The Awakening of China

by W. A. P. Martin

He adds in a tone of exultation:

"The province of Hupei was accordingly exempted
From the payment of an indemnity tax,
And allowed to spend the amount thus saved
In the erection of schoolhouses."

In these lines there is not much poetry; but the fact which they commemorate adds one more wreath to a brow already crowned with many laurels, showing how much the viceroy's heart was set on the education of his people.

In the interest of the educational movement, I was called to Chang's assistance in 1902. The Imperial University was destroyed in the Boxer War, and, seeing no prospect of its reëstablishment I was on the way to my home in America when, on reaching Vancouver, I found a telegram from Viceroy Chang, asking me to be president of a university which he proposed to open, and to instruct his junior officials in international law. I engaged for three years; and I now look back on my recent campaign in Central China as one of the most interesting passages in a life of over half a century in the Far East.

Besides instructing his mandarins in the law of nations, I had to give them some notion of geography and history, the two coördinates of time and place, without which they might, like some of their writers, mistake Rhode Island for the Island of Rhodes, and Rome, New York, for the City of the Seven Hills. A book on the Intercourse of Nations and a translation of Dudley Field's "International Code," remain as tangible results of those lectures. But the university failed to materialise.

Within a month after my arrival the viceroy was ordered to remove to Nanking to take up a post rendered vacant by the death of his eminent colleague, Liu. Calling at my house on the eve of embarking he said, "I asked you to come here to be president of a university for two provinces. If you will go with me to Nanking, I will make you president of a university for five provinces," meaning that he would combine the educational interests of the two viceroyalties, and showing how the university scheme had expanded in his fertile brain.

Before he had been a month at that higher post he learned to his intense disappointment that he was only to hold the place for another appointee. After nearly a year at Nanking, he was summoned to Peking, where he spent another year in complete uncertainty as to his future destination. In the meantime the university existed only on paper. In justice to the viceroy I ought to say that nothing could exceed the courtesy and punctuality with which he discharged his obligations to me. The despatch which once a month brought me my stipend was always addressed to me as president of the Wuchang University, though as a matter of fact I might as well have been styled president of the University of Weissnichtwo. In one point he went beyond his agreement, viz., in giving me free of charge a furnished house of two stories, with ten rooms and a garden. It was on the bank of the "Great River" with the picturesque hills of Hanyang nearly opposite, a site which I preferred to any other in the city. I there enjoyed the purest air with a minimum of inconvenience from narrow, dirty streets. To these exceptional advantages it is doubtless due that my health held out, notwithstanding the heat of the climate, which, the locality being far inland and in lat. 30° 30', was that of a fiery furnace. On the night of the autumnal equinox, my first in Wuchang, the mercury stood in my bedroom at 102°. I was the guest of the Rev. Arnold Foster of the London Missionary Society, whose hospitality was warm in more ways than one.

The viceroy returned from Peking, broken in health; the little strength he had left was given to military preparation for the contingencies of the Russo-Japanese War; and his university was consigned to the limbo of forgotten dreams.

Viceroy Chang has been derided, not quite justly, as possessing a superabundance of initiative along with a rather scant measure of finality, taking up and throwing down his new schemes as a child does its playthings. In these enterprises the paucity of results was due to the shortcomings of the agents to whom he entrusted their management. The same reproach and the same apology might be made for the Empress Dowager who, like the Roman Sybil, committed her progressive decrees to the mercy of the winds without seeming to care what became of them.

Next after the education of his people the development of their material resources has been with Chang a leading object. To this end he has opened cotton-mills, silk-filatures, glass-works and iron-works, all on an extensive scale, with foreign machinery and foreign experts. For miles outside of the gates of Wuchang the banks of the river are lined with these vast establishments. Do they not announce more clearly than the batteries which command the waterway the coming of a new China? Some of them he has kept going at an annual loss. The cotton-mill, for example, was standing idle when I arrived, because in the hands of his mandarins he could not make it pay expenses. A Canton merchant leased it on easy terms, and made it such a conspicuous success that he is now growing rich. It is an axiom in China that no manufacturing or mercantile enterprise can be profitably conducted by a deputation of mandarins.