numerous walled towns—the dirt of them—t'ung chou—romance of the evening light—my own little walled city—the gateways—hospitable landlady—bald heads—my landlady's room—a return present—“the ringleaders have been executed”—summary justice—to the rescue of the missionaries at hsi an fu—the elder brother society-primitive method of attack and defence—the sack of i chun.
oh that first walled city! it was the first of many walled cities, many of them so small that it did not take us more than a quarter of an hour to cross from gate to gate; but to enter one and all was like opening a door into the past, into the life our forbears lived before the country i was born and brought up in was ever thought of. when i was a little girl, i cherished a desire to marry a german baron, a german baron of the middle ages, who lived in a castle, and i could not help thinking, as the influenza left me and i regained my powers of thought, that here were the towns of my german baron's time—dirt and all. in my childhood i had never thought of the dirt, or perhaps i had not minded. one thing is certain, in the clean land of my childhood i never realised what the dirt that comes from a packed population, from seething humanity, can be like. the chinese live in these crowded towns for the sake of security—of security in this twentieth century—for even still, china seems to be much in the condition of europe of the middle ages, safety cannot be absolutely counted upon inside the gates of a town, but at least it is a little safer than the open country.
185we passed through t'ung chou when the soft tender evening shadows were falling upon battlements and walls built by a nation that, though it is most practical, is also one of the most poetical on earth; we passed through chi chou when the shadows were long in the early morning, and in the sunlight was the hope of the new-born day. through the gate was coming a train of peking carts, of laden donkeys, of great grain carts with seven mules, all bound for the capital in the south.
i remember these two perhaps because they were the first of many walled towns, but tsung hua chou will always remain in my memory as my own little walled city, the one that i explored carefully all by myself, and, when i think of a walled town, my thoughts always fly back to that little town, three-quarters of a mile square, at the foot of the hills that mark the limit of the great plain of china proper.
it was tuan's suggestion we should stay there. i would have lingered at the tombs, but he was emphatic.
“missie want make picture. more better we stop tsung hua chou. fine picture tsung hua chou.”
there weren't fine pictures at tsung hua chou. he had struck up a great friendship with the “cartee man,” and, perhaps, either he or the “cartee man” had a favourite gaming-house, or a favourite 186singing girl in the town. at any rate we went, and i, for some hardly explainable reason, am glad we did.
the road from the tombs was simply appalling. the hills frowned down on us, close on either side, high and steep and rugged, but the rough valley bottom, up which we went, was the wildest i was to see for a long time. to say i was tossed and jolted, is to but mildly express the condition of affairs. i sat on a cushion, i packed my bedding round me, and with both my hands i held on to the side of the cart, and if for one moment i relaxed the rigidity of my aching arms, my head or some other portion of my aching anatomy, was brought into contact with the woodwork of the cart, just in the place i had reckoned the woodwork could not possibly have reached me. there were little streams and bridges across them, which i particularly dreaded, for the bridges were always roughly paved, but it was nobody's business to see that the road and the pavement met neatly, and the jolt the cart gave, both getting on and getting off, nearly shook the soul out of my body. i thought of walking, for our progress was very slow, but in addition to the going being bad, the mules went just a little faster than i did, three and a half miles an hour to my three, and i felt there was nothing for it but to resign myself and make the best of a bad job. not for worlds would i have lingered an hour longer on that road than i was absolutely obliged. and yet, bad as it was, it was the best road i had till i got back to peking again. there may be worse roads than those of china, and there may be worse ways of getting over them than in a 187peking cart, but i do trust i never come across them.
we entered the gates of the city as the evening shadows were growing long, and as usual, i was carried back to the days of the crusaders—or farther still to babylon—as we rumbled under the arched gateway, but inside it was like every other town i have seen, dirty, sordid, crowded, with uneven pavements that there was no getting away from. within the curtain wall, that guarded the gate, there were the usual little stalls for the sale of cakes, big, round, flat cakes and little scone-like cakes, studded with sesame seed, or a bright pink sweetmeat; there were the sellers of pottery ware, basins and pots of all sorts, and the people stared at the foreign woman, the wealthy foreign woman who ran to two carts. it is an unheard-of thing in china for a chinese woman to travel alone, though sometimes the foreign missionary women do, but they would invariably be accompanied by a chinese woman, and one woman would not be likely to have two carts. one thing was certain however, my outfit was all that it should have been, bar the lack of a male protector. it bespoke me a woman of wealth and position in the eyes of the country folk, and the people of the little towns through which i passed. it is possible that a mule litter might have enhanced my dignity; but after all, two peking carts was very much like having a first-class compartment all to myself.
there were no foreigners, that i could hear of, in tsung hua chou. the missionaries had fled during the boxer trouble, and never come back, so that i was more of a show than usual, though 188indeed, in all the towns i passed through i was a show, and the people stared, and chattered, and crowded round the carts, and evidently closely questioned the carters.
they tell me chinese carters are often rascals, but i grew to like mine very much before we parted company.
they were stolid men in blue, with dirty rags wrapped round their heads to keep off the dust, and i have no reason to suppose that they affected water any more than the rest of the population, whereby i perceive, my affections are not so much guided by a desire for cleanliness as i had once supposed. they both had the hands of artists, artists with very dirty nails, so it may be a feeling of brotherhood had something to do with my feelings, for i am hoping you who read will count me an artist in a small way. what romance they wove about me, for the benefit of the questioning people, i don't know, but the result of their communications was that the crowd pressed closer, and stared harder, and they were evil-smelling, and had never, never in all their lives been washed. i ceased to wonder that i ached all over with the jolting and rumbling of the cart, i only wondered if something worse had not befallen me, and how it happened that these people, who crowded round, staring as if never in their lives had they seen a foreign woman before, did not fall victims to some horrible pestilence.
for once inside tsung hua chou i saw no beauty in it, for all the romantic walls outside. the evil-smelling streets we rumbled through to the inn were wickedly narrow, and down the centre hung notices in chinese characters on long strips of 189paper white and red, and pigs, and children, and creaking wheelbarrows, and men with loads, blocked the way. but we jolted over the step into the courtyard of the inn at last, quite a big courtyard, and quite a busy inn. this was an inn where they apparently ran a restaurant, for as i climbed stiffly out of my cart a servant, carrying a tray of little basins containing the soups and stews the chinese eat, was so absorbed in gazing at me he ran into the “cartee man,” and a catastrophe occurred which was the occasion of much bad language.
0276
the courtyard was crowded. there were blue-tilted peking carts, there were mules, there were donkeys, there were men of all sorts; but there was only one wretched little room for me. it was very dirty too, and i was very tired. what was to be done?
“plenty chinese gentlemen sleep here,” declared tuan, and i could quite believe it. at the door of every lattice-windowed room that looked out on to that busy courtyard, stood one, or perhaps two chinese of the better class—long petticoats, shaven head, queue and all—each held in his hand a long, silver-mounted pipe from which he took languid whiffs, and he looked under his eyelids, which is the polite way, at the foreign woman. the foreign woman was very dirty, very tired, and very uncomfortable, and the room looked very hopeless. the “cartee men” declared that this was the best inn in the town, and anyhow i was disinclined to go out and look for other quarters. then there came tottering forward an old woman with tiny feet, one eye and a yellow flower stuck in the knot at the back of her bald head. china is the country of bald 190women. the men, i presume, would not mind it very much, as for so long they have shaven off at least half their hair, but the women certainly must, for if they can they dress their dark hair very elaborately. and yet have i seen many women, like this innkeeper's wife, with a head so bald that but a few strands of hair cover its nakedness, yet those few poor hairs are gathered together into an arrangement of black silk shaped something like a horn, and beside it is placed a flower, a rose, a pink oleander blossom, or a bright yellow flower for which i have no name. that flower gives a finish to a sleek and well-dressed head, when the owner has plenty of hair, but when she has only the heavy horn of silk, half a dozen hairs, and the rest of her bald pate covered with a black varnish, it is a poor travesty. when a girl marries, immediately after her husband has lifted her veil and she is left to the women of his family they pluck out the front hairs on her forehead, so as to give a square effect, and the hair is drawn very tightly back and gathered generally into this horn. i suspect this heavy horn is responsible for the baldness, though an american of my acquaintance declares it is the plucking out of the hairs on the forehead. “the rest of the hair,” says he, “kinder gets discouraged.”
this innkeeper's wife was very kindly. she said i should not sleep in that room, i should have her room, and she would go to her mother's. the mother was a surprise to me. i hope when i am as old as she looked i shall have a mother to go to.
now i do not as a rule embrace my landlady. in england i couldn't even imagine myself feeling particularly kindly towards a dirty little woman clad 191in a shirt and trousers of exceedingly dirty blue cotton, but the intention was so evidently kind and hospitable, i knew not a word of her tongue, and was by no means sure the valued tuan would translate my words of thanks properly, so i could but take both her very dirty little hands in mine, clasp them warmly, and try and look my thanks.
then i inspected her room. it was approached through an entrance where lime was stored, it was rather dark, and it was of good size, though on one side was stacked a supply of stores for the restaurant. chinese macaroni, that looks as if it were first cousin to sheet gelatine, stale eggs and other nondescript eatables. there was a k'ang, of course, quite a family k'ang, and there was a large mirror on one wall. i had forgotten my camp mirror, so i looked in it eagerly, and the reflection left me chastened. i hadn't expected the journey to improve my looks, but i did hope it had not swelled up one cheek, and bunged up the other eye. i felt i did not want to stay in the room with that mirror, but there were other things worse than the mirror in it. the beautiful lattice-work window had apparently never been opened since the first cover of white tissue paper had been put on it, and the smell of human occupancy there defies my poor powers of description. the dirty little place i had at first disdained, had at least a door opening on to the comparatively fresh air of the courtyard. i told tuan to explain that while i was delighted to see her room, and admired everything very much in it, nothing would induce me to deprive her of its comforts. she certainly was friendly. as i looked in the chastening mirror, i, like a true woman, i suppose, put up 192a few stray locks that the jolting cart had shaken out of place, and she promptly wanted to do my hair herself with a selection from an array of elderly combs with which she probably dressed her own scanty locks. that was too much. i had to decline, i trust she thought it was my modesty, and then she offered me some of the macaroni. i tried to say i had nothing to give in return and then tuan remarked, “as friend, as friend.” so as a friend, from that little maimed one-eyed old woman up in the hills of china, i took a handful of macaroni and had nothing to give in return. i hope she feels as friendly towards me as i shall always do towards her.
it is not always that the difficulty of giving a return present is on the foreign side, sometimes it is the chinese who feel it. i remember a traveller for a business house telling me how on one occasion he had gone to a village and entertained the elders at dinner, giving them brandy which they loved, and liqueurs which seemed to the unsophisticated village fathers ambrosia fit for the gods. the next day, when he was about to take his departure, a small procession approached him and one of them bore on a tray a little chinese handleless cup covered with another. they said he could speak chinese, so there was no need for an interpreter, that he had given them a very good time, they were very grateful, and they wished to make him a present by which he might remember them sometimes. but their village was poor and small. it contained nothing worth his acceptance, and after much consultation, they had come to the conclusion that the best way would be to present him with the money, 193so that he might buy something for himself when he came to peking or some other large town. thereupon the cup was presented, the cover lifted off, and in the bottom lay a ten cent piece, worth about twopence halfpenny. probably it seemed quite an adequate present to men who count their incomes by cash of which a thousand go to the dollar.
i don't think my landlady minded much my declining the hospitality of her room. possibly she only wished me to see its glories, and presently she brought to the little room i had at first so despised, and now looked upon, if not as a haven of rest, at least as one of fresh air, a couple of nice hard wood stools, and a beautifully carved k'ang table thick with grease.
“say must make missie comfortable,” said tuan with the usual suggestion he had done it himself.
and those stools were covered, much to my surprise, with red woollen tapestry, and the pattern was one that i had seen used many a time in a little town on the staffordshire moors, where their business is to dye and print. and here was one of the results of their labours, a “wardle rag,” as we used to call them, up among the hills of northern china.
i was too tired to do anything but go to bed that night as soon as i had had my dinner. i had it, as usual, on the k'ang table, the dirt shrouded by my humble tablecloth, and curious eyes watched me, even as i watched the trays of full basins and the trays of empty ones that were for ever coming and going across the courtyard.
next morning my friendly landlady brought to see me two other small-footed women, both smoking 194long pipes, women who said, through tuan, their ages were forty and sixty respectively, and who examined, with interest, me and my belongings. they felt my boots so much, good, substantial, leather-built by peter yapp, that at last i judged they would like to see what was underneath, and took off a boot and stocking for their inspection, and the way they felt my foot up and down as if it were something they had never before met in their lives, amused me very much, at least at first it amused me, and then it saddened me. though they held out their own poor maimed feet, they did not return the compliment much as i desired it. they took me across the courtyard into another room where, behind lattice-work windows, that had not been opened for ages, were two more women sitting on the k'ang, and two little shaven-headed children. these were younger women, tall and stout, with feet so tiny, they called my attention to them, that it did not seem to me possible any woman could support herself upon them. my boy was not allowed in, so of course i could not talk to them, could only smile and drink tea.
these two younger women, who were evidently of superior rank, had their hair most elaborately dressed and wore most gorgeous raiment. one was clad in purple satin with a little black about it, and the other, a mere girl of eighteen, but married, for her hair was no longer in a queue, and her forehead was squared, wore a coat of pale blue silk brocade and grass-green trousers of the same material. their faces were impassive, as are the faces of chinese women of the better class, but they smiled, evidently liked their tortured feet to be noticed, gave 195me tea from the teapot on the k'ang table, and then presently all four, with the gaily dressed babies, tottered out into the courtyard, the older women leading the toddling children, and helping the younger, and, with the aid of settles, they climbed into two peking carts, my elderly friends taking their places on the outside, whereby i judged they were servants or household slaves.
“chinese wives,” said tuan, but whether they were the wives of one man, or of two, i had no means of knowing. the costumes of the two younger were certainly not those in which i would choose to travel on a chinese road in a peking cart, but the chinese have a proverb: “abroad wear the new, at home it does not matter,” so they probably thought my humble mole-coloured cotton cr?ape, equally out of place.
and when they were gone i set out to explore the town.
it was only a small place, built square, with two main roads running north, and south, and east, and west, and cutting each other at right angles in the heart of it. they were abominably paved. no vehicle but a springless peking cart would have dreamt of making its way across that pavement, but then probably no vehicle save a cart or a wheelbarrow in all the years of the city's life had ever been thought of there. the remaining streets were but evil-smelling alley-ways, narrow in comparison with the main ways which, anywhere else, i should have deemed hopelessly inadequate, thronged as they were with people and encroached upon by the shops that stood close on either side. they had no glass fronts, of course, these shops, but otherwise, 196they were not so very unlike the shops one sees in the poorer quarters of the great towns in england. but there was evidently no town council to regulate the use to which the streets should be put. the dyer hung his long strips of blue cloth half across the roadway, careless of the convenience of the passer-by, the man who sold cloth had out little tables or benches piled with white and blue calico—i have seen tradesmen do the same in king's road, chelsea—the butcher had his very disagreeable wares fully displayed half across the roadway, the gentleman who was making mud bricks for the repair of his house, made them where it was handiest in the street close to the house, and the man who sold cooked provisions, with his little portable kitchen and table, set himself down right in the fairway and tempted all-comers with little basins of soup, fat, pale-looking steamed scones, hard-boiled eggs or meat turnovers.
this place, hidden behind romantic grey walls, at which i had wondered in the evening light, was in the morning just like any other city, peking with the glory and beauty gone out of it, and the people who thronged those streets were just the poorer classes of peking, only it seemed there were more naked children and more small-footed women with elaborately dressed hair tottering along, balancing themselves with their arms. i met a crowd accompanying the gay scarlet poles, flags, musical instruments and the red sedan chair of a wedding. the poor little bride, shut up in the scarlet chair, was going to her husband's house and leaving her father's for ever. it is to be hoped she would find favour in the sight of her husband and 197her husband's women-folk. it was more important probably, that she should please the latter.
the bridal party made a great noise, but then all in that town was noise, dirt, crowding, and evil smells. the only peaceful place in it was the courtyard of the little temple close against the city wall. outside it stand two hideous figures with hands flung out in threatening attitude, and inside were more figures, all painted in the gayest colours. what they meant i have not lore enough to know, but they were very hideous, the very lowest form of art.
0286
there was the recording angel with a black face and the open book—after all, the recording angel must often wear a black face—and there was the eternal symbol that has appealed through all ages to all people, and must appeal one would think above all, to this nation that longs so ardently for offspring, the mother with the child upon her knee. but they were all ugly to my western eyes, and the only thing that charmed me was the silence, the cleanliness, and the quiet of the courtyard, the only place in all the busy little city that was at peace.
when i engaged tuan i had thought he was to do all the waiting upon me i needed, but it seems i made a mistake. the farther i got from peking the greater his importance became, and here he could not so much as carry for me the lightest wrap. his business appeared to be to engage other people to do the work. there was one dilapidated wretch to carry the camera, another the box with the plates, and yet a third bore the black cloth i would put over my head to focus my pictures properly. it was not a bit of good protesting, two minutes after i got rid 198of one lot of followers, another took their place, and as everyone had to be paid, apparently, i often thought, for the pleasure of looking at me, i resigned myself to my fate.
accompanied by all the idlers and children in the town i climbed the ramp on to the walls, which are in perfect order, three miles round and on the top from fifteen feet to twenty broad. that ramp must have been always steep, the last thing a chinese ever thinks about is comfort, steep almost as the walls themselves, and everywhere the stones are gone, making it a work of difficulty to climb to the top. tuan helped me in approved chinese fashion, putting his hand underneath my elbow, and once i was there the town was metamorphosed, it was again the romantic city i had seen from the plain in the evening light. now the early morning sunlight, with all the promise of the day in it, fell upon graceful curved chinese roofs and innumerable trees, dainty with the delicate vivid verdure that comes in the spring as a reward to a country where the winter has been long, bitter, and iron-bound.
the walls of most chinese cities are built square, with right angles at the four corners, but in at least two that i have been in, t'ung chou and pao ting fu, one corner is built out in a bow. i rather admired the effect at first, till i found it was a mark of deepest disgrace. there had been a parricide committed in the town. when such a terrible thing occurs a corner of the city wall must be pulled down and built out; a second one, another corner is pulled down and built out, and a third likewise; but the fourth time such a crime is committed in the 199luckless town the walls must be razed to the ground. but such a disgrace has never occurred in any town in the annals of chinese history, those age-long annals that go back farther than any other nation's, for if a town should be so unlucky as to have harboured four such criminals within its walls they generally managed, by the payment of a sum of money, to get a city that had some of its corners still intact to take the disgrace upon itself.
i strongly suspect too, that it is only when the offender is in high places that his crime is thus commemorated, for i have only heard of these two cases, and yet as short a while ago as 1912 there was a terrible murder in pao ting fu that shocked the town. it appeared there was an idle son, who instead of working for his family, spent all his time attending to his cage bird, taking it out for walks, encouraging it to sing, hunting the graves outside the town for insects for it. his poor old mother sighed over his uselessness.
“if it were not for the bird!” said she.
the young blood in china, it seems, goes to the dogs over a cage bird, a lark or a thrush, as the young man in modern europe comes to grief over horse-racing, so we see that human nature is the same all the world over. this chinese mother brooded over her boy's wasted life, and one day when he was out she opened the cage door and the bird flew away.
when he came in he asked for the bird and she said nothing, only with her large, sharp knife went on shredding up the vegetables that she was putting into a large cauldron of boiling water for supper. he asked again for the bird. still she took no 200notice, and he seized her knife and slit her up into small pieces and put her into the cauldron. he was taken, and tried, and was put to death by slicing into a thousand pieces—yes, even in modern china—but they did not think it necessary to pull down another corner of the city wall. possibly they felt the disgrace of a bygone age was enough for pao ting fu.
the corners of the walls of tsung hua chou were as they were first built, rectangular, and the watch-towers at those corners and over the four gates from the distance looked imposing, all that they should be, but close at hand i saw that they were tumbling into ruins, the doors were fallen off the hinges, the window-frames were broken, all was desolate and empty.
“once the soldier she watch here,” said my boy, whose pronouns were always somewhat mixed.
“why not now?”
“no soldier here now. she go work in gold mine ninety li away. gold mine belong plesident.”
tuan had got as far as the fact that a president had taken the place of the manchu emperor, but i wondered very much whether the inhabitants of tsung hua chou had. i meditated on my way back to “missie's inn” on the limitations of the practical chinese mind that because it is practical, i suppose, cannot conceive of the liberty, equality, and fraternity that a republic denotes. the president, to the humble chinese in the street, has just taken the place of the emperor, he is the one who rules over them, his soldiers are withdrawn. that there was a war in mongolia, a rebellion impending in the south, were items of news that had not reached 201the man in the street in tsung hua chou who, feeling that the soldiers must be put to some use, concluded they were working in the president's gold mine ninety li away.
0292
a foreigner went to a chinese tailor the other day to make him a suit of clothes, and he found occasion to complain that the gentleman's prices had gone up considerably since he employed him last. the man of the scissors was equal to the occasion, and explained that, since “revelations,” so many chinese had taken to wearing foreign dress, he was obliged to charge more.
“you belong revolution?” asked the inquiring foreigner, anxious to find out how far liberty, fraternity, and equality had penetrated.
the tailor looked at him more in sorrow than in scorn. how could he be so foolish.
“i no belong revelation,” he explained carefully, as one who was instructing where no instruction should have been necessary. the thing was self-evident, “i belong tailor man.”
when the revolution first dawned upon the country people all they realised—when they realised anything at all—was that there was no longer an emperor, therefore they supposed they would no longer have to pay taxes. when they found that emperor or no emperor taxes were still required of them, they just put the president in the emperor's place. i strongly suspect that if the greater part of the inhabitants of my walled city were to be questioned as to the revolution they would reply like the tailor: “no belong revolution, belong tsung hua chou!”
but in truth the civilisation of china is still so 202much like that of babylon and nineveh, that it is best for the poor man, if he can, to efface himself. he does not pray for rights as yet. he only prays that he may slip through life unnoticed, that he may not come in contact with the powers that rule him, for no matter who is right or who is wrong bitter experience has taught him that he will suffer.
we do not realise that sufficiently in the west when we talk of china. we judge her by our own standards. the time may come when this may be a right way of judging, but it has not come yet. rather should we judge as they judged in the days of the old testament, in the days of nineveh and babylon, when the proletariat, the slaves, were as naught in the sight of god or man.
a man told me how in the summer of 1912, travelling in the interior, he came to a small city in one of the central provinces, a city not unlike tsung hua chou, like indeed a thousand other little cities in this realm of cathay. the soldiers quartered there had not been paid, and they had turned to and looted the town. the unwise city men, instead of submitting lest a worse thing happen unto them, had telegraphed their woes to peking, and orders had come down to the general in command that the ringleaders must be executed. but no wise general is going to be hard on his own soldiers. this general certainly was not. still justice had to be satisfied, and he was not at a loss. he sent a body of soldiers to the looted shops, where certain luckless men were sadly turning over the damaged property. these they promptly arrested. the english onlooker, who spoke chinese, declared to me solemnly these arrested men were the merchants themselves, 203their helpers and coolies. that was nothing to the savage soldiery. there had to be victims. had not the order come from the central government. some of the men, there were twenty in all, they beat and left dead on the spot, the rest they dragged to the yamen. the traveller, furious and helpless, followed. of course the guilt of the merchants was a foregone conclusion. they never execute anyone who does not confess his guilt and the justice of his sentence in china, but they have means of making sure of the confession. presently out the unfortunate men came again, stripped to the waist, with their arms tied up high behind them, prepared, in fact, for death. the soldiers dragged them along, they protesting their innocence to unheeding ears. their women and children came out, running alongside the mournful procession, clinging to the soldiers and to their husbands and fathers, and praying for mercy. they tripped and fell, and the soldiers, the soldiers in khaki, pushed them aside, and stepped over them, and dragged on their victims. the traveller followed. no one took any notice of him, and what could he do, though his heart was sore, one against so many. through the narrow, filthy streets they went, past their own looted shops. they looked about them wildly, but there was none to help, and before them marched the executioner, with a great sharp sword in his hands, and always the soldiers in modern uniform emphasised the barbarity of the crime. presently they had distanced the wailing women and were outside the walls, but the foreign onlooker was still with them.
“and one was a boy not twenty,” he said with 204a sharp, indrawn breath, wiping his face as he told the ghastly tale.
they knelt in a row, just where the walls of their own town frowned down on them, and one by one the executioner cut off their heads. the death of the first in the line was swift enough, but, as he approached the end of the row the man's arm grew tired and he did not get the last two heads right off.
“i saw one jump four times,” said the shocked onlooker, “before he died.”
and then they telegraphed to peking that order had been restored, and the ringleaders executed.
since i heard that man's story, i always read that order has been restored in any chinese city with a shudder, and wonder how many innocents have suffered. for i have heard stories like that, not of one city, or told by one man, but of various cities, and told by different men. the chinese, it seems to me, copy very faithfully the european newspapers, the great papers of the western world. horrors like that are never read in a western paper, therefore you never see such things reported in the chinese papers. after all they are only the proletariat, the slaves of babylon or nineveh. who counted a score or so of them slain? order has been restored, comes the message for the benefit of the modern world, and in the little city the bloody heads adorn the walls and the bodies lie outside to be torn to pieces by the wonks and the vultures.
and when i heard tales like this, i wondered whether it was safe for a woman to be travelling alone. it is safe, of course, for the chinaman, strange as it may sound after telling such tales, is at bottom more law-abiding than the average 205european. true, he is more likely to insult or rob a woman than a man, because he has for so long regarded a woman as of so much less consequence than a man, that when he considers the matter he cannot really believe that any nation could hold a different opinion. still, in all probability, she will be safe, just as in all probability she might march by herself from land's end to john o' groats without being molested. she may be robbed and murdered, and so she may be robbed and murdered in china. the chinese are robbed and murdered often enough themselves poor things. also they do not suffer in silence. they revenge themselves when they can.
a man travelling for the british and american tobacco company, he was a young man, not yet eight-and-twenty, told me how, once, outside a small walled town, he came upon a howling mob, and parting them after the lordly fashion of the englishman, who knows he can use his hands, he saw they were crowding round a pit half filled with quicklime. in it, buried to his middle, was a ghastly creature with his eyes scooped out, and the hollows filled up with quicklime.
“if i had had a pistol handy,” said the teller of the tale, “i would have shot him. i couldn't have helped myself. it seemed the only thing to put him out of his misery, but, after all, i think he was past all feeling, and i wonder what the people would have done to me!”
they told him, when he investigated, that this man was a robber, that he had robbed and murdered without mercy, and so, when he fell into their hands, they had taken vengeance. 206was that babylon, or nineveh, i wondered? since such things happen in china one feels that the age of babylon and nineveh has not yet gone by. talk with but a few men who have wandered into the interior, and you realise the strong necessity for these walled towns.
when the rumour of the slaughter of the manchus, and the killing in the confusion of eight europeans at hsi an fu in shensi in october 1911, reached peking, nine young men banded themselves together into the shensi relief force, and set out from the capital to relieve the missionaries cut off there. one of these young men it was my good fortune to meet, and the story of their doings, told at first hand, unrolled for me the leaves of history. they set out to help the men and women of their own colour, but as they passed west from tai yuan fu, again and again, the people of the country appealed to them to stop and help them. the elder brother society, the ko lao hui were on the warpath, and, with whatever good intentions this society had originated, it was, on this way from tai yuan fu to hsi an fu, nothing less than a band of robbers, pillaging and murdering, and even the walled cities were hardly a safeguard. village after village, with no such defences, was wrecked, burned, and destroyed, and their inhabitants were either slain or refugees in the mountains. and the suffering that means, with the bitter winter of china ahead of them, is ghastly to think of. they died, of course, and those who were slain by the robbers probably suffered the least.
“what could we do? what could we possibly do?” asked my informant pitifully. 207at last they came to sui te chou, a walled city, and sui te chou was for the moment triumphant. it had driven off the robbers. the elder brother society had held the little city closely invested. they had built stone towers, and, from the top of them, had fired into the city, and at the defenders on the walls, and, under cover of this fire from the towers, they had attempted to scale the battlements. but the people on the walls had pushed them down with long spears, and had poured boiling water upon them, and, finally, the robbers had given way, and some braves, issuing from the south gate had fallen upon them, killing many and capturing thirty of them. it was a short shrift for them, and a festoon of heads adorned the gateway under which the foreigners passed.
but, though victorious, the braves of sui te chou knew right well that the lull was only momentary. they were reversing the scriptural order of things, and beating their ploughshares into swords. the brigands would be back as soon as they had reinforcements, the battle would be to the strong and it would indeed be “woe to the vanquished!”
“we could not help them. we could not,” reiterated the teller of the tale sadly; “we just had to go on.”
it was old china, he said, let us hope the last of old china. in that town were english missionaries, a man and his wife, another man and two little children, members of the english baptist church, dressed in chinese dress, the men with queues. these they rescued, and took along with them, and glad were they to have two more able-bodied men in the party, even though they were counterbalanced 208by the presence of the woman and two children, for everywhere along the track were evidences of the barbaric times in which they lived. human head? in wicker cages were common objects of the wayside, and the wolves came down from the mountains and gnawed at the dead bodies, or attacked the sick and wounded. old china was a ghastly place that autumn of 1911, during the “bloodless” revolution. chung pu they reached immediately after it had been attacked by six hundred men.
“i had to kick a dog away that was gnawing at a dead body as we led the lady into a house for the night,” said the narrator. “i could only implore her not to look.”
but at i ch??n things were worse still. they reached it just as it had fallen into the hands of the elder brother society, and they began to think they had taken those missionaries out of the frying-pan into the fire. i ch??n is a walled city up in the mountains of shensi, and the only approach was by a pathway so narrow that it only allowed of one mule litter at a time. on one side was a steep precipice, on the other the city wall, and along that wall came racing men armed with matchlocks, spears, and swords, yelling defiance and prepared, apparently, to attack. the worst of it was there was no turning that litter round. they halted, and the gate ahead of them opened, and right in the centre of the gateway was an ancient cannon with a man standing beside it with a lighted rope in his hand. turn the litter and get away in a hurry they could not. leave it they could not. there was seemingly no escape for them. it only wanted one of those excited men to shout “ta, ta,” and the match 209could have been applied, and the ancient gun would have swept the pathway. then the leader of the band of foreigners stepped forward. he flung away his rifle, he flung away his revolver, he flung away his knife, and he stood there before them defenceless, with his arms raised—modem civilisation bowing for the moment before the force of babylon. it was a moment of supreme anxiety. suppose the people misunderstood his actions.
“we scarcely dared breathe,” said the storyteller. every heart stood still. and then they understood. the man with the lighted rope dropped it, and they beckoned to the strangers to come inside the gates.
it required a good deal of courage to go inside those gates, to put themselves in the power of the elder brother society, and they spent an anxious night. the town had been sacked, the streets ran blood, the men were slain, their bodies were in the streets for the crows and the wonks to feed on, and the women—well women never count for much in china in times of peace, and in war they are the spoil of the victor—the goddess of mercy was forgotten those days in i ch??n. all night long the anxious little party kept watch and ward, and when day dawned were thankful to be allowed to proceed on their way unmolested, eventually reaching hsi an fu and rescuing all the missionaries who wished to be rescued.
“it was exciting,” said my friend, half apologising for getting excited over it. “it was the last of old china. such things will never happen again.”
exciting! it thrilled me to hear him talk, to know such things had happened barely a year before, to 210know they had happened in this country. would they never happen again? i was not so sure of that as i went through walled town after walled town, as i looked up at the walls of tsung hua chou. this was the correct setting. to talk in friendly, commonplace fashion to people who lived in such towns seemed to annihilate time, to bring the past nearer to me, to make me understand, as i had never understood before, that the people who had lived, and suffered, and triumphed, or lived, and suffered, and fallen, were almost exactly the same flesh and blood as i was myself.
back at the inn my friend the landlady brought me her little grandson to admire. he was a jolly little unwashed chap with a shaven head, clad in an unwashed shift, and i think i admired him to her heart's content. it was evidently worth having been born and lived all the strenuous weary days of her hard life to have had part in the bringing into the world of that grandson. his little sister in the blue-cornered handkerchief, looking on, did not count for much, and yet she had her own feelings, for when i clambered into my cart and was just rumbling over the step i was startled by a terrified childish outcry. looking back, i saw that a little serving-maid, a slave probably, was running after my cart with the small son and heir in her arms, making believe to give away the household treasure to the foreign woman, with grandmother and subordinates looking smilingly on. only the little sister, who was not in the secret, was shrieking lustily in protest.
i had been thinking of the cities in the plain of mesopotamia! and this carried me back to the 211days of my own childhood and the hills round ballarat! many and many a time in my young days have i seen the household baby offered to the “vegetable john,” and the small brothers and sisters shrieking a terrified protest. “they would be good, and love baby, and never be cross with him any more.” here was i taking the place of the smiling, bland, john chinaman of my childhood. after all human nature is much the same all the world over, on the sunny hills of ballarat, or in a walled city at the foot of the mountains in northern china. if we could but bridge the gulf that lies between, i expect we should have found it just exactly the same on the banks of the euphrates and beneath the walls of babylon.