Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 10

FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG

I shall have to go back to Peking some time. You must hurry out of the city, men tell you there, or else ere you know it the siren-like Lure of the East will grip you irresistibly; and I felt in some measure the soundness of the counsel. The knowledge that each day the long trains of awkward-moving camels are winding their unhurried way from Chien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow-tiled roofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them, while to the left are the faint gray-blue outlines of the Western Hills--all this will be to me a silent but perpetual invitation to go back.

The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never-failing interest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese men in gowns and queues (the wives wear the trousers over here!), the n.o.bles and officers in gorgeous silks and velvets; the fantastic head-dress of the Manchu ladies, and the hobbling movements of the Chinese women hampered by ruined feet; the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring, pig-tailed coolies in the shafts; the heavy two-wheeled Peking carts like half-sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreign or native woman glimpsed through the gla.s.s windows of her sedan chair, eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human burden; the long lines of shop fronts with such a pleasing variety of decorative color as to make one wonder why artists have not made them famous; the uniformed soldiers from every nation on the earth to guard the various legations, and {124} Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreign clothing. The strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memory ever after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, the jingling bells of the thousands of st.u.r.dy little saddle donkeys, the rattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging gong of a mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and behind to bear testimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of peddlers of many kinds, their wares balanced in baskets borne from their shoulders.

Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some man has died and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper-covered horse in the belief that it will be changed into a real horse to serve him in the Beyond; and imitations of other things that might be useful to him are burned in the same way.

Or perhaps a marriage procession may pa.s.s. A dozen servants carry placards with emblems of the rank of the family represented by the bride or groom, numerous other servants bear presents, and the bride herself pa.s.ses by concealed in a gorgeous sedan chair borne on the shoulders of six or eight coolies.

Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however, Peking is even richer in historic interest. And by historic in China is not meant any matter of the last half-hour, such as Columbus's discovery of America or the landing at Plymouth Rock; these things to the Chinaman are so modern as to belong rather in the category of recent daily newspaper sensations along with the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy or the Thaw trial. If he wishes something genuinely historic, he goes back three or four thousand years. For example, a friend of mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country.

Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom. "Yes,"' he answered, "that is our custom now, since we changed. But it has not always been so. We did the other way up to four or five centuries before Christ." Whereupon the audience, amazed at the utterly casual mention of an event two thousand {125} years old as if it were a happening of yesterday, was convulsed in merriment, which the young Chinaman was entirely unable to understand.

When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then bearing another name), having centuries before grown into eminence, had been destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering upon its second youth. About the time of the last Caesars it fell into the hands of the Tartars, who gave place to the Mongols after 1215. It was during the reign of the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital, then called Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nankou, built the great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to this day--forty feet high, wide enough on top for four or five carriages to drive abreast, and thirteen miles around.

Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have most often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only ten years and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. The widely current idea is that this Boxer movement originated in anti-missionary sentiment, but this is not borne out by the facts. The late Col.

Charles Denby, long American Minister to China, pointed out very clearly that the main cause was opposition to the land-grabbing policies of European nations. Once started, however, it took the form of opposition to everything foreign--missionaries and non-missionaries alike. I pa.s.sed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the siege that sounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs; stories of Chinese Christian converts butchered like sheep by their infuriated fellow countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in another part of the city, was finally rescued by foreign troops, the surviving Christians and missionaries were dying of starvation; they had become mere wan, half-crazed skeletons, subsisting on roots and bark.

The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts {126} during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of the church, but of mankind; for what man of us is not inspired to worthier things by every high deed of martyrdom which a fellowman anywhere has suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers hurled arrow after arrow with letters attached offering immunity to the Chinese converts if they would abandon their Christian leaders, but not even starvation led one to desert. Colonel Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000 Chinese Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day of one family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked out by suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying their Master, and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, "Jesus Is Leading Me." At Taiyan-fu an especially touching incident occurred: Five or six young girls, just in their teens, were about to be killed, when a leader intervened, declaring: "It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and urged them to recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since that is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for their faith with their lives.

I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means river in Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the famous Chinese industrial centre, about 600 miles south of Peking. About Hankow I found farming much more primitive than that around Peking, Nankou, and Tientsin. Instead of the three and four horse plows I found in North China, the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox.

The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of buying a "farm"; he buys a "field." In Kw.a.n.g-tung there is a saying that one sixth of an acre "will support one mouth." As nearly as I can find out, the average wages paid farm laborers is about 10 cents (gold) a day. The average for all kinds of labor, a member of the Emperor's Grand Council tells me, is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18 cents gold a day.

In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in {127} China or j.a.pan there are three or four things that must always be kept in mind. One is that there are no fences between fields; I haven't seen a wooden or wire farm-fence since I left America. A high row or ridge separates one field from another, and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm-houses. The people live in villages, from ten to fifty farmhouses grouped together, and the laborers go out from their homes to the fields each morning and return at evening. The same system, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as population becomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we shall doubtless attempt to group our farm homes also. Even now, much more--vastly more--might be done in this respect if our farmers only had the plan in mind in building new homes. Where three or four farms come near together, why should not the dwellings be grouped near a common centre? It would mean much for convenience and for a better social life. Another notable difference from our own country is the absence of wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any kind. In this part of China the farmhouse is made of mud bricks, or mud and reeds, or else of a mixture of mud and stone, and is usually surrounded by a high wall of the same material.

Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are basking in the joyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights they may reflect that the Chinaman on this side of the earth enjoys no such comfort.

Enough fire to cook the scanty meals is all that he can afford. To protect themselves against cold, as I have already pointed out, the poor put on many thicknesses of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wear furs and woolens. When a coolie has donned the maximum quant.i.ty of cotton padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-plated cruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him.

At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plowing and harrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out to the Temple of Agriculture, where each spring the Emperor or Prince Regent comes and plows sixteen rows, the purpose {128} being to bear testimony to the high honorableness of agriculture and its fundamental importance to the empire. This happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it is in late fall that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy now flailing grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, or grinding it in mills operated by a single donkey.

In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions--possibly billions--of the Chinese dead are even more in evidence than in the northern provinces. Let China last a few more thousand years with its present customs and the country will be one vast cemetery, and the people will have to move away to find land to cultivate. As not one grave in a thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem as if they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that each Chinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The care of their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even when John goes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be used to bring his body back to the ancestral burying ground.

In a land so given over to superst.i.tion I have no doubt that the most horrible disasters would also be expected as the penalty for interfering with any grave. It seems odd that a people who had a literature centuries before our Anglo-Saxon ancestors emerged from barbarism should now be the victims of superst.i.tions almost as gross as those prevailing in Africa; but such are the facts. Chang Chih-tung, who died a few months ago, was one of the most progressive and enlightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but not even a man of his type could free himself from the great body of superst.i.tion handed down from generation to generation.

In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as "Dragon Hill," because of the Chinese belief that a dragon inhabits it. This long hill divides the city into two parts; every day hundreds and sometimes possibly thousands of people must climb up one side and down the other in getting from one part of the town to another. Therefore, when Chang {129} Chih-tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that he would make a cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble.

And he did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a painful abscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he consulted were quick in pointing out the trouble. By making the cut in the hill, they told him, he had offended the earth dragon which inhabits it, and unless the cut were filled up Chang might die and disaster might come upon the city. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but to restore the ancient obstruction to travel, and so it remains to this day.

In sight from Dragon Hill is another hill known as Tortoise Hill, supposed to be inhabited by a tortoise spirit or devil, and at its foot are some lakes in which it has long been said that the tortoise washes its feet. Now these lakes are on property owned by the Hanyang Steel & Iron Works and they decided a few years ago that they would either drain off the water or else fill up the lakes so as to get more land. But before they got started the Chinese civil authorities heard of it and notified the Hanyang Company that such a proceeding could not be tolerated. The tortoise would have nowhere to wash his feet, and would straightway bring down the wrath of Heaven on all the community!

It is from superst.i.tions such as these that the schools must free the Chinese before the way can be really cleared for the introduction of Christianity. The teacher is as necessary as the preacher. And the task of getting the ma.s.ses even to the point where they can read and write is supremely difficult. The language, it must be remembered, has no alphabet. Each word is made not by joining several letters together, as with us, but by making a distinct character--each character an intricate and difficult combination of lines, marks, and dots. Or perhaps the word may be formed by joining two distinct characters together. For example, to write "obedience" in Chinese you write together the characters for "leaf" and "river," the significance being that true obedience is as trusting {130} and unresisting as the fallen leaf on the river's current. My point is, however, that for each word a distinct group of marks (like mixed-up chicken tracks) must be piled together, and the task of remembering how to recognize and write the five thousand or more characters in the language would make an average American boy turn gray at the very thought. My friend Doctor Tenney, of the American Legation in Peking, a.s.serts that at least five years of the average Chinese pupil's school life might be saved if the language were based on an alphabet like ours instead of on such arbitrary word-signs.

There is one thing that must be said in favor of the Chinese system of education, however, and that is the emphasis it has always laid on moral or ethical training. The teaching, too, seems to have been remarkably effective. Take so basic a matter as paying one's debts, for example: it is a part of the Chinaman's religion to get even with the world on every Chinese New Year, which comes in February. If he fails to "square up" at this time he "loses face," as his expressive phrase has it. He is a bad citizen and unpopular. Consequently all sorts of things may be bought cheaper just before the New Year than any other time. Every man is willing to make any reasonable sacrifice, selling his possessions at a great discount if necessary, rather than have a debt against him run over into the new period--an excellent idea for America!

I do not know whether Confucianism is responsible for this particular policy, but at any rate the fact remains that outside the Bible the world has never known a more sublime moral philosophy than that of Confucius. It means much, therefore, that every Chinese pupil must know the maxims and principles of the great sage by heart. Moreover, as Confucius did not profess to teach spiritual truth, the missionaries in China are fast coming to realize that it is both unnecessary and foolish to urge the people to abandon Confucianism.

The proper policy is to tell the Chinese, "Hold on to all that is good and true in Confucius. There is very little in his teachings that is {131} in conflict with religion, and Christian leaders now recognize him as one of the greatest moral forces the world has known. But to the high moral teaching of the Chinese master you must add now the moral teachings of Christianity and, more essential still, the great body of spiritual truth which Confucianism lacks." The grand old man among Chinese missionaries, Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who has been in the work since 1850, said to me in Peking, "Some of the best Christians are now the best Confucianists."

Confucianism, as any one can see by reading the books, is no more a subst.i.tute for Christianity than Proverbs is for St. John's Gospel. As Doctor Brewster, another missionary, says, "We do not ask an American scholar to renounce Plato to become a Christian; why should we ask a Chinaman to renounce Confucius?"

Confucius lived five centuries before Christ, and at his old home in Shantung are the graves alike of his descendants and his ancestors--the oldest family burying ground in the world. "No monarch on earth can trace back his lineage by an unbroken chain through so many centuries." In Peking I was so fortunate as to form a friendship with a descendant of Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation--Mr.

Kung Hsiang Koh--a promising and gifted senior in the Imperial College of Languages. At my request he inscribed a scroll for me in beautiful Chinese characters, representing one of my favorite quotations from his world-famous ancestor. I give an English translation herewith:

"Szema-New asked about the Superior Man. The Master said, 'The superior man is without anxiety or fear.'

"'Being without anxiety or fear,' said New, 'does this const.i.tute what we should call the superior man?'

"The Master replied, 'When a man looks inward and finds no guilt there, why should he grieve? or what should he fear?'"

On board _S. S. Kutwo_, Yangtze River, China.

{132}

XIV

SIDELIGHTS ON CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY

Having mentioned some of the good points of John Chinaman (and he has many excellent points), it is also necessary to point out some of his shortcomings. The trouble with John is that he had some tiptop ancestors, but he fell into the habit of looking backward at them so continuously that he has failed, in recent centuries, to make any further progress. He had a civilization and a literature when our white ancestors were wearing skins; but there he stopped, so that we have not only caught up with him, but have pa.s.sed him almost immeasurably. The result is that now China is waking up to find that a great number of ancient abuses, both in public and private life, must be sloughed off if she is to become a genuinely healthy modern nation.

Of what has been accomplished with reference to opium I have already written at length. But this is only a beginning.

With the opium evil under foot, China will still have other dragons to slay--if I may use the term dragon in an evil sense in a country whose national emblem is the dragon. For one thing, slavery still exists in China. A friend of mine in Peking told me of an acquaintance, an educated Chinaman, who bought a young girl two years ago for two hundred taels (about $120 gold), and says now he would not take one thousand two hundred (about $720 gold). Already, however, a vigorous sentiment for the complete abolition of slavery has {133} developed over the empire. About six months ago an imperial edict was issued prohibiting slave trading, decreeing that child-slaves should become free on reaching the age of twenty-five, and opening ways for older slaves to buy their freedom. The peons or slaves of the Manchu princes were, however, excepted from the terms of this edict.

Foot-binding also continues a grievous and widespread evil. Formerly every respectable Chinese father bound the feet of all his girls.

Fathers who did not were either degraded men, reckless of public opinion, or so bitterly poor as to require the services of their daughters in unremitting manual labor. Consequently, a natural foot on a woman became a badge of social inferiority: a Chinaman of prominence wouldn't marry her. Now, however, many of the wealthier upper-cla.s.s Chinamen in the cities are letting their girls grow up with unbound feet, and this custom will gradually spread until the middle and lower cla.s.ses generally, seeing that fashion no longer decrees such a barbaric practice, will also abandon it.

The progress of the reform, however, is by no means so rapid as could be wished. A father with wealth may risk getting a husband for his daughter even though she has natural feet, but ambitious fathers among the common people fear to take such risks. An American lady whose home I visited has a servant who asked for two or three weeks' leave of absence last summer, explaining that he wished to bind the feet of his baby daughter. My friend, knowing all the cruelty of the practice, and having a heart touched by memories of the heart-rending cries with which the poor little creatures protest for weeks against their suffering, pleaded with the servant to let the child's feet alone. But to no effect. "Big feet no b'long pretty," he said, and went home unconvinced.

"The feet," according to the brief statement of ex-Minister Charles Denby, "are bandaged at an age varying from three to five years. The toes are bent back until they penetrate the sole of the foot, and are tightly bound in that position. The {134} parts fester and the toes grow into the foot." The result is that women grow up with feet the same size as when they were children, and the flesh withers away on the feet and below the knees. Throughout life the fashion-cursed girl and woman must hobble around on mere stumps. When you first see a Chinese woman with bound feet you are reminded of the old pictures of Pan, the imaginary Greek G.o.d with the body of a man and the feet of a goat. The resemblance to goat's feet is remarkably striking. As the women are unable to take proper exercise--except with great pain--there is little doubt that their physical strength has been seriously impaired by this custom, and that the stamina of the whole race as well has suffered in consequence.

Whenever a foreigner--it is the white man who is "the foreigner" over here--begins a comparison or contrast between the Chinese and the j.a.panese, he is sure to mention among the first two or three things the vast difference in moral standards with regard to family life. The cleanness of the family life in China, he will tell you, is one of the great moral a.s.sets of the race, while the contrary conditions largely prevailing in j.a.pan would seem to threaten ultimate disaster to the people.

As in most Asiatic countries, however, there is in China no very definite moral sentiment against a man's marrying more than one wife.

In fact, it is regarded not as a question of morals but of expense. It is one of the privileges of the Chinaman who can afford it, and the No. 1 wife is often glad for her husband to take a No. 2 and a No. 3 wife, because the secondary wives are somewhat under her authority and relieve her of much work and worry. A few months ago a Chinaman in Hankow had a very capable No. 2 wife who was about to quit him to work for some missionaries, whereupon Wife No. 1, Wife No. 3, and the much-worried husband all joined in a protest against the household's losing so capable a woman.

All these three wives were in subjection to the husband's mother, however, until the old lady took cholera last year, and {135} in a day or so was dead. The prevalence of awful scourges, such as cholera and bubonic plague, is another evil which the new China must conquer.

These diseases are due mainly, of course, to unsanitary ways of living, and when you have been through a typical Chinese city you wonder that anybody escapes. The streets are so narrow that with outstretched arms you can almost reach from side to side, and the unmentionable foulness of them often smells to heaven.

Moreover, if you have the idea that the typical Chinaman is content to live only on rice, prepare to abandon it. Hogs are more common in a village of Chinamen than dogs in a village of negroes; and, in some cases, almost equally at home in the houses. I saw a Chinese woman in Kiukiang feeding a fat porker in the front room, while, in the narrow streets around, hogs and dogs were wandering together or lying contentedly asleep in the sunshine by the ca.n.a.l bank. In fact, the ancient Chinese character for "home" is composed of two characters--"pig" and "shelter"--a home being thus represented as a pig under a shelter!

Small wonder that cholera is frequent, smallpox a scourge, and leprosy in evidence here and there. Quite recently a couple of mission teachers of my denomination have died of smallpox: they "didn't believe in vaccination." Shanghai, as I write this, is just recovering from a bubonic plague scare. There were one or two deaths from the plague among the Chinese, whereupon the foreigners put into force such drastic quarantine regulations that the Chinese rebelled with riots.

The whites then put their cannon into position, the volunteer soldiers were called out, and it looked at one time as if I should find the city in a state of b.l.o.o.d.y civil war, but fortunately the trouble seems now to have blown over.

Unfortunately the ignorant Chinese put a great deal more faith in patent medicines and patent medicine fakirs than they do in approved sanitary measures. It is interesting to find that American patent medicines discredited at home by {136} the growing intelligence of our people have now taken refuge in the Orient, and are coining the poor Chinaman's ignorance into substantial shekels. Worst of all, some of the religious papers over here are helping them to delude the unintelligent, just as too many of our church papers at home are doing.

In Shanghai I picked up a weekly publication printed in Chinese and issued by the Christian Literature Society, and asked what was the advertis.e.m.e.nt on the back. "Dr. Williams's Pink Pills for Pale People," was the answer.