Across China on Foot Part 14

_Stages to the capital_. _Universality of reform in China_. _Political, moral, social and spiritual contrast of Yun-nan with other parts of the Empire_. _Inconsistencies of celestial life_. _Author's start for Burma_. _The caravan_. _To Che-chi_. _Dogs fighting over human bones_.

_Lai-t'eo-p'o: highest point traversed on overland journey_. _Snow and hail storms at ten thousand feet_. _Desolation and poverty_. _Brutal husband_. _Horse saves author from destruction_. _The one hundred li to Kongshan_. _Wild, rugged moorland and mournful mountains_. _Wretchedness of the people_. _Night travel in Western China_. _Author knocks a man down_. _Late arrival and its vexations_. _Horrible inn accommodation_.

_End of the Yun-nan Plateau_. _Appreciable rise in temperature_.

_Entertaining a band of inelegant infidels_. _European contention for superiority, and the Chinese point of view_. _Insoluble conundrums of "John's" national character_. _The Yun-nan railway_. _Current ideas in Yun-nan regarding foreigners_. _Discourteous fu-song and his escapades_.

_Fright of ill-clad urchin_. _Scene at Yang-lin_. _Arrival at the capital_.

No exaggeration is it to say that the eyes of the world are upon China.

It is equally safe to say that, whilst all is open and may be seen, but little is understood.

In the Far Eastern and European press so much is heard of the awakening of China that one is apt really to believe that the whole Empire, from its Dan to Beersheba, is boiling for reform. But it may be that the husk is taken from the kernel. The husk comprises the treaty ports and some of the capital cities of the provinces; the kernel is that vast sleepy interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing conditions so much out of his focus should readily be granted.

From Shanghai, up past Hankow, on to Ichang, through the Gorges to Chung-king, is a trip likely to strike optimism in the breast of the most skeptical foreigner. But after he has lived for a couple of years in an interior city as I have done, with its antiquated legislation, its superst.i.tion and idolatry, its infanticide, its girl suicides, its public corruption and moral degradation, rubbing shoulders continually at close quarters with the inhabitants, and himself living in the main a Chinese life, our optimist may alter his opinions, and stand in wonder at the extraordinary differences in the most ordinary details of life at the ports on the China coast and the Interior, and of the gross inconsistencies in the Chinese mind and character. If in addition he has stayed a few days away from a city in which the foreigners were shut up inside the city walls because the roaring mob of rebels outside were asking for their heads, and he has had to abandon part of his overland trip because of the fear that his own head might have been chopped off _en route_, he may increase his wonder to doubt. The aspect here in Yun-nan--politically, morally, socially, spiritually--is that of another kingdom, another world. Conditions seem, for the most part, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. And in his new environment, which may be a replica of twenty centuries ago, the dream he dreamed is now dispelled. "China," he says, "is _not_ awaking; she barely moves, she is still under the torpor of the ages." And yet again, in the capital and a few of the larger cities, under your very eyes there goes on a reform which seems to be the most sweeping reform Asia has yet known.

Such are the inconsistencies, seemingly unchangeable, irreconcilable in conception or in fact; a truthful portrayal of them tends to render the writer a most inconsistent being in the eyes of his reader.

No one was ever sped on his way through China with more goodwill than was the writer when he left Tong-ch'uan-fu; but the above thoughts were then in his mind.

Long before January 3rd, 1910, the whole town knew that I was going to Mien Dien (Burma). Confessedly with a sad heart--for I carried with me memories of kindnesses such as I had never known before--I led my nervous pony, Rusty, out through the Dung Men (the East Gate), with twenty enthusiastic scholars and a few grown-ups forming a turbulent rear. As I strode onwards the little group of excited younkers watched me disappear out of sight on my way to the capital by the following route--the second time of trying:--

Length of Height stage above sea 1st day--Che-chi 90 li. 7,800 ft.

2nd day--Lai-t'eo-p'o 90 li. 8,500 ft.

3rd day--Kongshan 100 li. 6,700 ft.

4th day--Yang-kai 85 li. 7,200 ft.

5th day--Ch'anff-o'o 95 li 6,000 ft.

6th day--The Capital 70 li 6,400 ft.

My caravan consisted of two coolies: one carried my bedding and a small basket of luxuries in case of emergency, the other a couple of boxes with absolute necessities (including the journal of the trip). In addition, there accompanied me a man who carried my camera, and whose primary business it was to guard my interests and my money--my general factotum and confidential agent--and by an inverse operation enrich himself as he could, and thereby maintain relations of warm mutual esteem. They received thirty-two tael cents per man per diem, and for the stopping days on the road one hundred cash. None of them, of course, could speak a word of English.

The ninety li to Che-chi was mostly along narrow paths by the sides of river-beds, the intermediate plains having upturned acres waiting for the spring. At Ta-chiao (7,500 feet), where I stayed for my first alfresco meal at midday, the man--a tall, gaunt, ugly fellow, pockmarked and vile of face--told us he was a traveler, and that he had been to Shanghai. This I knew to be a barefaced lie. He voluntarily explained to the visitors, gathered to see the barbarian feed, what condensed milk was for, but he went wide of the mark when he announced that my pony,[Z]

hog-maned and dock-tailed (but Chinese still), was an American, as he said I was. A young mother near by, suffering from acute eye inflammation, was lying in a smellful gutter on a felt mat, two pigs on one side and a naked boy of eight or so on the other, whilst she heaped upon the head of the innocent babe she was suckling curses most horribly blood-curdling. Dogs--the universal scavengers of the awakening interior, to which merest allusion is barred by one's Western sense of decency--just outside Che-chi, where I stayed the night, had recently devoured the corpse of a little child. Its clothing was strewn in my path, together with the piece of fibre matting in which it had been wrapped, and the dogs were then fighting over the bones.

To Lai-t'eo-p'o was a day that men might call a "killer."

It is a dirty little place with a dirty little street, lying at the foot of a mountain known throughout Western China as one of the wildest of Nature's corners, nearly ten thousand feet high, a terrific climb under best conditions. A clear half-moon, and stars of a silvery twinkle, looked pityingly upon me as I started at 3 a.m., ignorant of the dangerously narrow defile leading along cliffs high up from the Yili Ho.

In the dark, cautiously I groped along. Not without a painful emotion of impending danger, as I watched the stellular reflections dancing in the rushing river, did I wander on in the wake of a group of pack-ponies, and took my turn in being a.s.sisted over the broken chasms by the muleteers. Two fellows got down below and practically lifted the tiny animals over the pa.s.ses where they could not keep their footing.

Gradually I saw the nightlike shadows flee away, and with the dawn came signs of heavy weather.

Snow came cold and sudden. As we slowly and toilsomely ascended, the velocity of the wind fiercely increased; down the mountain-side, at a hundred miles an hour, came clouds of blinding, flinty dust, making the blood run from one's lips and cheeks as he plodded on against great odds. With the biting wind, howling and hissing in the winding ravines and snow-swept hollows, headway was difficult. Often was I raised from my feet: helplessly I clung to the earth for safety, and pulled at withered gra.s.s to keep my footing. The ponies, patient little brutes, with one hundred and fifty pounds strapped to their backs, came near to giving up the ghost, being swayed hopelessly to and fro in the fury. For hours we thus toiled up pathways seemingly fitter for goats than men, where leafless trees were bending dest.i.tute of life and helpless towards the valley, as the keen wind went sighing, moaning, wailing through their bare boughs and budless twigs.

Such a gale, wilder than the devil's pa.s.sion, I have not known even on the North Atlantic in February.

At times during the day progression in the deepening snow seemed quite impossible, and my two men, worn and weary, bearing the burden of an excessively fatiguing day, well-nigh threw up the sponge, vowing that they wished they had not taken on the job.

But the scenery later in the day, though monotonously so, was grand. The earth was literally the color of deep-red blood, the crimson paths intertwining the darker landscape bore to one's imagination a vision of some b.l.o.o.d.y battle--veritable rivers of human blood. To cheer the traveler in his desolation, the sun struggled vainly to pierce with its genial rays through the heavy, angry clouds rolling lazily upwards from the black valleys, and enveloping the earth in a deep infinity of severest gloom. The cold was damp. In the small hemmed-in hollows, whereto our pathway led, the icy dew clung to one's hair and beard. From little brown cottages, with poor thatched roofs letting in the light, and with walls and woodwork long since uniformly rotten, men and women emerged, rubbing their eyes and b.u.t.toning up their garments, looking wistfully for the hidden sun.

At Shao-p'ai (8,100 feet) a brute of a fellow was administering cruellest chastis.e.m.e.nt to his disobedient yoke-fellow, who took her scourging in good part. I pa.s.sed along as fast as I could to the ascent over which a road led in and around the mountain with alarming steepness, a road which at home would never be negotiated on foot or on horseback, but which here forms part of the main trade route. From the extreme summit one dropped abruptly into a protecting gorge, where falling cascades, sparkling like crystal showers in the feeble sunlight occasionally breaking through, danced playfully over the smooth-worn, slippery rocks; a stream foamed noisily over the loose stones, and leapt in rushing rapids where the earth had given way; there was no gra.s.s, no scenery, no life, and in the sudden turnings the hurricane roared with heavenly anger through the long deep chasms, over the twelve-inch river-beds at the foot.

At Lai-t'eo-p'o accommodation at night was fairly good. Men laughed hilariously at me when I raved at some carpenters to desist their clumsy hammering three feet above my head. Hundreds of dogs yelped unceasingly at the moon, and with the usual rows of the men in mutual invitation to "Come and wash your feet," or "Ching fan, ching fan," the draughts, the creaks and cracks, the unintermitting din, and so much else, one was not sorry to rise again with the lark and push onwards in the cold.

Down below this horrid town there is a plain; in this plain there is a hole fifty feet deep, and had my pony, which I was leading, not pulled me away from falling thereinto, my story would not now be telling.

To Kongshan (6,700 feet), past Yei-chu-t'ang (8,100 feet) and Hsiao-lang-t'ang (7,275 feet), one hundred li away, was a journey through country considerably more interesting, especially towards the end of the day, a peculiar combination of wooded slope and rough, rock-worn pathways.

Hsiao-lang-t'ang, twenty-five li from the end of the stage, overlooks a wide expanse of barren, uninviting moorland. Deep, jagged gullies break the uneven rolling of the mountains; dark, weird caverns of terrible immensity yawn hungrily from the surface of weariest desolation, ever widening with each turn. Mist hid the ugliest spots high up among the peaks, whose white summits, peeping sullenly from out this blue sea of damp haze, told a wondrous story of winter's withering all life to death, a spot than which in summer few places on earth would be more entrancing. But these mountains are breathing out a solitude which is eternal. Man here has never been. Far away beyond lies the country of the aborigines; but even the Lolo, wild and rugged as the country, fearless of man and beast, have never dared to ascend these heights.

They are mournful, cheerless, devoid of a single smile from the common mother of us all, lacking every feature by which the earth draws man into a spirit of unity with his G.o.d. Horrid, frowning waste and aimless discontinuity of land, harbinger of loneliness and of evil! People, poor struggling beings of our kind, here seemed mocked of destiny, and a hot raging of misery waged within them, for all that the heart might desire and wish for had to them been denied. If, indeed, the earth be the home of hope, and man's greatest possession be hope, then would it seem that these poor creatures were entirely cut off, shut out from life, wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert. There were no exceptions, it was the common lot. Each day and every day did these men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued dest.i.tution, and temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding country, pregnant only with aggravation to their own dire wretchedness.

In such spots, unhappily in Yun-nan not few, does the mystery of life grow ever more mysterious to one whom distress has never hara.s.sed. A great pity seized my heart, but these poor people would probably have laughed had they known my thoughts.

As I pa.s.sed they came uninterestedly to look upon me. They watched in expressive silence; they were silent because of poverty. And I, too, kept a seal upon my lips as I ate the good things here provided under the eyes of those to whom hunger had given none but a jealous outlook.

Pitiful enough were it, thought I, merely to watch without allowing speech to escape further to taunt them. So I ate, and they looked at me.

I came and went, but never a word was uttered by these men and women, or even by the children, whose most painful feeling seemed that of their own feebleness. They were indeed feeble units standing in a threatening infinitude of life, and their thoughts probably dwelt upon my luxury and wealth as mine could not help dwelling upon their hungry town of hungry men and famished children. Words cannot paint their poverty--men void of hope, of life, of purpose, of idea. Happy for them that they had known no other.

We ascended over a road of unspeakable torture to one's feet. Gazing down, far away into a seemingly bottomless abyss, we could faintly hear in the lulling of the wind the rush of a torrent, fed by a hundred mountain streams, which washed our path and in horrible disfigurement tore open the surface of the hill-sides.

The long day was drawing wearily to a close. As the sun was sinking beyond the uneven hills over which I was to climb before the descent to the town begins, the effect of the green and gold and red and brown produced a striking picture of sweet poetic beauty. I stood in contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, nonchalantly picking out mouldy monkey-nuts from some coa.r.s.e sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female.

Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone breaking the hollow's gloom. Uncanny is night travel in China.

"Who knows but that ghosts, those fierce-faced denizens of the hills, may run against thee and bewitch thee," murmured one man to the others.

They stopped, and I stopped with them. And in the darkness, pegging on alone at the mercy of these coolies, my own thoughts were not unsynchronistic.

At last, with no slight misgiving, we came down into the city's smoke.

Dogs barked at me, and ran away like the curs they are. Midway down the stone footway my yamen runner too cautiously crept up to me in the dark, muttering something, and I floored him with my fist. Afterwards I learnt that he came to relieve me of the pony I was leading.

Every room in every wretched inn was occupied; opium fumes already issued from the doorways, and it was now pitch dark, so that I could scarce see the sallow faces of the hungry, uncouth crowd, to whom with no little irritation I tried to speak as I peered carefully into the caravanserai. Evident it certainly was that the duty lying nearest to me at that particular moment, to myself and all concerned therein, was to accept what I was offered, and not wear out my temper in grumbling. My boy, Lao Chang (an I-pien), the brick, expressed to me his regrets, and something like real sympathy shone out from his eyes in the dimness.

"Puh p'a teh, puh p'a teh" ("Have no fear, have no fear"), said he; and as I stood the while piling up cruellest torture upon my uncourtly host, he made off to prepare a downstair room (to lapse into modern boarding-house phraseology).

First through an outer apartment, dark as darkest night; on past the caterwauling cook and a few disreputable culinary hangers-on; asked to look out for a pony, which I could not see, but which I was told might kick me; then onward to my boy, who stood on a stool and dropped the grease of a huge red Chinese candle among his plaited hair, as he wobbled it above his head to light the way. He gripped me tenderly, took me to his bosom as it were, gave me one push, and I was there. He tarried not. What right had he to listen to what I in secret would say of the horrid keeper and his twice horrid shakedown inn? He pa.s.sed out swiftly into outer darkness, uttering a groan I rudely interpreted as, "That or nothing, that or nothing."

It _was_ a room, that is in so far as four sides, a floor and a ceiling comprise one. Of that I had no doubt. A sort of uncomely offshoot from the main inn building, built on piles in the earth after the fashion of the seash.o.r.e houses of the Malay--but much dirtier and incomparably more shaky. For many a long year, longer than mine horrid host would care to recollect, this now unoccupied s.p.a.ce had served admirably as the common cooking-room--the ruined fireplace was still there; later, it had been the stable--the ruined horse trough was still there. At one extreme corner only could I stand upright; long sooty cobwebs graced the black wood beams overhead, hanging as thick as icicles in a mountain valley; each step I took in fear and trembling (the slightest move threatened to collapse the whole dilapidation). Four planks, four inches wide at the widest part and of varying lengths and thicknesses, placed on a pile of loose firewood at the head and foot, comprised the bedstead on which I tremulously sat down. Upon this improvised apology for a bed, under my mosquito curtains (no traveler should be without them in Western China), I washed my blistered feet on an ancient _Daily Telegraph_, whilst my cook saw to my evening meal. His bringing in the rice tallied with my laying the tablecloth in the same place where I had washed my feet--the one available spot.

As I ate, rats came brazenly and picked up the grains of rice I dropped in my inefficient handling of chopsticks, and in scaring off these hardened, hungry vermin I accidentally upset tea over my bed, whilst at the same moment a clod-hopping coolie came in with an elephant tread, with the result that my European reading-lamp lost its balance from the top of a tin of native sugar and started a conflagration, threatening to make short work of me and my belongings--not to mention that horrid fellow and his inn.

During the night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch--moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to gaze out to a disconsolate eternity--gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the previous day was due. There were the rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks and cracks--no quiet about the place from night to morning. Then came the barking of dogs, the noises of the c.o.c.ks and kine, of horses and foals, of pigs and geese--the general wail of the zoological kingdom--cows bellowing, duck diplomacy, and much else. So that it were not surprising to learn that this distinguished traveler in these contemptible regions was sitting on a broken-down bridge, looking wearily on to the broken-down tower on the summit of a pretty little knoll outside Kungshan, thinking that it were well a score of such were added did their design embrace a warning to evade the place.

Having done some twenty li by moonlight, I managed with little difficulty to reach Yang-kai (6,350 feet) by 3.0 p.m. This road, which is not the main road to the capital, was purposely chosen; most travelers go through Yang-lin. The journey is comprised of pleasant ascents and descents over the latter portion of the great Yun-nan Plateau, and a very appreciable difference in the temperature was here noticed. While the people at the north-east of the province, from which I had come, were shivering in their rags and complaining about the price of charcoal, the population here basked under Italian skies in a warm sun. From Lui-shu-ho (7,200 feet) the country was beautifully wooded with groves of firs and chestnuts.

At the inn to which I was led the phlegmatic proprietor, after wishing me peace, a.s.sumed unostentatiously the becoming att.i.tude of a Customs official, and scrutinized with vigor the whole of my gear, from an empty Calvert's tooth-powder tin to my Kodak camera, showering particularly condescending felicitations upon my English Barnsby saddle and field-gla.s.ses thereto attached.

His excitement rose at once.

He called loudly for his confederates--a band of inelegant infidels--and bidding them stand one by one at given distances, he gaped at them through the gla.s.ses with the hilarity of a schoolboy and the stupidity of an owl. He jumped, he shouted, he waved his arms about me, and handing them back to me with both hands, shouted deafeningly in my ear that they were quite beyond his ken; and then he sucked his teeth disgustingly and spat at my feet. His a.s.sociates were speechless, a.s.ses that they were, and could only stare, in horror or impudence I know not.

Meantime Lao Chang brought tea, and sallied forth immediately to fraternize among old friends. As I drank my tea, after having invited them one by one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty stare, dest.i.tute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese gentry, sucking at tobacco-pipes as long as their own overfed bodies, forced upon me a sense of my unfitness for the unknown conditions of the life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in the sterile waste of their fashionable life. They spoke to me subsequently, and I bravely threw at them a Chinese phrase or two; but when the conversation got above my head, I told them, quietly but determinedly, that I could not understand, my English speech seemed vaguely to indicate a sudden collapse of the acquaintance, the opening of a gulf between us, destined to widen to the whole length and breadth of Yang-kai, swallowing up their erstwhile confidences. One of them facetiously remarked that the gentleman wished to eat his rice; and as they cleared out, falling over each other and the high step at the entrance to the room, I thought that no matter how old they are, Chinese are but little children. But had I treated them as little children I should have found that they were old men.

There was in me withal a sense of better rank in the eyes of this super-excellent few who worshipped, in "heathen" China, the Satan of Fashion. As a matter of fact, their rank had emerged from such long centuries ago that it seemed to me to be so identified with them that they were hardly capable of a.n.a.lysis of people such as myself. As I looked pityingly upon them and the involved simplicity of their immutable natures, I realized an unconquerable feeling of inborn rank and natural elevation in respect to nationality. This is, however, against my personal general conception of Eastern peoples, but I must admit I felt it this afternoon. And so perhaps it is with the majority of Europeans in the Far East, who, because they have no knowledge of the language or a familiarity with national customs and ideas, remain always aliens with the Easterner. They cannot sympathize with him in his joys and sorrows, his likes and dislikes, his prejudice and bias, or understand anything of his point of view. This is one of the hardest lessons for the European traveler in China who has little of the language. Because we do not understand him, we call the Chinese a heathen--it is easier.