Length of Height stage above sea 1st day—Anning-cheo 70 li 6,300 ft. 2nd day—Lao-ya-kwan 70 li 6,800 ft. 3rd day—Lu-feng-hsien 75 li 5,500 ft. 4th day—Sei-tze 80 li 6,100 ft. 5th day—Kwang-tung-hsien 60 li 6,300 ft. 6th day—Rest day. 7th day—Ch'u-hsiong-fu 70 li 6,150 ft. 8th day—Luho-kai 60 li 6,000 ft. 9th day—Sha-chiao-kai 65 li 6,400 ft. 10th day—Pu-peng 90 li 7,200 ft. 11th day—Yuen-nan-i 65 li 6,800 ft. 12th day—Hungay 80 li 6,000 ft. 14th day—Chao-chow 60 li 6,750 ft. 15th day—Tali-fu 60 li 6,700 ft.

A long, winding and physically-exhausting road took me from Sha-chiao-kai to Yin-wa-kwan, the most elevated pass between Yuen-nan-fu and Tali-fu, and continued over barren mountains, bereft of shelter, and void of vegetation and people, to Pupeng. A rough climb of an hour and a half then took me to the top of the next mountain, where roads and ruts followed a high plateau for about thirty li, and with a precipitous descent I entered the plain of Yuen-nan-i. Then over and between barren hills, passing a small lake and plain with the considerable town of Yuen-nan-hsien ten li to the right, I continued in a narrow valley and over mountains in the same uncultivated condition to Hungay, situated in a swampy valley. Having crossed this valley, another rough climb brings the traveler to the top of the next pass, Ting-chi-ling, whence the road descends, and leads by a well-cultivated valley to Chao-chow. After an easy thirty li we reached Hsiakwan,[AD] one of the largest commercial cities in the province, lying at the foot of the most magnificent mountain range in Yuen-nan, and by the side of the most famous lake. A paved road takes one in to his destination at Tali-fu, where I was welcomed by Dr. and Mrs. Clark, of the China Inland Mission, and hospitably entertained for a couple of days.

The roads in general from Yuen-nan-fu to Tali-fu were worse than any I have met from Chung-king onwards, partly owing to the mountainous condition of the country, and partly to neglect of maintenance.

Where the road is paved, it is in most places worse than if it had not been paved at all, as neither skill nor common sense seems to have been exercised in the work. It is probably safe to say that there are no ancient roads in Yuen-nan, in the sense of the constructed highways which have lasted through the centuries, for the civilization of the early Yuen-nanese was not equal to such works. As a matter of fact, the condition of the roads is all but intolerable. Many were never made, and are seldom mended—one may say that with very few exceptions they are never repaired, except when utterly impassable, and then in the most make-shift manner.

My highly-strung Rusty received a shock to his nervous system as I led him leisurely from the incline leading into Anning-cheo (6,300 feet), through the arched gateway in a pagoda-like entrance, which when new would have been a credit to any city. The stones of the main street were so slippery that I could hardly keep on my legs. Frightened by one of their number dragging its empty wooden carrying frame along the ground behind it, a drove of unruly-pack-ponies lashed and bucked and tossed themselves out of order, and an instant afterwards came helter-skelter towards my ten-inch pathway by the side of the road. All of my men caught the panic, and in their mad rush several were knocked down and trampled upon by the torrent of frightened creatures. I thought I was being charged by cavalry, but beyond a good deal of bruising I escaped unhurt. Closer and closer came the hubbub and the din of the town—the market was not yet over. As I approached the big street, throngs of blue-cottoned yokels, quite out of hand, created a nerve-racking uproar, as they thriftily drove their bargains. I shrugged my shoulders, gazed long and earnestly at the motley mob, and putting on a bold front, pushed through in a careless manner. Ponies with salt came in from the other end of the town, and in their waddling the little brutes gave me more knocks.

It was an awful crowd—Chinese, Minchia, Lolo, and other specimens of hybridism unknown to me. Yet I suppose the majority of them may be called happy. Certainly the simplicity of the life of the common people, their freedom from fastidious tastes, which are only a fetter in our own Western social life, their absolute independence of furniture in their homes, their few wants and perhaps fewer necessities, when contrasted with the demands of the Englishman, is to them a state of high civilization. Here were farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers, and retired people living a simple, unsophisticated life. All the strength of the world and all its beauties, all true joy, everything that consoles, that feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark paths, everything that enables us to discern across our poor lives a splendid goal and a boundless future, comes to us from true simplicity. I do not say that we get all this from the Chinese, but in many ways they can teach us how to live in the spirit of simplicity. They were living from hand to mouth, with seemingly no anxieties at all—and yet, too, they were living without God, and with very little hope.

And here the foreigner re-appeared to disturb them. Even in Anning-cheo, only a day from the capital, I was regarded as a being of another species, and was treated with little respect. I was not wanted.

No international question has become more hackneyed than "Does China want the foreigner?" Columns of utter nonsense have from time to time been printed in the English press, purporting to have come from men supposed to know, to the effect that this Empire is crying out, waiting with open arms to welcome the European and the American with all his advanced methods of Christendom and civilization. It has by general assent come to be understood that China does want the foreigner. But those who know the Chinese, and who have lived with them, and know their inherent insincerity in all that they do, still wonder on, and still ask, "Does she?"

To the European in Hong-Kong, or any of the China ports, having trustworthy Chinese on his commercial staff—without whom few businesses in the Far East can make progress—my argument may seem to have no raison d'etre. He will be inclined to blurt out vehemently the absurdity of the idea that the Chinese do not want the foreigner. First, they cannot do without him if China is to come into line as a great nation among Eastern and Western powers. And then, again, could anyone doubt the sincerity of the desire on the part of the Celestial for closer and downright friendly intercourse if he has had nothing more than mere superficial dealings with them?

Thus thought the writer at one time in his life. He has had in a large commercial firm some of the best Chinese assistants living, in China or out of it, and has nothing but praise for their assiduous perseverance and remarkable business acumen and integrity.

As a business man, I admire them far and away above any other race of people in the East and Far East. Is there any business man in the Straits Settlements who has not the same opinion of the Straits-born Chinese? But as one who has traveled in China, living among the Chinese and with them, seeing them under all natural conditions, at home in their own country, I say unhesitatingly that at the present time only an infinitesimal percentage of the population of the vast Interior entertain genuine respect for the white man, and, in centers where Western influence has done so much to break down the old-time hatred towards us, the real, unveneered attitude of the ordinary Chinese is one not calculated to foster between the Occident and the Orient the brotherhood of man. Difficult is it for the foreigner in civilized parts of China—and impossible for the great preponderance of the European peoples at home—to grasp the fact that in huge tracts of Interior China the populace have never seen a foreigner, save for the ubiquitous missionary, who takes on more often than not the dress of the native.

Although the Chinese Government recognizes the dangerous situation of the nation vis-a-vis with nations of Europe, and has ratified one treaty after another with us, the nation itself does not, so far as the traveler can see, appreciate the fact that she cannot possibly resist the white man, and hold herself in seclusion as formerly from the Western world. China is discovering—has discovered officially, although that does not necessarily mean nationally—as Japan did so admirably when her progress was most marked, that steam and machinery have made the world too small for any part thereof to separate itself entirely from the broadening current of the world's life.

Whilst not for a moment failing to admire the aggressive character of Occidentals, and the resultant necessity of thwarting them—we see[1] this especially in official circles in Yuen-nan—Chinese leaders of thought and activity are recognizing that in international relations the final appeal can be only to a superior power, and that power, to be superior, must be thorough, and thorough throughout. So different to what has held good in China for countless ages. That is why China is making sure of her army, and why she will have ready in 1912—ten years before the period originally intended—no less than thirty-six divisions, each division formed of ten thousand units.[A] China is now endeavoring to walk the ground which led Japan to greatness among the nations—she takes Japan as her pattern, and thinks that what Japan has done she can do—and, officially abandoning her long course of self-sufficient isolation, is plunging into the flood of international progress, determined to acquire all the knowledge she can, and thus win for herself a place among the Powers.

But I am in Yuen-nan, and things move slowly here.

All this does not mean that my presence is desired, or that fear of me, the foreigner, has ceased. On the contrary, it signifies that I am more greatly to be feared. The European is not wanted in China, no matter how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who sits and devours all the newspaper copy—good, bad and indifferent—which filters through regarding China becoming the El Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of teaching the Chinese to foreignize as much as he can, teaching the leaders of the people to strive to modify national life, and to raise public conduct and administration to the best standards of the West.

When China is capable of looking after herself, and able to maintain the position she is securing by the aid of the foreigner in her provinces, following her present mode of thought and action, the foreigner may go back again. But it is to be hoped that the evolution of the country will be different.

Another feature impressed upon me was the emptiness of the lives of the people. Education was rare, and any education they had was confined to the Chinese classics.

Neither of the three men I had with me could read or write. The thoughts of these people are circumscribed by the narrow world in which they live, and only a chance traveler such as myself allows them a glimpse of other places. Each man, with rare exception, lives and labors and dies where he is born—that is his ambition; and in the midst of a people whose whole outlook of life is so contracted, I find difficulty in believing that progress such as Japan made in her memorable fifty-year forward movement will be made by the Chinese of Yuen-nan in two hundred years. Everything one can see around him here, at this town of Anning-cheo, seems to make against it. In my dealings with Chinese in their own country—I speak broadly—I have found that they "know everything." I erected a printing-press in Tong-ch'uan-fu some months ago—a type of the old flat handpress not unlike that first used by Caxton. It was a part of the equipment of the Ai Kueh Hsieh Tang (Love of Country School), and I was invited by the gentry to erect it. Now the thing had not been up an hour before all the old fossils in the place knew all about it. Printing to them was easy—a child could do it. It is always, "O ren teh, o ren teh" ("I know, I know"). These men, dressed in their best, stood with arms behind them, and smiled stupidly as I labored with my coat off fixing their primitive machinery. Yet they did not know, and now, within a few months, not a sheet has been printed, and the whole plant is going to rack and ruin.

This is the difference between the Chinese and the tribespeople of Yuen-nan. Here we see the god of the missionary again, quite apart from any religious basis. The tribesman comes and lays himself at the feet of the missionary, and says at once, "I do not know. Tell me, and I will follow you. I want to learn." That is why it is that the Chinese stand open-eyed and open-mouthed when they see the Miao making strides altogether impossible to themselves, in proportion to their standard of civilization, and this position of things will not be altered, unless they cease to deceive themselves. I have seen a Miao boy of nine who never in his life had seen a Chinese character, who did not know that school existed and, whose only tutoring depended on the week's visit of the missionary twice a year. I have seen this youngster read off a sheet of Chinese characters no Chinese boy of his age in the whole city would succeed in. I have not been brought into contact with any other tribe as I have with the Hua Miao.[1]

But if the progress this once-despised people are making is maintained, the Yuen-nanese will very soon be left behind in the matter of practical scholarship. These Miao live the simplest of simple lives, but they wish to become better—to live purer lives, to become civilized, to be uplifted; and therefore they are most humble, most approachable, and are slowly evolving into a happy position of proud independence. Education among the Hua Miao is not lost: among the Chinese much of the labor put forward in endeavors to educate them is lost, or seems to bear no immediate fruit. The Miao are living by confidence and hope that turns towards the future; the Yuen-nanese are content with their confidence in the past. The Miao, however, were not like this always—but a few years ago they were not heard of outside China.

The coming emancipation of their women, demands some attention. The few Europeans who have lived among the multitudes in Central China would not associate beds of roses with the lives of the women anywhere.

The daughter is seldom happy, and unless the wife present her husband with sons, who will perpetuate the father's name and burn incense at his tablet after his death, her life is more often than not made absolutely unbearable—a fact more than any other one thing responsible for the numerous suicides. She is the drudge, the slave of the man. And the popular belief is that all the women of the Middle Kingdom are essentially Chinese; but little is heard of the tribespeople—more numerous probably than in any other given area in all the world—whose womankind are as far removed from the Chinese in language, habits and customs as English ladies of to-day are removed from Grecians. A decade or so ago no one heard of the Miao women: they were the lowest of the low, having no status. They were far worse off than their Chinese sisters, who, no matter what they had to endure after marriage, were certainly safeguarded by law and etiquette allowing them to enter the married state with respectability; but no social laws, no social ties protect the Miao women.

Until a few years ago their "club" was a common brothel, too horrible to describe in the English language. As soon as a girl gave birth to her first child she came down on the father to keep her. In many cases, it is only fair to say, they lived together faithfully as man and wife, although such cases were not by any means in the majority. The poor creatures herded together in their unspeakable vice and infamy, with no shame or common modesty, fighting for the wherewithal to live, and only by chance living regularly with one man, and then only just so long as he wished. Little girls of ten and over regularly attended these awful hovels, and children grew out of their childhood with no other vision than that of entering into the disgraceful life as early as Nature would allow them. It meant little less than that practically the whole of the population was illegitimate, viewed from a Western standpoint. No such thing as marriage existed. Men and women cohabited in this horrible orgy of existence, with the result that murder, disease and pestilence were rife among them. It was only a battle of the survival of the fittest to pursue so terrible a life. Nearly all the people were diseased by the transgression of Nature's laws.

After a time, however, through the instrumentality of Protestant missionaries, these wretched people began to see the light of civilization. Gradually, and of their own free will, the girls gave up their accursed dens of misery and shame, and the men lived more in accord with social law and order.

The Miao, too, had hitherto been dependent for their literature upon the Chinese character, which only a few could understand. Soon they had literature in their own language,[AE] and a great social reform set in. They showed a desire for Western learning such as has seldom been seen among any people in China—these were people lowest down in the social scale; and now the latest phase is the establishment of bethrothal and marriage laws, calculated to revolutionize the community and to introduce what in China is the equivalent for home life.

Betrothal among the Chinese is a matter with which the parties most deeply concerned have little to do. Their parents engage a go-between or match-maker, and another point is that there is no age limit. Not so now with the Christian Miao. No paid go-between is engaged, and brides are to be at a minimum age of eighteen years, and bridegrooms twenty. The establishment of these laws will, it is hoped, make for the emancipation from a life of the most dreadful misery of thousands of women in one of the darkest countries of the earth.[AF]

But now the Miao is pressing forward under his burdens, to guide himself in the struggle, to retrieve his falls and his failures; and in the future lies his hope—the indomitable hope upon which the interest of humanity is based—and he has in addition the grand expectation of escaping despair even in death. It is all the praiseworthy work of our fellow-countrymen, living isolated lives among the people, building up a worthy Christian structure upon Miao simplicity and humble fidelity to the foreigner.

But I digress from my travel.

Little out of the ordinary marked my travels to Lao-ya-kwan (6,800 feet), an easy stage. My meager tiffin at an insignificant mountain village was, as usual, an educational lesson to the natives. Each tin that came from my food basket—one's servant delighted to lay out the whole business—underwent the severest criticism tempered with unmeaning eulogy, picked up and put down by perhaps a score of people, who did not mean to be rude. When I used their chopsticks—dirty little pieces of bamboo—in a manner very far removed from their natural method, they were proud of me. Outrageously panegyric references were made when an old man, scratching at his disagreeable itch-sores under my nose, clipped a youngster's ear for hazarding my age to be less than that of any of the bystanders, the length of my moustache and a three-day growth on my chin giving them the opinion that I was certainly over sixty.[AG]

I entered Lao-ya-kwan under an inauspicious star. No accommodation was to be had, all the inns were literally overrun with sedan chairs and filled with well-dressed officials, already busy with the "hsi-lien" (wash basin). In my dirty khaki clothes, out at knee and elbow, looking musty and mean and dusty, with my topee botched and battered, I presented a most unhappy contrast as I led my pony down the street under the sarcastic stare of bystanding scrutineers. The nights were cold, and in the private house where I stayed, mercifully overlooked by a trio of protesting effigies with visages grotesque and gruesome, rats ran fearlessly over the room's mud floor, and at night I buried my head in my rugs to prevent total disappearance of my ears by nibbling. Not so my men. They slept a few feet from me, three on one bench, two on another. Bedding was not to be had, and so among the dirty straw they huddled together as closely as possible to preserve what bodily heat they had. Snow fell heavily. In the early morning sunlight on January 13th the undulating valley, with its grand untrodden carpet of white, looked magnificently beautiful as I picked out the road shown me by a poor fellow whose ears had got frost-nipped.

No easy work was it climbing tediously up the narrow footway in a sharp spur rising some 1,000 feet in a ribbed ascent, overlooking a fearful drop. Over to the left I saw an unhappy little urchin, hardly a rag covering his shivering, bleeding body, grovelling piteously in the snow, while his blind and goitrous mother did her best at gathering firewood with a hatchet. The pass leading over this range, through which the white crystalline flakes were driven wildly in one's face, was a half-moon of smooth rock actually worn away by the endless tramping of myriads of pack-ponies, who then were plodding through ruts of steps almost as high as their haunches.

A man with a diseased hip joined me thirty li farther on, dismounting from his pile of earthly belongings which these men fix on the backs of their ponies. It is a creditable trapeze act to effect a mount after the pony is ready for the journey. He had, he said, met me before. He knew that I was a missionary, and had heard me preach. He remembered my wife and myself and children passing the night in the same inn in which he stayed on one of his pilgrimages from his native town somewhere to the east of the province. I had never seen him before! I had no wife; I have never preached a sermon in my life. I should be pained ever again to have to suffer his unmannerly presence anywhere.

Ponies were being loaded near my table. The rapscallion in question explained that the black blocks were salt, taking a pinch from my salt-cellar with his grimy fingers to add point to his remarks. I kicked at a couple of mongrels under the rude form on which I sat—they fought for the skins of those potato-like pears which grow here so prolifically. The person announced that they were dogs, and that an idiosyncrasy of Chinese dogs was to fight. Several wags joined in, and all appeared, through the traveling nincompoop, to know all about my past and present, lapsing into a desultory harangue upon all men and things foreign. The street reminded me of Clovelly—rugged and ragged—and the people were wrinkled and wretched; and, indeed, being a Devonian myself by birth, I should be excused of wantonly intending to hurt the delicate feelings of the lusty sons of Devon were I to declare that I thought the life not of a very terrible dissimilarity from that port of antiquity in the West.

Salt was everywhere, much more like coal than salt, certainly as black. The blocks were stacked up by the sides of inns ready for transport, carried on the backs of a multitude of poor wretches who work like oxen from dawn to dusk for the merest pittance, on the backs of droves and droves of ponies, scrambling and spluttering along over the slippery once-paved streets.

All day long, with the exception of two or three easy ascents, we were travelling in pleasantly undulating country of park-like magnificence. My men dallied. I tramped on alone; and sitting down to rest on the rocks, I realized that I was in one of the strangest, loneliest, wildest corners of the world. Great mountain-peaks towered around me, white and sparkling diadems of wondrous beauty, and at my feet, black and stirless, lay a silent pool, reflecting the weird shadows of my coolies flitting like specters among the jagged rocks of these most solitary hills.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote AD: Hsiakwan would be supplied by a branch line of the main railway in the Kunlong scheme advocated by Major H.R. Davies, leaving at Mi-tu, to the south of Hungay.—E.J.D.]

[Footnote AE: The written language was framed and instituted by the Rev. Sam. Pollard, of the Bible Christian Mission (now merged into the United Methodist Mission).—E.J.D.]

[Footnote AF: The marriage laws were instituted by the China Inland Mission at Sa-pu-shan, where a great work is being done among the Hua Miao. A good many more stipulations are embodied in the excellent rules, but I have no room here to detail.—E.J.D.]

[Footnote AG: The Chinese have the crudest ideas of the age of foreigners. Among themselves the general custom is for a man to shave his upper lip so long as his father is alive, so that in the ordinary course a man wearing a moustache is looked upon as an old man. In Tong-ch'uan-fu the rumor got abroad that three "uei kueh ren" ("foreign men") went riding horses—(two young ones and one old one. The "old one" was myself, because I had hair on my top lip, despite the fact that I was considerably the junior. And the fact that one was a lady was not deemed worthy of the slightest consideration.—E.J.D.]



CHAPTER XVI.

Lu-feng-hsien and its bridge. Magnificence of mountains towards the capital. Opportunity for Dublin Fusiliers. Characteristic climbing. Crockery crash and its sequel. Mountain forest. Changeableness of climate. Wayside scene and some reflections. Is your master drunk? Babies of the poor. Loess roads. Travelers, and how they should travel. Wrangling about payment at the tea-shop. The lying art among the Chinese. Difference of the West and East. Strange Chinese characteristic. Eastern and Western civilization, and how it is working. Remarks on the written character and Romanisation. Will China lose her national characteristics? "Ih dien mien, ih dien mien." A nasty experience of the impotently dumb. Rescued in the nick of time.

When the day shall come for its history to be told, the historian will have little to say of Lu-feng-hsien, that is—if he is a decent sort of fellow.

He may refer to its wonderful bridge, to its beggars and its ruins. The stone bridge, one of the best of its kind in the whole empire, and I should think better than any other in Yuen-nan, stands to-day conspicuously emblematic of ill-departed prosperity. So far as I remember, it was the only public ornament in a condition of passable repair in any way creditable to the ratepayers of the hsien. The wall is decayed, the people are decayed, and in every nook and cranny are painful evidences of preventable decay, marked by a conservatism among the inhabitants and unpardonable indolence.

The bridge, however, has stood the test of time, and bids fair to last through eternity. Other travelers have passed over it since the days of Marco Polo, but I should like to say a word about it. Twelve yards or so wide, and no less than 150 yards long, it is built entirely of grey stone; with its massive piers, its excellent masonry, its good (although crude) carving, its old-time sculpturing of dreadful-looking animals at either end, its decorative triumphal arches, its masses of memorial tablets (which I could not read), its seven arches of beautiful simplicity and symmetry and perfect proportion, it would have been a credit to any civilized country in the world. I noticed that, in addition to cementing, the stones and pillars forming the sides of the roadway were also dovetailed. Among the works of public interest with which successive emperors have covered China, the bridges are not the least remarkable; and in them one is able to realize the perseverance of the Chinese in the enormous difficulties of construction they have had to overcome.

Passing over the stream—the Hsiang-shui Ho, I believe—I stepped out across the plain with one foot soaked, a pony having pulled me into the water as he drank. Peas and beans covered with snow adjoined a heart-breaking road which led up to a long, winding ascent through a glade overhung by frost-covered hedgerows, where the sun came gently through and breathed the sweet coming of the spring. From midway up the mountain the view of the plain below and the fine range of hills separating me from the capital was one of exceeding loveliness, the undisturbed white of the snow and frost sparkling in the sunshine contrasting most strikingly with the darkened waves of billowy green opposite, with a background of sharp-edged mountains, whose summits were only now and again discernible in the waning morning mist. Snow lay deep in the crevices. My frozen path was treacherous for walking, but the dry, crisp air gave me a gusto and energy known only in high latitudes. In a pass cleared out from the rock we halted and gained breath for the second ascent, surmounted by a dismantled watch-tower. It has long since fallen into disuse, the sound tiles from the roof having been appropriated for covering other habitable dwellings near by, where one may rest for tea. The road, paved in some places, worn from the side of the mountain in others, was suspended above narrow gorges, an entrance to a part of the country which had the aspect of northern regions. The sun, tearing open the curtain of blue mist, inundated with brightness one of the most beautiful landscapes it is possible to conceive. A handful of Dublin Fusiliers with quick-firing rifles concealed in the hollows of the heights might have stopped a whole army struggling up the hill-sides. But no one appeared to stop me, so I went on.

Climbing was characteristic of the day. Lu-feng-hsien is about 5,500 feet; Sei-tze (where we were to sleep) 6,100 feet. Not much of a difference in height; but during the whole distance one is either dropping much lower than Lu-feng or much higher than Sei-tze. For thirty li up to Ta-tsue-si (6,900 feet) there is little to revel in, but after that, right on to the terrific drop to our destination for the night, we were going through mountain forests than which there are none better in the whole of the province, unless it be on the extreme edge of the Tibetan border, where accompanying scenery is altogether different.

From a height of 7,850 feet we dropped abruptly, through clouds of thick red dust which blinded my eyes and filled my throat, down to the city of Sei-tze. I went down behind some ponies. Upwards came a fellow struggling with two loads of crockery, and in the narrow pathway he stood in an elevated position to let the animals pass. Irony of fate! One of the horses—it seemed most intentional—gave his load a tilt: man and crockery all went together in one heap to a crevice thirty yards down the incline, and as I proceeded I heard the choice rhetoric of the victim and the muleteer arguing as to who should pay.

Just before that, I dipped into the very bosom of the earth, with rugged hills rising to bewildering heights all around, base to summit clad luxuriously in thick greenery of mountain firs, a few cedars, and the Chinese ash. Black patches of rock to the right were the death-bed of many a swaying giant, and in contrast, running away sunwards, a silver shimmer on the unmoving ocean of delicious green was caused by the slantwise sun reflections, while in the ravines on the other side a dark blue haze gave no invitation. Smoothly-curving fringes stood out softly against the eternal blue of the heavens. Farther on, eloquent of their own strength and imperturbability, were deep rocks, black and defiant; but even here firs grew on the projecting ledges which now and again hung menacingly above the red path, shading away the sunlight and giving to the dark crevices an atmosphere of damp and cold, where men's voices echoed and re-echoed like weird greetings from the grave. Onwards again, and from the cool ravines, adorned with overhang branches, forming cosy retreats from the now blazing sun, one emerged to a road leading up once more to undiscovered vastnesses. Yonder narrowed a gorge, fine and delicately covered, pleasing to one's aesthetic sense. The center was a dome, all full of life and waving leafage, ethereal and sweet; and running down, like children to their mother, were numerous little hills densely clothed in a green lighter and more dainty than that of the parent hill, throwing graceful curtsies to the murmuring river at the foot. As I write here, bathed in the beauty of spring sunlight, it is difficult to believe that a few hours since the thermometer was at zero. Little spots of habitation, with foodstuffs growing alongside, looking most lonely in their patches of green in the forest, added a human and sentimental picturesqueness to a scene so strongly impressive.

A thatched, barn-like place gave us rest, the woman producing for me a huge chunk of palatable rice sponge-cake sprinkled with brown sugar. Little naked children, offspring of parents themselves covered with merest hanging rags, groped round me and treated me with courteous curiosity; goats smelt round the coolie-loads of men who rested on low forms and smoked their rank tobacco; smoke from the green wood fires issued from the mud grates, where receptacles were filled with boiling water ready for the traveler, constantly re-filled by a woman whose child, hung over her back, moaned piteously for the milk its mother was too busy to give to it. Near by a young girl gave suck to a deformed infant, lucky to have survived its birth; her neck was as big as her breasts—merely a case of goitre. Coolies passed, panting and puffing, all casting a curious glance at him to whose beneficence all were willing to pander.

At tiffin I counted thirty-three wretched people, who turned out to see the barbarian. They desired, and desired importunately, to touch me and the clothes which covered me. And I submitted.

This half-way place was interesting owing to the fact that the lady in charge of the buffet could speak two words of French—she had, I believe, acted as washerwoman to a man who at one time had been in the Customs at Mengtsz. Great excitement ensued among the perspiring laborers of the road and the dumb-struck yokels of the district. The lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire village, she endured such terrible poverty that one would have thought her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out. But no! The lusty dame was still sprightly. She had been three times divorced. The person at present connected with her in the bonds of wedded life—also goitrous and morally repulsive—stood by and gazed down upon her like a proud bridegroom. He resented the levity of Shanks and his companion, but, owing to the detail of a sightless eye, he could not see all that transpired. However, we were all happy enough. Charges were not excessive. My men had a good feed of rice and cabbage, with the usual cabbage stump, two raw rice biscuits (which they threw into the ashes to cook, and when cooked picked the dirt off with their long finger-nails), and as much tea as they could drink—all for less than a penny.

There is something in traveling in Yuen-nan, where the people away from the cities exhibit such painful apathy as to whether dissolution of this life comes to them soon or late, which breeds drowsiness. After a tramp over mountains for five or six hours on end, one naturally needed rest. To-day, as I sat after lunch and wrote up my journal, I nearly fell asleep. As I watched the reflections of all these ill-clad figures on the stony roadway, and dozed meanwhile, one rude fellow asked my man whether I was drunk!

I was not left long to my reverie.

Entering into a conversation intended for the whole village to hear, my bulky coolie sublet his contract for two tsien for the eighty li—we had already done fifty. The man hired was a weak, thin, half-baked fellow, whose body and soul seemed hardly to hang together. He was the first to arrive. As soon as he got in; this same man took a needle from the inside of his great straw hat and commenced ridding his pants of somewhat outrageous perforations. Such is the Chinese coolie, although in Yuen-nan he would be an exception. Late at night he offered to put a shoe on my pony. I consented. He did the job, providing a new shoe and tools and nails, for 110 cash—just about twopence.

I could not help, thinking of the children I had seen to-day, "Sad for the dirt-begrimed babies that they were born." These children were all a family of eternal Topsies—they merely grew, and few knew how. They are rather dragged up than brought up, to live or die, as time might appoint. Babies in Yuen-nan, for the great majority, are not coaxed, not tossed up and down and petted, not soothed, not humored. There are none to kiss away their tears, they never have toys, and dream no young dreams, but are brought straight into the iron realities of life. They are reared in smoke and physical and moral filth, and become men and women when they should be children: they haggle and envy, and swear and murmur. When in Yuen-nan—or even in the whole of China—will there be the innocence and beauty of childhood as we of the West are blessed with?

Roads here were in many cases of a light loess, and some of red limestone rock, with a few li of paved roads. Many of the main roads over the loess are altered by the rains. Two days of heavy rain will produce in some places seas of mud, often knee-deep, and this will again dry up quite as rapidly with the next sunshine. They become undermined, and crumble away from the action of even a trickling stream, so as to become always unsafe and sometimes quite impassable.

Delays are very dear to the heart of every Chinese. The traveler, if he is desirous of getting his caravan to move on speedily, has little chance of success unless he assumes an attitude of profoundest indifference to all men and things around him—never appear to be in a hurry.

We are accompanied to-day to Kwang-tung-hsien by the coolie who carried the load yesterday. He sits by staring enviously at his compatriots in the employ of the foreign magnate, who rests on a stone behind and listens to the conversation. They invite him to carry again; he refuses. Now the argument—natural and right and proper—is ensuing with warmth. Lao Chang, with the air of a hsien "gwan," sits in judgment upon them, bringing to bear his long experience of coolies and the amount of "heart-money" they receive, and has decided that the fellow should receive a tenth of a dollar and twenty cash in addition for carrying the heavier of the loads the remaining thirty li, as against ten cents offered by the men. He is now extending philosophic advice to them all, based on a knowledge of the coolie's life; the little meeting breaks up, good feeling prevails, and the loads carried on merrily. I still linger, sipping my tea. Lao Chang has grumbled because he has had to shell out seven cash, and I have already drunk ten cups (he generally uses the tea leaves afterwards for his personal use).

But wrangling about payment prevails always where Chinese congregate. In China, by high and low, lies are told without the slightest apparent compunction. One of the men in the above-mentioned dispute had an irrepressible volubility of assertion. He at once flew into a temper, adopting the style of the stage actor, proclaiming his virtue so that it might have been heard at Yuen-nan-fu. He was preserving his "face." For in this country temper is often, what it is not in the West, a test of truth. Among Westerners nothing is more insulting sometimes than a philosophic temper; but in China you must, as a first law unto yourself, protect yourself at all costs and against all comers, and it generally requires a good deal of noise. Here the bully is not the coward. In respect of prevarication, it seems to be absolutely universal; the poor copy the vice from the rich. It seems to be in the very nature of the people, and although it is hard to write, my experience convinces me that my statement is not exaggeration. I have found the Chinese—I speak of the common people, for in my travels I have not mixed much with the rich—the greatest romancer on earth. I question whether the great preponderance of the Chinese people speak six consecutive sentences without misrepresentation or exaggeration, tantamount to prevarication. Regretting that I have to write it, I give it as my opinion that the Chinese is a liar by nature. And when he is confronted with the charge of lying, the culprit seems seldom to feel any sense of guilt.

And yet in business—above the petty bargaining business—we have as the antithesis that the spoken word is his bond. I would rather trust the Chinese merely on his word than the Jap with a signed contract.

The Chinese knows that the Englishman is not a liar, and he respects him for it; and it is to be hoped that in Yuen-nan there will soon be seen the two streams of civilization which now flow in comparative harmony in other more enlightened provinces flowing here also in a single channel. These two streams—of the East and the West—represent ideas in social structure, in Government, in standards of morality, in religion and in almost every human conception as diverse as the peoples are racially apart. They cannot, it is evident, live together. The one is bound to drive out the other, or there must be such a modification of both as will allow them to live together, and be linked in sympathies which go farther than exploiting the country for initial greed. The Chinese will never lose all the traces of their inherited customs of daily life, of habits of thought and language, products which have been borne down the ages since a time contemporary with that of Solomon. No fair-minded man would wish it. And it is at once impossible.

The language, for instance. Who is there, who knows anything about it, who would wish to see the Chinese character drop out of the national life? Yet it is bound to come to some extent, and in future ages the written language will develop into pretty well the same as Latin among ourselves. Romanization, although as yet far from being accomplished, must sooner or later come into vogue, as is patent at the first glance at business. If commerce in the Interior is to grow to any great extent in succeeding generations, warranting direct correspondence with the ports at the coast and with the outside world, the Chinese hieroglyph will not continue to suffice as a satisfactory means of communication. No correspondence in Chinese will ever be written on a machine such as I am now using to type this manuscript, and this valuable adjunct of the office must surely force its way into Chinese commercial life. But only when Romanization becomes more or less universal.

This, however, by the way.

My point is, that no matter how Occidentalized he may become, the Chinese will never lose his national characteristics—not so much probably as the Japanese has done. What the youth has been at home, in his habits of thought, in his purpose and spirit, in his manifestation of action, will largely determine his after life. Chinese mental and moral history has so stamped certain ineffaceable marks on the language, and the thought and character of her people, that China will never—even were she so inclined—obliterate her Oriental features, and must always and inevitably remain Chinese. The conflict, however, is not racial, it is a question of civilization. Were it racial only, to my way of thinking we should be beaten hopelessly.

And as I write this in a Chinese inn, in the heart of Yuen-nan—the "backward province"—surrounded by the common people in their common, dirty, daily doings, a far stretch of vivid imagining is needed to see these people in any way approaching the Westernization already current in eastern provinces of this dark Empire.

This is what I wrote sitting on the top of a mountain during my tour across China. But it will be seen in other parts of this book that Western ideas and methods of progress in accord more with European standards are being adopted—and in some places with considerable energy—even in the "backward province." In travel anywhere in the world, one becomes absorbed more or less with one's own immediate surroundings, and there is a tendency to form opinions on the limitations of those surroundings. In many countries this would not lead one far astray, but in China it is different. Most of my opinion of the real Chinese is formed in Yuen-nan, and it is not to be denied that in all the other seventeen provinces, although a good many of them may be more forward in the trend of national evolution and progress, the same squalidness among the people, and every condition antagonistic to the Westerner's education so often referred to, are to be found. But China has four hundred and thirty millions of people, so that what one writes of one particular province—in the main right, perhaps—may not necessarily hold good in another province, separated by thousands of miles, where climatic conditions have been responsible for differences in general life. With its great area and its great population, it does not need the mind of a Spencer to see that it will take generations before every acre and every man will be gathered into the stream of national progress.

The European traveler in China cannot perhaps deny himself the pleasure of dwelling upon the absurdities and oddities of the life as they strike him, but there is also another side to the question. Our own civilization, presenting so many features so extremely removed from his own ancient ideas and preconceived notion of things in general, probably looks quite as ridiculous from the standpoint of the Chinese. The East and the West each have lessons to offer the other. The West is offering them to the East, and they are being absorbed. And perhaps were we to learn the lessons to which we now close our eyes and ears, but which are being put before us in the characteristics of Oriental civilization, we may in years to come, sooner than we expect, rejoice to think that we have something in return for what we have given; it may save us a rude awakening. It does not strike the average European, who has never been to China, and who knows no more about the country than the telegrams which filter through when massacres of our own compatriots occur, that Europe and America are not the only territories on this little round ball where the inhabitants have been left with a glorious heritage.

But I was speaking of my men delaying on the road to Kwang-tung-hsien, when they laughed at my impatience.

"Ih dien mien, ih dien mien," shouted one, as he held out a huge blue bowl of white wormlike strings and a couple of chopsticks. "Mien," it should be said, is something like vermicelli. A tremendous amount of it is eaten; and in Singapore, without exception, it is dried over the city's drains, hung from pole to pole after the rope-maker's fashion. Its slipperiness renders the long boneless strings most difficult of efficient adjustment, and the recollection of the entertainment my comrades received as I struggled to get a decent mouthful sticks to me still.

After that I hurried on, got off the "ta lu," and suffered a nasty experience for my foolishness. When nearing the city, inquiring whether my men had gone on inside the walls, a manure coolie, liar that he was, told me that they had. I strode on again, encountering the crowds who blocked the roadway as market progressed, who stared in a suspicious manner at the generally disreputable, tired, and dirty foreigner. Each moment I expected the escort to arrive. I could not sit down and drink tea, for I had not a single cash on my person. I could speak none of the language, and could merely push on, with ragtags at my heels, becoming more and more embarrassed by the pointing and staring public. I turned, but could see none of my men. I managed to get to the outer gate, and there sat down on the grass, with five score of gaping idiots in front of me. Seeing this vulgar-looking intruder among them, who would not answer their simplest queries, or give any reason for being there, suspicion grew worse; they naturally wanted to know what it was, and what it wanted. Some thought I might be deaf, and raved questions in my ear at the top of their voices. Even then I remained impotently dumb. Two policemen came and said something. At their invitation I followed them, and found myself later in a small police box, the street lined with people, facing an officer.

The man hailed me in speech uncivil. He was huge as the hyperborean bear, and cruel looking, and with a sort of apologetic petitionary growl I sidled off; but it was anything but comfortable, and I should not have been surprised had I found myself being led off to the yamen. After a nerve-trying half-hour, I was thankful to see the form of my men appearing at the moment when I was vehemently expressing indignation at not being understood.



CHAPTER XVII.

A bumptious official. Ignominious contrasts of two travelers. Diminishing respect for foreigners in the Far East. Where the European fails. His maltreatment of Orientals. Convicts on the way to death. At Ch'u-hsiony-fu. Buffaloes and children. Exasperating repetition met in Chinese home life. Unaesthetic womanhood. Quarrymen and careless tactics. Scope for the physiologist. Interesting unit of the city's humanity. Signs of decay in the countryside. Carrying the dead to eternal rest. At Chennan-chou. Public kotowing ceremony and its aftermath. Chinese ignorance of distance.

All-round idyllic peace did not reign at Kwang-tung-hsien, where I rested over Sunday. Contacts in social conditions gave rise inevitably to causes for conflicts.

Arriving early, my men were able to secure the best room and soon after, with much imposing pomp and show, a "gwan"[AH] arrived, disgusted that he had to take a lower room. I bowed politely to him as he came in. He did not return it, however, but stood with a contemptuous grin upon his face as he took in the situation. I do not know who the person was, neither have a wish to trace his ancestry, but his bumptiousness and general misbehavior, utterly in antagonism to national etiquette, made me hate the sight of the fellow. Pride has been said to make a man a hedgehog. I do not say that this man was a hedgehog altogether, but he certainly seemed to wound everyone he touched. He had with him a great retinue, an extravagant equipage, fine clothes, and presumably a great fortune; but none of this offended me—it was his contempt which hurt. He seemed to splash me with mud as he passed, and was altogether badly disposed. In his every act he heaped humiliation upon me, and insulted me silently and gratuitously with unbearable disdain. Luckily, be it said to the credit of the Chinese Government, one does not often meet officials of this kind; such an atmosphere would nurture the worst feeling. It is, of course, possible that had I been traveling with many men and in a style necessary for representatives of foreign Governments, this hog might have been more polite; but the fact that I had little with me, and made a poor sort of a show, allowed him to come out in his true colors and display his unveneered feeling towards the foreigner. That he had no knowledge of the man crossing China on foot was evident. He was great and rich—that was the sentiment he breathed out to everyone—and the foreigner was humble. There is no wrong in enjoying a large superfluity, but it was not indispensable to have displayed it, to have wounded the eyes of him who lacked it, to have flaunted his magnificence at the door of my commonplace.

Had I been able to speak, I should have pointed out to this fellow that to know how to be rich is an art difficult to master, and that he had not mastered it; that as an official his first duty in exercising power was to learn that of humility; and that it is the irritating authority of such very lofty and imperious beings as himself, who say, "I am the law," that provokes insurrection. However, I was dumb, and could only return his contemptuous glance now and again.

To him I could have said, as I would here say also to every foreigner in the employ of the Chinese Government, "The only true distinction is superior worth." If foreigners in China are to have social and official rank respected, they must begin to be worthy of their rank, otherwise they help to bring it into hatred and contempt. It is a pity some native officials have to learn the same lesson.

In several years of residence in the Far East I have noticed respect for the foreigner unhappily diminishing. The root of the evil is in the mistaken idea that high station exempts him who holds it from observing the common obligations of life. It comes about—so often have I seen it in the Straits Settlements and in various parts of India—that those who demand the most homage make the least effort to merit that homage they demand. That is chiefly why respect for the foreigner in the Orient is diminishing, and I have no hesitancy in asserting that the average European in the East and Far East does not treat the Oriental with respect. He considers that the Chinese, the Malay, the Burman, the Indian is there to do the donkey work only. The newcomer generally discovers in himself an astounding personal omnipotence, and even before he can talk the language is so obsessed with it that as he grows older, his sense of it broadens and deepens. And in China—of the Chinese this is true to-day as in other spheres of the Far East—the native is there to do the donkey work, and does it contentedly and for the most part cheerfully. But he will not always be so content and so cheerful. He will not always suffer a leathering from a man whom he knows he dare not now hit back.[AI] Some day he may hit back. We have seen it before, how at some moment, by some interior force making a way to the light, an explosion takes place: there is an upheaval, all sorts of grave disorders, and because some Europeans are killed the Celestial Government is called upon to pay, and to pay heavily. Indemnities are given, but the Chinese pride still feels the smart.

[1 Pulling away up the sides of barren, sandy hills in my lonely pilgrimage, I could see wide, fertile plains sheltered in the undulating hollows of mountains, over which in arduous toil I vanished and re-appeared, how or where I could hardly calculate. Suddenly, rounding an awkward corner, a magnificent panorama broke upon the view in a rolling valley watered by many streams below, all green with growing wheat. A high spur about midway up the rolling mountain forms a capital spot for wayfarers to stop and exchange travelers' notes. A couple of convicts were here, their feet manacled and their white cotton clothing branded with the seal of death; by the side were the crude wooden cages in which they were carried by four men, with whom they mixed freely and manufactured coarse jokes. In six days bang would fall the knife, and their heads would roll at the feet of the executioners at Yuen-nan-fu.

Coming into Ch'u-hsiong-fu[AJ]—the stage is what the men call 90 li, but it is not more than 70—I was brought to an insignificant wayside place where the innkeeper upbraided my boy for endeavoring to allow me to pass without wetting a cup at his bonny hostelry. Had I done so, I should have avouched myself utterly indifferent to reputation as a traveler.

But I did not stay the night here. I passed on through the town to a new building, an inn, into which I peered inquiringly. A well-dressed lad came courteously forward, in his bowing and scraping seeming to say, "Good sir, we most willingly embrace the opportunity of being honored with your noble self and your retinue under our poor roof. Long since have we known your excellent qualities; long have we wished to have you with us. We can have no reserve towards a person of your open and noble nature. The frankness of your humor delights us. Disburden yourself, O great brother, here and at once of your paraphernalia."

I stayed, and was charged more for lodging than at any other place in all my wanderings in China. My experience was different from that of Major Davies when he visited this city in 1899. He writes:—

"The people of this town are particularly conservative and exclusive. They have such an objection to strangers that no inn is allowed within the city walls, and no one from any other town is allowed to establish a shop.... When the telegraph line was first taken through here there was much commotion, and so determined was the opposition of the townspeople to this new-fangled means of communication that the telegraph office had to be put inside the colonel's yamen, the only place where it would be safe from destruction."

The proprietor of the inn in which I stayed was a man of about fifty, of goodly person and somewhat corpulent, comely presence, good humor, and privileged freedom. He had a pretty daughter. He was an exception to the ordinary father in China, in the fact that he was proud of her, as he was of his house and his faring. But in all conscience he should have been abundantly ashamed of his charges, for my boy said I was charged three times too much, and I have no cause for doubting his word either, for he was fairly honest. I once had a boy in Singapore who acted for three weeks as a "ganti"[AK] whilst my own boy underwent a surgical operation, and between misreckonings, miscarriages, misdealings, mistakes and misdemeanors, had he remained with me another month I should have had to pack up lock, stock and barrel and clear.

I stayed here a day in the hope of getting my mail, but had the pleasure of seeing only the bag containing it. It was sealed, and the postmaster had no authority to break that seal.

There were no telegraph poles in the district through which I was passing; the connections were affixed to the trunks of trees. The telegraph runs right across the Ch'u-hsiong-fu plain, on entering which one crosses a rustic bridge just below a rather fine pagoda, from which an excellent view is obtained of the old city. The wall up towards the north gate, where there is another pagoda, is built over a high knoll. Inside the wall half the town is uncultivated ground. Four youngsters here were having a great time on the back of a lazy buffalo, who, turning his head swiftly to get rid of some irritating bee, dislodged the quartet to the ground, where they fought and cursed each other over the business.

Everything that one sees around here is particularly "Chinesey." It may be supposed that I am not the first person who has gone through town after town and found in all that he looks at, particularly the houses, certain forms identical, inevitable, exasperating by common repetition. It has been said that poetry is not in things, it is in us; but in China very little poetry comes into the homes and lives of the common millions: they are all dead dwelling-houses, even the best, bare homes without life or brightness. Among the working-classes of the West there is to be found a kind of ministering beauty which makes its way everywhere, springing from the hands of woman. When the dwelling is cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift finds a way to make order and puts care and art into everything in her house, puts a soul into the inanimate, and gives those subtle and winsome touches to which the most brutish of human beings is sensible. But in China woman does nothing of this. Her life is unaesthetic to the last degree. No happy improvisations or touches of the stamp of personality enter her home; one cannot trace the touches of witchery in the tying of a ribbon. Everywhere you find the same class of furniture and garniture, the same shape of table, of stool, of form, of bed, of cooking utensils, of picture, of everything; and all the details of her housekeeping are so apathetically uninteresting. The Chinese woman has no charming art, rather is it a common, horrid, daily grind. She is not, as the woman should be, the interpreter in her home of her own grace, and she differs from her Western sister in that it is impossible for her to express in her dress also the little personalities of character—all is eternally the same. But I know so very little of ladies' clothing, and therefore cease.

Quarrying was going on high up among the hills as I left the city. Men were out of sight, but their hammering was heard distinctly. As each boulder was freed these wielders of the hammer yelled to passers-by to look out for their heads, gave the stone a push to start it rolling, and if it rolled upon you it was your own fault and not theirs—you should have seen to it that you were somewhere else at the time. If it blocked the pathway, another had to be made by those who made the traffic. Directly under the quarry I was accosted by a beggar. "Old foreign man! Old foreign man!" he yelled. Stones were falling fast; it is possible that he does not sit there now.

Physiognomists do not swarm in China. There is grand scope for someone. There would be ample material for research for the student in the soldiers alone who would be sent to guard him from place to place. He would not need to go farther afield; for he would be given fat men and lean men, brave men and cowards, some blessed with brains and some not one whit brainy, civil and surly, stubby and lanky, but rogues and liars all. Travelers are always interested in their chairmen; oftentimes my interest in them was greater than theirs in me, until the time came for us to part. Then the "Ch'a ts'ien,"[AL] always in view from the outset of their duty, brought us in a manner nearer to each other.

As I came out of the inn at Ch'u-hsiong-fu somewhat hurriedly, for my men lingered long over the rice, I stumbled over the yamen fellow who crouched by the doorside. He laughed heartily. Had I fallen on him his tune might have been changed; but no matter. This unit of the city humanity was not bewilderingly beautiful. He was profoundly ill-proportioned, very goitrous, and ravages of small-pox had bequeathed to him a wonderful facial ugliness. He had, however, be it written to his honor, learnt that life was no theory. One could see that at a glance as he walked along at the head of the procession, with a stride like an ox, manfully shouldering his absurd weapon of office, which in the place of a gun was an immense carved wooden mace, not unlike a leg of the old-time wooden bedstead of antiquity. His ugliness was embittered somewhat by sunken, toothless jaws and an enigmatical stare from a cross-eye; he was also knock-kneed, and as an erstwhile gunpowder worker, had lost two fingers and a large part of one ear. But he had learnt the secret of simple duty: he had no dreams, no ambition embracing vast limits, did not appear to wish to achieve great things, unless it were that in his fidelity to small things he laid the base of great achievements. He waited upon me hand and foot; he burned with ardor for my personal comfort and well-being; he did not complicate life by being engrossed in anything which to him was of no concern—his only concern was the foreigner, and towards me he carried out his duty faithfully and to the letter. I would wager that that man, ugly of face and form, but most kindly disposed to one who could communicate little but dumb approval, was an excellent citizen, an excellent father, an excellent son.

So very different was another traveler who unceremoniously forced himself upon me with the inevitable "Ching fan, ching fan," although he had no food to offer. He commenced with a far-fetched eulogium of my ambling palfrey Rusty, who limped along leisurely behind me. So far as he could remember, poor ignorant ass, he had never seen a pony like it in his extensive travels—probably from Yuen-nan-fu to Tali-fu, if so far; but as a matter of fact, Rusty had wrenched his right fore fetlock between a gully in the rocks the day before and was now going lame. Dressed fairly respectably in the universal blue, my unsought companion was of middle stature, strongly built, but so clumsily as to border almost on deformity, and to give all his movements the ungainly awkwardness of a left-handed, left-legged man. He walked with a limp, was suffering (like myself) with sore feet; if not that, it was something incomparably worse. Not for a moment throughout the day did he leave my side, the only good point about him being that when we drank—tea, of course—he vainly begged to be allowed to pay. In that he was the shadow of some of my friends of younger days.

But of men enough.

From Ch'u-hsiong-fu on to Tali-fu the whole country bears lamentable signs of gradual ruin and decay, a falling off from better times. The former city is probably the most important point on the route, and is mentioned as a likely point for the proposed Yuen-nan Railway.

The country has never recovered from the terrible effects of the great Mohammendan Rebellion of 1857. Foundations of once imposing buildings still stand out in fearful significance, and ruins everywhere over the barren country tell plain tales all too sad of the good days gone. Temples, originally fit for the largest city in the Empire, with elaborate wood and stone carving and costly, weird images sculptured in stone, with particularly fine specimens of those blood-curdling Buddhistic hells and their presiding monsters, with miniature ornamental pagodas and intricate archways, are all now unused; and when the people need material for any new building (seldom erected now in this district), the temple grounds are robbed still more. In the days of its prosperity Yuen-nan must have been a fair land indeed, bright, smiling, seductive; now it is the exact antithesis, and the people live sad, flat, colorless existences.

For three days my caravan was preceded by twelve men, headed by a sort of gaffer with a gong, carrying a corpse in a massive black coffin, elaborate in red and blue silk drapings and with the inevitable white cock presiding, one leg tied with a couple of strands of straw to the cover, on which it crowed lustily. Their mission was an honorable one, carrying the honored dead to its last bed of rest eternal; for this dead man had secured the fulfillment of the highest in human destiny—to have his bones buried near the scene of his youth, near his home. This is a simple custom the Chinese cherish and reverence, of highest honor to the dead and of no mean value to the living. To the dead, because buried near the home of his fathers he would not be subject to those delusive temptations in the future state of that confused and complex life; to the living, because it gave work to a dozen men for several days, and enabled them to have a good time at the expense of the departed. A perpetual and excruciatingly unmusical chant, in keeping with the occasion's sadness, rent the mountain air, interrupted only when the bearers lowered the coffin and left the remains of the great dead on a pair of trestles in the roadway, whilst they drank to his happiness above and smoked tobacco which the relatives had given them. Once this heaper-up of Chinese merit[AM] was dumped unceremoniously on the turf while the headman entered into a blackguarding contest with one of the fellows who was alleged to be constantly out of step with his brethren, because he was a much smaller man. The gaffer gave him a bit of a drubbing for his insolence.

Rain came on at Chennan-chou, a small town of about three hundred houses, where I sought shelter in the last house of the street. The householder, a shrivelled, goitrous humpback, received me kindly, removed his pot of cabbage from the fire to brew tea for his uninvited guest, and showed great gratitude (to such an extent that he nearly fell into the fire as he moved to push the children forward towards me) when I gave a few cash to three kiddies, who gaped open-mouthed at the apparition thus found unexpectedly before their parent's hearth. More came in, my beneficent attention being modestly directed towards them; others followed, and still more, and more, whilst the man, removing from his mouth his four-foot pipe, and wiping the mouthpiece with his soiled coat-sleeve before offering it to me to smoke, smiled as I distributed more cash.

"They are all mine," he said cutely.

Poor fellow! There must have been a dozen nippers there, and I sighed at the thought of what some men come to as the last of half a string of cash slipped through my fingers.[AN]

Outside the town, on the lee side of a triumphal arch—erected, maybe, to the memory of one of the virtuous widows of the district—I untied my pukai and donned my mackintosh and wind-cap. A gale blew, my fingers ached with the cold, breathing was rendered difficult by the rarefied air. As we were thus engaged and discussing the prospects of the storm, yelling from under a gigantic straw hat, a fellow said—

"Suan liao" ("not worth reckoning") "only five more li to Sha-chiao-kai."

We had thirty li to do. Such is the idea of distance in Yuen-nan.[AO]

The storm did not come, however, and my men ever after reminded me to keep out my wind-cap and my mackintosh, partly to lighten their loads, of course, and partly on account of the good omen it seemed to them to be.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote AH: "Gwan" is the Chinese for "official."]

[Footnote AI: I have seen a European, with an imperfect hold of an eastern language, knock an Asiatic down because he thought the man was a fool, whereas he himself was ignorant of what was going on. The message the coolie was bringing was misunderstood by the conceited assistant, and as a result of having just this smattering of the vernacular, he ran his firm in for a loss of fifty thousand dollars.—E.J.D.]

[Footnote AJ: Ts'u-hsiong-fu, as it is pronounced locally, with a strong "ts" initial sound.]

[Footnote AK: Meaning a relief hand (Malay).]

[Footnote AL: Literally, "tea money."]

[Footnote AM: "Heaping up merit" is one of the elementary practices of Chinese religious life.]

[Footnote AN: Chennan-chou, which stands at a height of 6,500 feet, has been visited again since by myself. My caravan consisted on this occasion of two ponies (one I was riding), two coolies, a servant, and myself. As we got to the archway in the middle of the street leading to the busy part of the town, my animal nearly landed me into the gutter, and the other horse ran into a neighboring house, both frightened by crackers which were being fired around a man who was bumping his head on the ground in front of an ancestral tablet, brought into the street for the purpose. A horrid din made the air turbulent. I sought refuge in the nearest house, tying my ponies up to the windows, and was most hospitably received as a returned prodigal by a well-disposed old man and his courtly helpmate. The genuineness of the hospitality of the Chinese is as strong as their unfriendliness can be when they are disposed to show a hostile spirit to foreigners. Just as I had laid up for dinner the din stopped, we breathed gunpowder smoke instead of air, everyone from the head-bumping ceremony came around me, and there lingered in silent admiration. My boy came and whispered, quite aloud enough for all to hear, that in that part of the town cooked rice could not be bought, and that I was going to be left to look after the horses and the loads whilst the men went away to feed. He advised the assembled crowd that if they valued sound physique they had better keep their hands off my gear and depart. My friendly host shut the doors and windows, with the exception of that through which I watched our impedimenta, and at once commenced good-natured inquiry into my past, and concerning vicissitudes of life in general. Luckily, I was able to give the old man good reason for congratulating me upon my ancestral line, my own great age, the number of my wives and offshoots—mostly "little puppies"—and as each curious caller dropped in to sip tea, so did one after another of the patriarchal dignitaries who were responsible for the human product then entertaining the crowd come vividly before the imagination of the company, and they were graced with every token of age and honor. (Chinese speak of sons as "little puppies.")]

[Footnote AO: In crossing a river here I slipped, and from ray pocket there rolled a box of photographic films, and in reaching over to re-capture it, I let my loaded camera fall into the water. I was disappointed, as most of my best pictures were thus (as I imagined) spoilt. But when I developed at Bhamo, I found not a single film damaged by water, and every picture was a success from both the roll in the tin and the roll in the camera. It is a tribute to the Eastman-Kodak Company Ltd. that their non-curling films will stand being dipped into rivers and remain unaffected. The films in question should have been developed six months prior to the date of my exposure.—E.J.D.]



CHAPTER XVIII.

Stampede of frightened women. To the Eagle Nest. An acrobatic performance, and some retaliation at the author's expense. Over the mountains to Pu-peng A magnificent storm, and a description. In a "rock of ages." Hardiness of my comrades. Early morning routine and some impressions. Unspeakable filth of the Chinese. Lolo people of the district. Physique of the women. Aspirations towards Chinese customs. Skilless building. Mythological, anthropological, craniological and antediluvian disquisitions. At Yuen-nan-i. Flat country. Thriftless humanity. To Hungay. A day of days. Traveler in bitter cold unable to procure food. Fright in middle night. A timely rescue. Murder of a bullock on my doorstep. Callous disposition of fellow-travelers. Leaving the capital of an old-time kingdom. Bad roads and good men. National virtue of unfailing patience. Human consumption of diseased animals. Minchia at Hungay. Major Davies and the Minchia. Author's differences of opinion. Increasing popularity of the small foot.

But the storm came the next day, as we were on our way to Pu-peng, during the ninety li when we passed the highest point on this journey. By name The Eagle Nest Barrier (Ting-wu-kwan), this elevated pass, 8,600 feet above the level, reached after a gradual ascent between two mountain ranges, was surmounted after a couple of hours' steep climbing, where rain and snow had made the paths irritatingly slippery and the task most laborious. Although the condition of the road was enough to take all the wind out of one's sails, the sublimity of the scenery of the dense woods which clothed the mountains, exquisitely pretty ravines, tumbling waterfalls, running rivulets and sparkling brooks, with little patches of snow hidden away in the maze of greens of every hue, all rendered it a climb less tiring than the narrow pathways over which we were then to travel. Half-way up we met a string of ponies, and I underwent a few nervous moments until they had passed in the twenty-inch road—a slight tilt, a slip, a splutter, probably a yell, and I should have dropped 500 feet without a bump.

As we went along together, just before reaching this hill, we saw women carrying bags of rice. They saw us, too. One passed me safely, but with fear. The others carelessly dropping their burdens, scampered off, afraid of their lives; and when one of my soldiers (whose sense of humor was on a par with my own when as a boy I used to stick butterscotch drops on the bald head of my Sunday School teacher, and bend pins for small boys to sit on and rise from) shouted to them, they dived straight as a die over the hedge into a submerged rice-field, and made a sorry spectacle with their "lily" feet and pale blue trousers, covered with the thin mud. In struggling to get away, one of them, the silly creature, went sprawling on all fours in the slime, and with only the imperfect footing possible to her with her little stumps, she would have been submerged, had not the man who had frightened her, at my bidding, gone to drag her out. As it was, they looked anything but beautiful with their wet and muddy garments clinging tightly to their bodies, and betraying every curve of their not unbeautiful figures. One of the women, a comely damsel of some twenty summers, did not jump into the field, but lay flat on the ground behind some bushes, thereby hoping to get out of sight, and now came forward with amorous glances. We, however, sent them on their way, and I will lay my life that they will not "scoot" at the sight of the next foreigner.

And now we are at the "Nest." Many travelers have made remarks upon this place, where I was waited upon by a shrivelled, shambling specimen of manhood, whose wife—in contrast to her kind in China—seemed to rule house and home, bed and board. Whilst we were there, a Chinese, bound on the downward journey, endeavored to mount his mule at the very moment the animal was reaching out for a blade of straw. As he swung his leg across the mule took another step forward, and the rider fell bodily with an enormous bump into the lap of one of my coolies, upsetting him and his bowl of tea over his trousers and my own. I could not suppress hearty approval of this acrobatic incident.

But the end was not yet.

I sat on one end of one of those narrow forms, and this same coolie sat on the other. He rose up suddenly, reached over for the common salt-pot, and I came off—with the multitude of alfresco diners laughing at this smart retaliation until their chock-full mouths emitted the grains of rice they chewed.

After that I cleared off. Descending through a fertile valley, from the bottom there loomed upwards higher mountains, looking black and dismal, with clouds black and dismal keeping them company. We had now to cross the undulating ground still separating us from Pu-peng. The early portion of the ground was something like Clifton Downs, something like Dartmoor. The country was poor, and the people barely put themselves out to boil water for chance travelers.

The storm broke suddenly. From the shelter of a hollowed rock I watched it all.

Over the submerged plain and the bare hills the blackness was as of night. Red earth without the sun looked brown, brown looked black, and the trees, swaying helplessly before the raging fury of the gale, seemed struck by death. Lightning continued its electrical vividity of fork-like greenish white among the heavy clouds, drooping threateningly from the hill-tops to the darkened valleys below, laden still with their waiting, unshed deluge. Through a narrow incision in the cruel clouds the sun peeped out with a nervous timidity, and a tiny patch over yonder, in a flash illuminated with gold and purple, across which the lightning danced in heavenly rivalry, displayed the magic touch of the Artist of the skies. Then came a rainbow of sweetest multi-color, of a splendor glorious and exquisite, delicate as the breath from paradise, stretching its majestic archbow athwart the waning gloom from range to range. As one drank in the glimpses of that dark corner in this peculiar fairyland, a mighty peal of magnificent, stentorian clashing broke finally upon me, and heaven's electricity again flitted fearfully over the earth, aslant, upwards, downwards again, upwards again, disappearing over the unmoved hills like a thousand tortured souls fleeing from Dante's Hades. And here I sit on, in that veritable "rock of ages" cleft for me, glad that no human touch save that of my own mean clay, that no human voice came between me and the voice of that Infinite beyond. I seemed to have been standing on the verge of another world, another great unknown. The heavens raged and the thunders thereof roared, and the wild wind hissed and moaned and wailed the hopeless wail of a lonely, tormented soul. The cold was intense, and through it all I sat drenched to the skin.

On the bleak mountain thus I was the pitifulest atom of loneliest humanity, yet felt no loneliness. The face of the earth frowned in angry fury, the awfulness of the raging elements dwarfed all else to utter annihilation. But even at such a time, coming all too seldom in the lives of most of us, when standing in some remote spot which still tells forth the story of the world's youth, one's inmost nature thrills with a sense of unison with it all beyond human expression. All was so grand, inspiring one with an awe beyond one's comprehension, a peculiar, dread of one's own earthly insignificance. These pictures, graven in one's memory with the strong pencil of our common mother, are indelible, yet quite beyond expression. As in our own souls we cannot frame in words our deepest life emotions, so as we penetrate into the depths of that kindly common mother of us all we find human words the same utterly futile channel of expression. To have our souls tuned to this silent eloquence of Nature, to catch the sweetness of those wind-swept, heaven-directed mountains, to understand the unspoken messages of those rushing rivers and those gigantic gorges, to feel the heart-beat of Nature and her beauty in perfect harmony with all that is best within us, we must be silent, undisturbed, preferably alone. This is not flowery sentiment—it is what every true lover of old and lovely Nature would feel in Western China, yet still unspoiled by the taint of man's absorbing stream of civilization. And in the stress of modern life, and the progress of man's monopolization of the earth on which he lives, it is beautiful to some of us, of whom it may be said the highest state of inward happiness comes from solitary meditation in unperturbed loneliness under the broad expanse of heaven, to know that there are still some spots of isolation where human foot has never turned the clay, and where, out of sight and sound of fellow mortals, we may even for a time shake off the violating, unnatural fetters of a harassing Western life.

Soon it seemed as if a silken cord had suddenly been severed, and I had been dragged from a world of sweet infinitude down to a sphere mundane and everyday, to something I had known before.... "....Or what is Nature? Ha! why do I not name thee God? Art thou not the 'Living Garment of God'? O Heaven, is it in very deed, He, then, that ever speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?"[AP]

I heard the crack of the bamboo and the patter of feet in the sodden, slippery pathway, and I knew my men were come. Crawling out from my rock, I descended again to common things, having to listen to the disgusting talk of my Chinese followers, though a very slender vocabulary saved me from losing entirely the memory of that great picture then passing away. The sun shone through the clouds, which had given place again to blue, the pervading blackness of a few moments before had disappeared, and with the sinking sun we descended thoughtfully to the town. The hill is solid sandstone, and the uneven ruts made by the daily procession of ponies were transformed into a network of tiny streams.

That my comrades were drenched to the skin gave them no thought; they turned to immediately, while I dived hurriedly to the bottom of my box and gulped down quinine. They sat around and drank hot water, holding forth with eloquence beyond their wont on the general advantages, naturally and supernaturally, of their native city of Tong-ch'uan-fu. And well they might, for I know no prettier spot in the whole of Western China.

Fifty men—coolies who were carrying general merchandise in all directions, and who had taken shelter in the large inn I stayed at—rose with me the next morning. As I ate my morning meal, spluttering the rice over the floor as I tried vainly to control my chopsticks with frost-nipped fingers, they went through the filthy round of early morning routine. Squatting about with their dirty face-rags, and a half-pint of greasy water in their brass receptacle shaped like the soup-plate of civilization, and leaving upon their necks the traces of their swills, they wiped the dirt into their hair, and considered they had washed themselves. Men would emerge from their rooms, fully dressed, with the dishclout in one hand and the hand-basin in the other—on the way to their morning tub. Oh, the filth, the unspeakable filth of these people! Would that the Chinese would emulate the cleanliness of the Japs, though even that I would question. In several years in the Orient I have not yet come across the cleanliness in any race of people to be compared with that cleanliness which in England is next to godliness.

The people of Pu-peng were pleased to see me. They hurried about obligingly to get food for man and beast, and the womankind, poor but light-hearted, cracked suggestive jokes with my men with the utmost freedom.

In this town there are many Lolo—it might be said that the entire population is of Lolo origin, although had I suggested to any particular inhabitant that this was a fact he would probably have taken keen offense, and things might have gone badly with me. With the men it is most difficult to tell—there is little difference between the Han ren and the tribesman. But the difference is often most marked in respect to the women. The Chinese woman has a considerably fairer skin than the female of Lolo descent, and her customs and manners, apart from the distinct colloquial accent, are quite evident as pretty sure proof of distinction of race. After the Lolo have mingled with the Chinese for a few years, however, it is quite difficult to differentiate between them, as most of the Lolo women now speak Chinese (in this town I did not hear any language foreign to the Chinese language), and a good many of the men are sufficiently educated to read the Chinese character even if they do not write it. The forward racial condition of the Lolo people in this district is far greater than that of the people of the same tribe to the west of Tali-fu, and in latitudes where their language and customs of life and dress are more or less maintained. The women are generally of better physique than the Chinese, principally on account of the fact that their work is almost exclusively outdoor; but as they begin to copy the Chinese, and live a more sedentary life, this fine physique will probably gradually disappear. A good many already bind their feet.

When I came out in the early morning the thermometer was twenty degrees below zero, and my nose was red and without feeling. Feng-mao[AQ] and great coat were required, but I was totally oblivious of the hour's stiff climbing awaiting me immediately outside the town, to reach the highest point in which bathed me in perspiration as if I had played three sets of tennis in the tropics.

Mountains were wild and barren, with nothing in them to enable one to forget in natural beauty the fatigues of a toilsome ascent. Villages came now and again in sight, stretched out at the extremity of the plain before my eyes, with their white gables, red walls, and black tiled roofs, but during the day we passed through two only. The first was a little place where decay would have been absolute had it not been for the likin[AR] flag, which enables "squeezes" to be extorted ruthlessly from the muleteer and conveyed to the pockets of the prospering customs agent. It boasted only ten or twelve tumbling lean-to tenements, where my sympathy went out to the half-dozen physical wrecks of men who came slowly and stared long, and wondered at the commonest article of my meager impedimenta. They seemed poorer and lower down the human scale than any I had yet seen. On one of the ragged garments worn by a man of about twenty-five I counted no less than thirty-four patches of different shapes, sizes and materials, hieroglyphically and skillessly thrown together to hide his sore-strewn back; but still his brown unwashed flesh was visible in many places.