Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their crippled feet
Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their crippled feet
Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the relative inadequacy of their crippled feet
The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East
The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East
The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most modern cities of the Far East
A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the Russians at Port Arthur. Hundreds of such war memorials are preserved by the Japanese on the sites of their first victory over the white race
A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the Russians at Port Arthur. Hundreds of such war memorials are preserved by the Japanese on the sites of their first victory over the white race
A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the Russians at Port Arthur. Hundreds of such war memorials are preserved by the Japanese on the sites of their first victory over the white race
The empty Manchu throne of Mukden
The empty Manchu throne of Mukden
The empty Manchu throne of Mukden
The centuries-old Chinese method of execution by the lopping off of heads seems almost to have died out in modern militaristic China, at least in the north, along with such punishments as the slicing or the boxing up of those who win official displeasure. As condemned men cross the bridge to the execution-ground at Mukden, they are politely asked whether they wish to take morphine. Most of them “save face” by refusing it and assuming an outward air of bravery and indifference, perhaps even of gaiety. Sometimes as many as a score kneel on the ground together, their arms tied behind them. A soldier, who gets two “Mex” dollars for each man he despatches, walks down the line and kills as many as he chooses, and when he tires of the sport another soldier quickly takes his place. There are stories of men quarreling violently because the first one killed more than his share. The rifle barrel is placed behind the ear of each victim in prompt succession, the other kneeling men gazing up the line to see when their turn is coming, sometimes even laughing aloud at a bad shot, and as each man falls on his face from the force of the discharge a guard yanks the body out straight and cuts off the leg-irons. One might as well be in a barber-shop so far as any atmosphere of life and death, as we of the West understand it, goes at these frequent execution-parties at Feng-tien.
It must take a certain nerve-control to serve under the “war lord of Manchuria.” Hardly an hour after the two generals so radically cured of grafting had joined their ancestors, another general was asked to step into an automobile and go out to the execution-grounds with two American visitors. There was something about his manner which suggested that the general was under some great strain, but his companions, familiar with despotic rulers only in popular fiction, did not suspect until they reached their destination just why it was so obviously an effort for him to keep his attention on a subject, or even to swallow. But when he saw that there were no armed soldiers on hand to receive him, and that he had really been sent for no other purpose than to act as guide for the visitors, he thawed out so thoroughly that the foreigners carried off a false impression of the expansiveness which a Chinese gentleman displays to casual acquaintances.
Chang himself is evidently not without certain misgivings of a personal nature. When another American, armed with a motion-picture outfit and full credentials, was introduced into the war lord’s residence by one of his most trusted officials, General Chang the younger, his son and commander-in-chief of his armies, came to look things over in person, and even then the father cautiously examined the camera when he appeared, and a dozen of his personal body-guard—to which, rumor has it, no one is eligible who has not killed at least ten men—stood behind the camera-man with rifles loosely slung in the crook of their elbows during the filming. Yet the younger general reads, and to a certain extent speaks, English; his wife wears over her ears the hair-puffs of the Western “flapper”; a graduate of Columbia University is the official interpreter, several Chinese graduates of West Point serve under him, and the general’s favorite carcomes from Michigan’s best automobile factory—where it was fitted with machine-gun emplacements and straps to keep the guards on the running-boards from changing their minds in times of danger.
I passed through Mukden four times before my journeys in as many directions from that focal point of Manchuria ended, and often had news from there after we moved on, for the doings of Chang Tso-lin were always of interest to the rest of China. To all intents and purposes this forceful little Chinese had become the absolute ruler of what was the home-land of the Manchus before they usurped the throne at Peking, completely reversing the rôles of the two peoples as they were played in 1644. The influx of Chinese after that date, when the Great Wall ceased to be a barrier between the overcrowded regions inside it and the vast open spaces of the nomad herdsmen beyond, gradually turned these into tilled fields where cultivation had hitherto been as strictly prohibited as had Chinese immigration, and finally swamped the thinly inhabited region entirely. The Manchus conquered China, and China began again in her time-honored way to swallow up the conquerors, until to-day there is no such thing as a Manchu nation, hardly a spoken remnant of the sonorous Manchu language, no one resembling the fierce warriors and hardy horsemen who put an end to the Ming dynasty such a little while ago. For it is barely three centuries since the chief of the “Eastern Tartars” commanded several learned persons of his nation to design a system of writing Manchu, upon the model of that of the Mongols, and not until two decades later that his successor ascended the dragon throne. To-day one meets individuals all over China who consider themselves Manchus, but they are hardly in any way distinguishable from the Chinese among whom they have been completely assimilated. One may travel the length and breadth of Manchuria now without realizing that he is not in China “proper,” and particularly since the rise of its present Chinese dictator it is much more fittingly known by its Chinese name of “Eastern Three Provinces.”
Virtually, if not openly, independent under his rule, that vast fertile region may possibly have a new future that will make it worthy of still another name, devoid of any suggestion of dependency. Mukden has its own foreign office; the incomes from the national salt monopoly and the customs, from that portion of the railway to Peking which lies north of the Great Wall, and from other similar sources flow directly into Chang’s treasury. The latest report is that he is making a good and, within Chinese limits, honest use of them. Mukdenthreatens to blossom out soon in widened and paved streets, to increase her school facilities, to send the old horse-cars off again on their wanderings and become the third city of China with electric tramways. Incidentally there is talk of a system of conscription to give Chang’s armies the full supply of hardy young men which this great granary of them under his command is capable of supplying, which will be a line of demarcation indeed from the haphazard, voluntary enlistments so long and fixedly in vogue in China “proper.” There are those who believe that provincial autonomy in place of the tightly centralized form of government of imperial days is not merely the visible development in modern “republican” China but the best thing that could happen to the colossal old empire, and these are watching with interest what they hope is the advancement of Manchuria under its approximately independent rule. But political changes are often swift in what was for so many centuries the unchangeable Middle Kingdom, and which still calls itself by the old name, so that it would be worse than boldness to prophesy whether another year will find Chang Tso-lin the undisputed sovereign of a progressive and well administered Northeastern China or merely another of those innumerable eliminated politicians fattening into dotage over their ill gotten gains in the safety-zones commonly known as foreign concessions.
As the traveler races north or southward from Mukden by the excellent expresses of the South Manchurian Railway, well ballasted and much of it already double-tracked, through towns lighted by electricity and as spick and span as Japanese rule can make them, it is hard to realize that when the present century began the home-land of the Manchus was almost unknown to the outside world in anything but name. Back behind these modern railway cities bulk the old walled towns of China, and in the never distant background the mere passenger glimpses the primitive methods of transportation and of life in general that are in such sharp contrast to his immediate surroundings, fitted with almost everything that civilization has mechanically to offer. In the summer seasonkaoliang, a species of what our own South knows as sorghum and which bears a considerable resemblance to the Kaffir-corn widely cultivated in Haiti, covers the earth with its deep green to the height of a horseman’s head, often as far as the eye can see for hours at a time—and makes magnificent hiding for bandits. The flatness of Manchuria at Mukden and to the north is made up for by the splendid range of mountains that follows the railwaynot far off on the left all the way to Dairen, great tumbled hills in which the mere tramper or the seeker after old temples and ancient monasteries finds himself equally rewarded. But it was still my lot for a time longer to stick rather closely to the lines of modern travel and to commonplace, if comfortable, modern cities.
Dairen, which the Japanese have made of the Russian Dalny in the leased portion of the Liaotung Peninsula that fell to them as the spoils of war, has all the un-Chinese characteristics of such cities, to enumerate which would merely be to describe in detail any one of a hundred great ports and railway termini in Europe or, with certain modifications, North America. May not therefore the broad macadamed streets, the big brick and stone buildings, the great breakwaters, the mammoth cranes on the docks, and all the rest of the signs of what we call progress, so admirable but so unpicturesque, be taken for granted? We liked Port Arthur, which the Japanese have redubbed Ryojun, better. There life was more leisurely; old buildings constructed by the Russians, streets that broke out every little while into grass- and even weed-grown open spaces, the spaciousness of a place which never grew to be the large busy city its founders planned, gave it something of the atmosphere of an old town of England, or of our South, somewhat off the track of present-day hasty and bustling activity. Ryojun is the seat of government of the Japanese leased territory, while Dairen is merely its metropolis. The old Port Arthur and the new are separated by a rivulet emptying into the splendid landlocked port, and by some hills, of which there are more than the eye can count rolling and piling away across all the landscape of the region. These are by far the most conspicuous features of Port Arthur and vicinity, for there is scarcely a knoll among them that does not bear on its summit a monument. Whether it is merely an unconscious manifestation of their military spirit, strong and continual as far back as history can trace them, or a deliberate parading of their victory over a branch of the white man’s world, the Japanese have marked every spot where a handful of their countrymen fell and have preserved the ruins of every fort out of which the Russian defenders were bombarded, so that the hilly landscape of all the region is littered with mementos to the god of war. Nor is his day over in Port Arthur, for a garrison commander sits ever on the alert against kodaking tourists who would profane his stone-built playthings overlooking the bay. Both at Port Arthur and at Dairen there are beaches that might become the international resorts the Japanese are striving to make them, could their sponsors ever learn that the rest of the world is not so enamoured of the dwarfish Nipponese form in the nude as they seem themselves to be.