An Australian in China Part 7

"4. Likewise if the motion of the pulse resembles the pace of a frog when he is embarra.s.sed in the weeds, death is certain.

"5. If the motion of the pulse resembles the hasty pecking of the beak of a bird, there is a defect of spirits in the stomach."

Heredity is the most important factor in the evolution of a doctor in China, success in his career as an "hereditary physician" being specially a.s.sured to him who has the good fortune to make his first appearance in the world feet foremost. Doctors dispense their own medicines. In their shops you see an amazing variety of drugs; you will occasionally also see tethered a live stag, which on a certain day, to be decided by the priests, will be pounded whole in a pestle and mortar.

"Pills manufactured out of a whole stag slaughtered with purity of purpose on a propitious day," is a common announcement in dispensaries in China. The wall of a doctor's shop is usually stuck all over with disused plasters returned by grateful patients with complimentary testimonies to their efficiency; they have done what England is alleged to expect of all her sons--their duty.

Medicines, it is known to all Chinamen, operate variously according to their taste, thus:--"All sour medicines are capable of impeding and retaining; bitter medicines of causing looseness and warmth as well as hardening; sweet possess the qualities of strengthening, of harmonising, and of warming; acids disperse, prove emollient, and go in an athwart direction; salt medicines possess the properties of descending; those substances that are hard and tasteless open the orifices of the body and promote a discharge. This explains the use of the five tastes."

Coming from Szechuen, we frequently met porters carrying baskets of armadillos, leopard skins, leopard and tiger bones. The skins were for wear, but the armadillos and bones were being taken to Suifu to be converted into medicine. From the bones of leopards an admirable tonic may be distilled; while it is well known that the infusion prepared from tiger bones is the greatest of the tonics, conferring something of the courage, agility, and strength of the tiger upon its partaker.

Another excellent specific for courage is a preparation made from the gall bladder of a robber famous for his bravery, who has died at the hands of the executioner. The sale of such a gall bladder is one of the perquisites of a Chinese executioner.

Ague at certain seasons is one of the most common ailments of the district of Chaotong, yet there is an admirable prophylactic at hand against it: write the names of the eight demons of ague on paper, and then eat the paper with a cake; or take out the eyes of the paper door-G.o.d (there are door-G.o.ds on all your neighbours' doors), and devour them--this remedy never fails.

Unlike the Spaniard, the Chinese disapproves of blood-letting in fevers, "for a fever is like a pot boiling; it is requisite to reduce the fire and not diminish the liquid in the vessel, if we wish to cure the patient."

Unlike the Spaniard, too, the Chinese doctors would not venture to a.s.sert, as the medical faculty of Madrid in the middle of last century a.s.sured the inhabitants, that "if human excrement was no longer to be suffered to acc.u.mulate as usual in the streets, where it might attract the putrescent particles floating in the air, these noxious vapours would find their way into the human body and a pestilential sickness would be the inevitable consequence."

For boils there is a certain cure:--There is a G.o.d of Boils. If you have a boil you will plaster the offending excrescence without avail, if that be _all_ you plaster; to get relief you must at the same time plaster the corresponding area on the image of the G.o.d. Go into his temple in Western China, and you will find this deity dripping with plasters, with scarcely an undesecrated s.p.a.ce on his superficies.

At the yamen of the Brigadier-General in Chaotong, the entrance is guarded by the customary stone images of mythical shape and grotesque features. They are believed to represent lions, but their faces are not leonine--they are a reproduction, exaggerated, of the characteristic features of the bulldog of Western China. The images are of undoubted value to the city. One is male and the other female. On the sixteenth day of the first month they are visited by the townspeople, who rub them energetically with their hands, all over from end to end. Every spot so touched confers immunity from pain upon the corresponding region of their own bodies for the ensuing year. And so from year to year these images are visited. Pain accordingly is almost absent from the city, and only that man suffers pain who has the temerity to neglect the opportunity of insuring himself against it.

I was called to a case of opium-poisoning in Chaotong. A son came in casually to seek our aid in saving his father, who had attempted suicide with a large over-dose of opium. He had taken it at ten in the morning and it was now two. We were led to the house and found it a single small unlit room up a narrow alley. In the room two men were unconcernedly eating their rice, and in the darkness they seemed to be the only occupants; but, lying down behind them on a narrow bed, was the dim figure of the dying man, who was breathing stertorously. A crowd quickly gathered round the door and pent up the alley-way. Rousing the man, I caused him to swallow some pints of warm water, and then I gave him a hypodermic injection of apomorphia. The effect was admirable, and pleased the spectators even more than the patient.

Opium is almost exclusively the drug used by suicides. No Chinaman would kill himself by the mutilation of the razor or pistol-shot because awful is the future punishment of him who would so dare to disturb the integrity of the body bequeathed to him by his fathers.

China is the land of suicides. I suppose more people die from suicide in China in proportion to the population than in any other country. Where the struggle for existence is so keen, it is hardly to be wondered at that men are so willing to abandon the struggle. But poverty and misery are not the only causes. For the most trivial reason the Chinaman will take his own life. Suicide with a Chinaman is an act that is recorded in his honour rather than to his opprobrium.

Thus a widow, as we have seen, may obtain much merit by sacrificing herself on the death of her husband. But in a large proportion of cases the motive is revenge, for the spirit of the dead is believed to "haunt and injure the living person who has been the cause of the suicide." In China to ruin your adversary you injure or kill yourself. To vow to commit suicide is the most awful threat with which you can drive terror into the heart of your adversary. If your enemy do you wrong, there is no way in which you can cause him more bitterly to repent his misdeed than by slaying yourself at his doorstep. He will be charged with your murder, and may be executed for the crime; he will be utterly ruined in establishing, if he can establish, his innocence; and he will be haunted ever after by your avenging spirit.

Occasionally two men who have quarrelled will take poison together, and their spirits will fight it out in heaven. Opium is very cheap in Chaotong, costing only fivepence an ounce for the crude article. You see it exposed for sale everywhere, like thick treacle in dirty besmeared jars. It is largely adulterated with ground pigskin, the adulteration being detected by the craving being unsatisfied. Mohammedans have a holy loathing of the pig, and look with contempt on their countrymen whose chief meat-food is pork. But each one in his turn. It is, on the other hand, a source of infinite amus.e.m.e.nt to the Chinese to see his Mohammedan brother unwittingly smoking the unclean beast in his opium-pipe.

On our way to the opium case we pa.s.sed a doorway from which pitiful screams were issuing. It was a mother thrashing her little boy with a heavy stick--she had tethered him by the leg and was using the stick with both hands. A Chinese proverb as old as the hills tells you, "if you love your son, give him plenty of the cudgel; if you hate him, cram him with delicacies." He was a young wretch, she said, and she could do nothing with him; and she raised her baton again to strike, but the missionary interposed, whereupon she consented to stay her wrath and did so--till we were round the corner.

"Extreme lenity alternating with rude pa.s.sion in the treatment of children is the characteristic," says Meadows, "of the lower stages of civilisation." I mention this incident only because of its rarity. In no other country in the world, civilised or "heathen," are children generally treated with more kindness and affection than they are in China. "Children, even amongst seemingly stolid Chinese, have the faculty of calling forth the better feelings so often found latent.

Their prattle delights the fond father, whose pride beams through every line of his countenance, and their quaint and winning ways and touches of nature are visible even under the disadvantages of almond eyes and shaven crowns" (Dyer Ball).

A mother in China is given, both by law and custom, extreme power over her sons whatever their age or rank. The Sacred Edict says, "Parents are like heaven. Heaven produces a blade of gra.s.s. Spring causes it to germinate. Autumn kills it with frost. Both are by the will of heaven.

In like manner the power of life and death over the body which they have begotten is with the parents."

And it is this law giving such power to a mother in China which tends, it is believed, to nullify that other law whereby a husband in China is given extreme power over his wife, even to the power in some cases of life and death.

The Mohammedans are still numerous in Chaotong, and there are some 3000 families--the figures are Chinese--in the city and district. Their numbers were much reduced during the suppression of the rebellion of 1857-1873, when they suffered the most awful cruelties. Again, thirteen years ago, there was an uprising which was suppressed by the Government with merciless severity. One street is exclusively occupied by Moslems, who have in their hands the skin trade of the city. Their houses are known by a conspicuous absence from door and window of the coloured paper door-G.o.ds that are seen grotesquely glaring from the doors of the unbelievers. Their mosque is well cared for and unusually clean. In the centre, within the main doorway, as in every mosque in the empire, is a gilt tablet of loyalty to the living Emperor. "May the Emperor reign ten thousand years!" it says, a token of subjection which the mosques of Yunnan have especially been compelled to display since the insurrection.

At the time of my visit an aged mollah was teaching Arabic and the Koran to a ragged handful of boys. He spoke to me through an interpreter, and gave me the impression of having some little knowledge of things outside the four seas that surround China. I told him that I had lived under the shelter of two of the greatest mosques, but he seemed to question my contention that the mosque in Cordova and the Karouin mosque in Fez are even more n.o.ble in their proportions than his mosque in Chaotong. In some of the skin-hongs that I entered, the walls were ornamented with coloured plans of Mecca and Medinah, bought in Chentu, the capital city of the province of Szechuen.

CHAPTER X.

THE JOURNEY FROM CHAOTONG TO TONGCHUAN.

In Chaotong I engaged three new men to go with me to Tongchuan, a distance of 110 miles, and I rewarded liberally the three excellent fellows who had accompanied me from Suifu. My new men were all active Chinamen. The headman Laohwan was most anxious to come with me.

Recognising that he possessed characteristics which his posterity would rejoice to have transmitted to them, he had lately taken to himself a wife and now, a fortnight later, he sought rest. He would come with me to Burma, the further away the better; he wished to prove the truth of the adage about distance and enchantment. The two coolies who were to carry the loads were country lads from the district. My men were to receive _4s. 6d._ each for the 110 miles, an excessive wage, but all food was unusually dear, and people were eating maize instead of rice; they were to find themselves on the way, in other words, they were "to eat their own rice," and, in return for a small reward, they were to endeavour to do the five days' stages in three days. I bought a few stores, including some excellent oatmeal and an annular cake of that compressed tea, the "Puerh-cha," which is grown in the Shan States and is distributed as a luxury all over China. It is in favour in the palace of the Emperor in Peking itself; it is one of the finest teas in China, yet, to show how jealous the rivalry now is between China tea and Indian, when I submitted the remainder of this very cake to a well-known tea-taster in Mangoe Lane, Calcutta, and asked his expert opinion, he reported that the sample was "of undoubted value and of great interest, as showing what _muck can be called tea_."

We left on the 3rd, and pa.s.sed by the main-street through the crowded city, past the rich wholesale warehouses, and out by the west gate to the plain of Chaotong. The country spread before us was smiling and rich, with many farmsteads, and orchards of pears and peaches--a pretty sight, for the trees were now in full blossom. Many carts were lumbering along the road on their uneven wheels. Just beyond the city there was a noisy altercation in the road for the possession apparently of a blunt adze. Carts stopped to see the row, and all the bystanders joined in with their voices, with much earnestness. It is rare for the disputants to be injured in these questions. Their language on these occasions is, I am told, extremely rich in allusions. It would often make a _gendarme_ blush. Their oaths are more ornate than the Italians'; the art of vituperation is far advanced in China. A strong wind was blowing in our faces. We rested at some mud hovels where poverty was stalking about with a stick in rags and nakedness. Full dress of many of these beggars would disgrace a Polynesian. Even the better dressed were hung with garments in rags, tattered, and dirty as a Paisley ragpicker's. The children were mostly stark-naked. In the middle of the day we reached a Mohammedan village named Taouen, twenty miles from Chaotong, and my man prepared me an _al fresco_ lunch. The entire village gathered into the square to see me eat; they struggled for the orange peel I threw under the table.

From here the road rises quickly to the village of Tashuitsing (7380 feet above sea level), where my men wished to remain, and apparently came to an understanding with the innkeeper; but I would not understand and went on alone, and they perforce had to follow me. There are only half-a-dozen rude inns in the village, all Mohammedan; but just outside the village the road pa.s.ses under a magnificent triple archway in four tiers made of beautifully cut stone, embossed with flowers and images, and richly gilt--a striking monument in so forlorn a situation. It was built two years ago, in obedience to the will of the Emperor, by the richest merchant of Chaotong, and is dedicated to the memory of his virtuous mother, who died at the age of eighty, having thus experienced the joy of old age, which in China is the foremost of the five measures of felicity. It was erected and carved on the spot by masons from Chungking. Long after dark we reached an outlying inn of the village of Kiangti, a thatched mud barn, with a sleeping room surrounded on three sides by a raised ledge of mud bricks upon which were stretched the mattresses. The room was dimly lit by an oil-lamp; the floor was earth; the grating under the rafters was stored with maize-cobs. Outside the door cooking was done in the usual square earthen stove, in which are sunk two iron basins, one for rice, the other for hot water; maize stalks were being burnt in the flues. The room, when we entered, was occupied by a dozen Chinese, with their loads and the packsaddles of a caravan of mules; yet what did the good-natured fellows do? They must all have been more tired than I; but, without complaining, they all got up when they saw me, and packed their things and went out of the room, one after the other, to make way for myself and my companions. And, while we were comfortable, they crowded into another room that was already crowded.

Next day a tremendously steep descent took us down to Kiangti, a mountain village on the right bank of a swift stream, here spanned in its rocky pa.s.s by a beautiful suspension bridge, which swings gracefully high above the torrent. The bridge is 150 feet long by 12 feet broad, and there is no engineer in England who might not be proud to have been its builder. At its far end the parapets are guarded by two sculptured monkeys, hewn with rough tools out of granite, and the more remarkable for their fidelity of form, seeing that the artist must have carved them from memory. The inevitable likin-barrier is at the bridge to squeeze a few more cash out of the poor carriers. That the Inland Customs dues of China are vexatious there can be no doubt; yet it is open to question if the combined duties of all the likin-barriers on any one main road extending from frontier to frontier of any single province in China are greater than the _ad valorem_ duties imposed by our colony of Victoria upon the protected goods crossing her border from an adjoining colony.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAG.o.dA BY THE WAYSIDE, WESTERN CHINA.]

Leaving the bridge, the road leads again up the hills. Poppy was now in full flower, and everywhere in the fields women were collecting opium.

They were scoring the poppy capsules with vertical scratches and sc.r.a.ping off the exuded juice which had bled from the incisions they made yesterday. Hundreds of pack horses carrying Puerh tea met us on the road; while all day long we were pa.s.sing files of coolies toiling patiently along under heavy loads of crockery. They were going in the same direction as ourselves to the confines of the empire, distributing those teacups, saucers, and cuplids, china spoons, and rice-bowls that one sees in every inn in China. Most of the crockery is brought across China from the province of Kiangsi, whose natural resources seems to give it almost the monopoly of this industry. The trade is an immense one. In the neighbourhood of King-teh-chin, in Kiangsi, at the outbreak of the Taiping rebellion, more than one million workmen were employed in the porcelain manufactories. Cups and saucers by the time they reach so far distant a part of China as this, carried as they are so many hundreds of miles on the backs of coolies, are sold for three or four times their original cost. Great care is taken of them, and no piece can be so badly broken as not to be mended. Crockery-repairing is a recognised trade, and the workmen are unusually skilful even for Chinese. They rivet the pieces together with minute copper clamps. To have a specimen of their handiwork I purposely in Yunnan broke a cup and saucer into fragments, only to find when I had done so that there was not a mender in the district. Rice bowls and teacups are neatly made, tough, and well finished; even the humblest are not inelegantly coloured, while the high-cla.s.s china, especially where the imperial yellow is used, often shows the richest beauty of ornamentation.

Inns on this road were few and at wide distances; they were scarcely sufficient for the numbers who used them. The country was red sandstone, open, and devoid of all timber, till, descending again into a valley, the path crossed an obstructing ridge, and led us with pleasant surprise into a beautiful park. It was all green and refreshing. A pretty stream was humming past the willows, its banks covered with the poppy in full flower, a blaze of colour, magenta, white, scarlet, pink and blue picked out with hedges of roses. The birds were as tame as in the Garden of Eden; magpies came almost to our feet; the sparrows took no notice of us; the falcons knew we would not molest them; the pigeons seemed to think we could not. All was peaceful, and the peasants who sat with us under the cedars on the borders of the park were friendly and un.o.btrusive. Long after sundown we reached, far from the regular stage, a lonely pair of houses, at one of which we found uncomfortable accommodation. Fire had to be kindled in the room in a hollow in the ground; there was no ventilation, the wood was green, the smoke almost suffocating. My men talked on far into the night until I lost patience and yelled at them in English. They thought that I was swearing, and desisted for fear that I should injure their ancestors. There was a shrine in this room for private devotions, the corresponding spot in the adjoining room being a rough opium-couch already occupied by two l.u.s.ty thickset "slaves to this thrice-accursed drug." My men ate the most frugal of suppers. Food was so much in advance of its ordinary price that my men, in common with thousands of other coolies, were doing their hard work on starvation rations.

On the 5th we did a long day's stage and spent the night at a bleak hamlet 8500 feet above sea level, in a position so exposed that the roofs of the houses were weighted with stones to prevent their being carried away by the wind. This was the "Temple of the Dragon King," and it was only twenty li from Tongchuan.

Next day we were astir early and soon after daylight we came suddenly to the brow of the tableland overlooking the valley of Tongchuan. The compact little walled city, with its whitewashed buildings glistening in the morning sun, lay beyond the gleaming plats of the irrigated plain, snugly ensconced under rolling ma.s.ses of hills, which rose at the far end of the valley to lofty mountains covered with snow. All the plain is watered with springs; large patches of it are under water all the year round, and, rendered thus useless for cultivation, are employed by the Chinese for the artificial rearing of fish and as breeding grounds for the wild duck and the "faithful bird," the wild goose. A narrow d.y.k.e serpentining across the plain leads into the pretty city, where, at the north-east angle of the wall, I was charmed to find the cheerful home of the Bible Christian Mission, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Sam Pollard and two lady a.s.sistants, one of whom is a countrywoman of my own. This is, I believe, the most charming spot for a mission station in all China. Mr.

Pollard is quite a young man, full of enthusiasm, modest, and clever.

Everywhere he is received kindly; he is on friendly terms with the officials, and there is not a Chinese home within ten miles of the city where he and his pretty wife are not gladly welcomed. His knowledge of Chinese is exceptional; he is the best Chinese scholar in Western China, and is examiner in Chinese for the distant branches of the Inland Mission.

The mission in Tongchuan was opened in 1891, and the results are not discouraging, seeing that the Chinaman is as difficult to lead into the true path as any Jew. No native has been baptized up to date. The convert employed by the mission as a native helper is one of the three converts of Chaotong. He is a bright-faced lad of seventeen, as ardent an evangelist as heart of missionary could desire, but a native preacher can never be so successful as the foreign missionary. The Chinese listen to him with complacency, "You eat Jesus's rice and of course you speak his words," they say. The att.i.tude of the Chinese in Tongchuan towards the Christian missionary is one of perfect friendliness towards the missionary, combined with perfect apathy towards his religion. Like any other trader, the missionary has a perfect right to offer his goods, but he must not be surprised, the Chinese thinks, if he finds difficulty in securing a purchaser for wares as much inferior to the home production as is the foreign barbarian to the subject of the Son of Heaven.

There is a Catholic Mission in Tongchuan, but the priest does not a.s.sociate with the Protestant. How indeed can the two a.s.sociate when they worship different G.o.ds!

The difficulty is one which cannot be easily overcome while there exists in China that bone of contention among missionaries which is known as the "Term Question."

The Chinese recognise a supreme G.o.d, or are believed by some to recognise a supreme G.o.d--"High Heaven's ruler" (_Shangtien hou_), who is "probably intended," says Williams, "for the true G.o.d." The Mohammedans, when they entered China, could not recognise this G.o.d as identical with the only one G.o.d, to whom they accordingly gave the Chinese name of "true Lord" (_Chen Chu_). The Jesuits, when they entered China, could not recognise either of these G.o.ds as identical with the G.o.d of the Hebrews, whom they accordingly represented in Chinese first by the characters for "Supreme Ruler" (_Shang ti_), and subsequently by the characters for "Lord of Heaven" (_Tien Chu_). The Protestants naturally could not be identified with the Catholics, and invented another Chinese name, or other Chinese names, for the true G.o.d; while the Americans, superior to all other considerations, discovered a different name still for the true G.o.d to whom they a.s.signed the Chinese characters for "the true Spirit" (_Chen Shen_), thereby suggesting by implication, as Little observes, that the other spirits were false. But, as if such divergent terms were not sufficiently confusing for the Chinese, the Protestants themselves have still more varied the Chinese characters for G.o.d. Thus, in the first translation of the Bible, the term for G.o.d used is the Chinese character for "Spirit" (_Shen_); in the second translation this term is rejected and "Supreme Ruler" (_Shang ti_), subst.i.tuted; the third translation reverts to the "Spirit"; the fourth returns to the "Supreme Ruler"; and the fifth, by Bishop Burdon of Hong Kong, and Dr.

Blodget of Peking, in 1884, rejects the t.i.tle that was first accepted by the Jesuits, and accepts the t.i.tle "Lord of Heaven" (_Tien Chu_), that was first rejected by the Jesuits.

"Many editions," says the Rev. J. Wherry, of Peking, "with other terms have since been published." "Bible work in particular," says the Rev.

Mr. Muirhead, of Shanghai, "is carried on under no small disadvantage in view of this state of things." "It is true, however," adds Mr. Muirhead, "that G.o.d has blest all terms in spite of our incongruity." But obviously the Chinese are a little puzzled to know which of the contending G.o.ds is most worthy of their allegiance.

But apart from the "Term Question" there must be irreconcilable antagonism between the two great missionary churches in China, for it cannot be forgotten that "in the development of the missionary idea three great tasks await the (Protestant) Church.... The second task is _to check the schemes of the Jesuit_. In the great work of the world's evangelisation the Church has no foe at all comparable with the Jesuit.... Swayed ever by the vicious maxim that the end justifies the means, he would fain put back the shadow of the dial of human progress by half a dozen centuries. Other forms of superst.i.tion and error are dangerous, but Jesuitism overtops them all, and stands forth an organised conspiracy against the liberties of mankind. This foe is not likely to be overcome by a divided Protestantism. If we would conquer in this war we must move together, and in our movements must manifest a patience, a heroism, a devotion equal to anything the Jesuit can claim."

(The Rev. A. Sutherland, D.D., Delegate from Canada to the Missionary Conference, 1888, _Records_, i., 145.)

And, on the other hand, the distracted Chinese reads that:--"Protestantism is not only a veritable Babel, but a horrible theory, and an immoral practice which blasphemes G.o.d, degrades man, and endangers society." (Cardinal Cuesta's Catechism cited in "China and Christianity," by Michie, p. 8.)

CHAPTER XI.

THE CITY OF TONGCHUAN, WITH SOME REMARKS UPON INFANTICIDE.