the worst bred ignoramus in the Western world would never dream of intruding; and as the Chinese desire for privacy is as slight as their sense of it, such intrusions are not only seldom rebuked but probably in many cases not even noticed. Even a private home is little more respected than a public office. When the Tuchun came to lunch with us his soldiers poured into the house of our host, crowding the doorway of dining-room or parlor and, as we ate or chatted, fingering their Lugers, unconsciously perhaps, but as if they were expecting us at any moment to attempt the assassination of their chief.
Shensi’s ruler at the time of our visit had been civil governor of the province under the “Christian General.” Upon his own accession to chief power he retained, and apparently honestly attempted to keep up, many of the reforms and policies of his predecessor, though he made no profession of Christianity. Feng, for instance, had abolished the “red light” district and actually driven the inmates out of the province, a very unusual and to most of the population an incomprehensible action. Several times the Sian-fu chief of police had petitioned the new Tuchun to allow these places to be reëstablished, because they brought large increases to the provincial treasury—to say nothing, of course, of the liberal “squeeze” to all officials concerned. His refusal was still apparently genuine at the time of our visit. But pity the poor officials of present-day China who wish to be honest and progressive, and perhaps even moral in the Western sense; a Tuchun must at least have money to pay his troops, must he not? When Feng took over the province of Shensi it had been for some time under the rule of a former bandit, who had followed an honored precedent in collecting all land and other possible taxes for years in advance. This left the new Tuchun the rather scanty likin taxes and a few minor sources of income on which to run his government and keep his troops up to their unusually high efficiency. It could not be done; and after he had appealed to the Christian missionaries to show him any possible means to avoid resorting to that extreme, Feng fell back upon the lucrative tax on opium exported from his province or passing through from Kansu beyond, however illegal such traffic is and whatever his personal feelings toward it were. A mere local detail this; but it is symbolical of hundreds of problems facing those who really wish to work for the future betterment of China, and it is not difficult to guess what happens in the case of the many more weak or indifferent men who have attained to some degree of power, with still no vision beyond the universal corruption which sank its roots deep into Chinese society in the old imperial days.
CHAPTER XXI
ONWARD THROUGH SHENSI
Our good British host of Sian-fu conceived the nefarious project of sending us on to Lanchow in “Peking carts”; but the few unavoidable churnings in those of the Tuchun had firmly convinced us that anything else was preferable. Anything else boiled down to a single choice,—the transformation of pack-mules in the postal service into riding-animals by the simple expedient of disguising them as such with the American army saddles and bridles we had brought with us. For militarists had drained the provinces of horses; good riding-mules could be bought, if at all, only for a fortune, and could not be hired for so long and hazardous a journey under any circumstances. We took two carts also, it is true, a “large” and a “small” one in Chinese parlance, though the difference in size was not great and the three mules of the one hardly better than the two of the other. But these were for the baggage and our two servants.
An inventory of the whole expedition may be mildly of interest, not so much for the information of other travelers as to show that the most modest of foreigners can scarcely escape a princely retinue when they travel in the interior of China. The “large” cart exacted forty-four dollars; the small one twenty-seven dollars; each pack-mule sixteen dollars, with a dollar “tea-money” at the end (specified in the contract). This included a driver for each cart, a mafu, or groom, on foot to attend to the riding-animals—for most of the way, it turned out, we had two of them—all self-sustaining, except their mere lodging at inns and, of course, a certain inevitable “squeeze” through understandings with innkeepers. For a journey of fifteen hundred li, or four hundred and fifty miles, the sum total did not seem excessive, particularly as it was merely in “Mex” and but little more than half what it would have been in American currency. The trip, we learned, was usually divided into eighteen stages and could scarcely be made with such an outfit in less than sixteen days. We took the precaution of promising a dollar a day cumshaw to each of the cart-drivers for every day they bettered the ordinary schedule.