Chapter 21

One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray, with green domes and golden crosses, with much gaudy trimming

A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down upon

Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks in the “thieves’” market of Harbin—when they catch any one who can afford to be blacked

Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok, selling second-hand hardware of every description, suggest why the factories and trains of Bolshevik Russia have difficulty in running

I traveled from end to end of the Chinese Eastern Railway, including the extension of it from Pogranichnaya to Vladivostok, through what was once, like Korea, Chinese territory. Endless steppes, flat as a floor, covered as far as the eye could see with coarse grass, here and there being hayed, was the general aspect north of the Sungari. Great herds of cattle and sheep, carts drawn by six or eight horses over roads which in the rainy season could not have been passable at all, millions of acres of potential wheat-fields, a great granary of everything, including sturdy youths for Chang Tso-lin’s armies, formed the outstanding features of Hai-lung-chiang, northernmost and largest of China’s provinces. South-bound freight-trains were not only crowded with Chinese soldiers, gambling amid the chaotic messiness that surrounded them in their roofed cars, but the uncovered flat-cars loaded with their paraphernalia, with car-wheels and rusted machinery, were crowded with Russian women and children sleeping on makeshift nests in sunshine or heavy rain. There were cattle-cars with barefooted Russian men tending them, little European box-cars fitted up as homes, sometimes with a still aristocratic-looking young woman suckling a babe in the center of it, impertinent Chinese soldiers looking on. There is no way of computing how many pretty Russian girls, with nothing to live on but the sale of their charms, there were along the C. E. R. from Manchuli to Vladivostok, like the little end of the funnel down through which the miseries of Russia had been oozing for years.

For all the rumors of degeneration of that line, however, the through express was an excellent train, though even more leisurely than that on the branch from Harbin southward, halting interminably at every station, apparently to let the crew talk to the girls who decorated every platform. It had all the comforts of compartment-divided sleeping-cars, with Russian attendants; the dining-car, with its ikon and its abacus, had a boarding-house table the entire length of it, and comely young Russian waitresses, who rolled their socks.

When I awoke in the morning beyond Tsitsihar, the landscape was silvery with white birches. Large and often pretty towns appeared every now and then among the low green hills or on the broad prairies of this most arctic of the “Eastern Three Provinces,” decidedly Russian towns, with wide unpaved streets, discordantly colored half-Oriental churches of the Greek Orthodox faith rising high above all else, againstbackgrounds that gave above all a sense of vast, wide-open spaces. The Russians have about twelve square miles at each station, and a strip of territory on either side of the railway, where they can rent land for about eighty years, as against only eighteen for foreigners in the rest of China, where none but Chinese can own land, with certain exceptions in favor of missionaries. There were far more Russians than Chinese at the stations of these frontier towns, reminiscent of those of the Dakotas, where every one came down to see the daily train go through. Most of the peasant women were barefoot; in town the girls all rolled their stockings, or went without them entirely. But huge bearskin coats and big fur caps hung out on lines, airing. Hot water was furnished at all the important stations, and bushels of eggs, all manner of food, especially just at this season most magnificent raspberries, were for sale by robust Russian women, often in a substantial booth built for the purpose. But long lines of Chinese soldiers with drawn bayonets still slouched along every platform, besides no end of Russians in uniforms of every swaggering description, as if the dregs of a dozen routed armies had been scattered along the line. Many of these strutting fellows wore swords, and some carried firearms, members evidently of some sort of local or railway police, as the unarmed majority were probably men who had no other garments left. The constant swashbuckling, the incessant parading of deadly weapons, got on the nerves; quite aside from the decided economic loss of so many men withdrawn from production, there was an ominous something about these thousands of young fellows, who had not been old enough to get into the war, now strutting about in its aftermath as if looking for a chance to make up for lost opportunities. The Russians saluted all Chinese officials, even those in civilian dress, raising their hats to them obsequiously if they themselves were not in uniform. At one station a drunken Russian went around forcing Chinese ragamuffins to shake hands with him.

All northern Manchuria was much troubled by bandits,hung-hu-tze, or “red beards,” they were called, who had devastated far and wide, even attacking the trains and station towns. There were at least a few renegade Russians among some of the bands. The public shooting ofhung-hu-tze, in an open space between Pristan and the railway town, was one of the frequent sights of Harbin. But the real curse of Manchuria, as we were to find it of almost all China, were the soldiers. The bandits often paid for what they took, but the soldiers looted openly and carried off their plunder by the train-load within plain sight ofevery one. When they wished to move, away from the railroad, they forced farmers to let their crops go to waste and furnish them transportation for ten-day journeys, feeding the drivers and their animals along the way, but leaving them to find their way home as best they could. If there were no other carts to be had at the end of the ten days, the old ones must go on, twenty, thirty days, and even more. One man I heard of had been away a year, and still could not get back. A few hundred hand-picked, well paid soldiers, perhaps with a few Russians among them to give them starch, could, according to competent opinion, put a stop to banditry in Manchuria. But such coolies in uniform as swarm up and down the C. E. R. accomplish nothing to that end, even when they are not in actual collusion with the bandits. Thehung-hu-tzerout whole barracks of them, and prey on the Chinese and the Russian population alike. Yet the Government clings to the fiction that they afford sufficient protection, and will not allow the Russians to go armed, unless they hold some kind of military position under the Chinese. Soldiers and bandits alike abuse all the inhabitants of northern Manchuria, except the Japanese, who have their own troops on the spot.

Manchuli, on the edge of Siberia and almost on the fiftieth parallel, is a large, prairie-like town of much more Russian than Chinese aspect. Many of its houses are built of logs, yet are not unhomelike; sod hovels like caves half below and half above ground shelter some of the population, among which were many down-and-outs. Cossacks in their big caps, with curiously liquid eyes, roam the wide, if dusty, streets. Russians and Chinese sit joking together; both ride the small sturdy horses of the region; many of the Chinese wear the long, soft, black boots so general among their neighbors, but there seemed to be very few mixtures of the two races. Sturdy fellows indeed were these bearded Caucasian farmers from the north and west, but for that matter the far-northern Chinese, with enough to eat and room to live in, are big and strong, too, real pioneers, used to a different environment than are their overcrowded compatriots farther south, in touch with and more sympathetic toward European civilization. Now and again one of the Chinese spoke to me in Russian and, when I could not answer, announced to his companions that I was ayang gwei, though without any thought of insult in the term, Russians evidently being so numerous and familiar that they are no longer ranked as “foreign devils.” A market-place of scores of makeshift shanties was stocked with enough second-hand hardware to supply half Manchuria. Like those in Harbin and,I found later, Vladivostok, these marts were crammed with everything from railroad equipment to hinges, from factory machinery to crooked nails, all more or less rusted, broken, and out of order. It was as if every Russian who had fled before the “Reds” had torn loose and brought with him anything he could lay his hands on, and here was another explanation of why the factories and trains of Soviet Russia have difficulty in running.

From Manchuli one can easily look across into Bolshevik territory; but that was not China, and the traveler must turn back somewhere. An ancient engine and the most rattletrap collection of cars that ever masqueraded under the name of train was preparing to set out for Chita, wretched-looking women and gaunt, hungry babies among the passengers who occupied the dirty, miserably dilapidated compartments that were lighted only by the candles travelers brought with them. Even those of us for whom hardships have a certain zest could hardly regret that the way lay back the comfortable way we had come.

From Mukden on to Peking one has a feeling of being in the real China at last. Silver dollars take the place of convenient bank-notes; the chaotic rough and tumble of Chinese crowds unchecked by foreign discipline pervades stations and trains, both swarming with unsoldierly men and boys in faded, ill fitting, gray cotton uniforms, who pack even the dining-car to impassability; here and there a bullet-hole through wall or window of the stuffy coupés into which the half-breed American-European cars, with certain curious native characteristics, are divided reminds one of recent history in the once Celestial Empire. Endless fields, enormous seas, ofkaoliang, enough to hide all the bandits in China, flank the way. For that matter the towns as well as brigands hide in it, for the slightly oval-roofed houses of stone and baked mud are barely as high as this tall grain, and as the roofs themselves are often covered with grass, places of considerable size easily escape the eye entirely. In other seasons it is quite different, for once they are denuded the fields are mere wind-swept stretches of bare earth protesting against the habitual scarcity of moisture in North China by sending frequent swirling clouds of dust to envelop any one and anything within reach. Walled towns far from the stations that serve them, iron-riveted cart-wheels hub-deep in the “roads” through which rural transportation laboriously flounders its way, Chinese in long cloaks, almost universally denim-blue in color, naked children and ragged, diseased adults begging abjectly wherever the train halts, were but afew of the details that somehow we had always associated with China. Even the towns hidden in the grain seemed to be overrun with soldiers, yet about all pretentious properties were big stone walls that suggested bandits in perpetuity. All these things we saw hazily, through a veil, as it were, for some pseudo-genius has had the unhappy thought of lining nearly all the railways of China with willow-trees, which flash constantly past with exasperating persistence, combining with the inadequate little windows of the stuffy compartments still further to reduce the visibility.

At Shanhaikwan, where the Great Wall clambers down to the sea at last, weary with its three thousand miles over the mountains, soldiers were much less numerous than in towns not so important to the north and south of it. For the warring factions had declared a neutral zone on either side of the colossal ancient rampart, which had become again, after nearly three centuries of no real importance, the dividing-line between what threatens to be an independent Manchuria and China proper. On the beach at Shanhaikwan, or neighboring Pei-tai-ho, where half the foreign residents of North China spend the summer, with turbaned Hindus, white and black soldiers of France, an Italian gunboat, and other reminders of their protective home governments to discount rumors of being in danger, the heat was still too scorching to make an immediate entry into still hotter Peking inviting, though August was well on the wane. Even a week later, when much of the landscape was flooded with the brief rainy season, a cool breath of air night or day was as rare as a Chinese field without a grave. Within the Great Wall, beyond which seems to be considered outer darkness for such purposes, these bare, untended mounds, without even the grass which beautifies those of Korea, dotted the country like spatters of raindrops on a placid yellow sea. As we neared Taku, at the mouth of the river that gives Tientsin its importance and all but washes the walls of Peking, higher, newer conical heaps of earth suggested that many men of importance, or wealth, had recently been buried there. But these turned out to be salt-fields, where the surface soil of a great sea-flooded region is thrown up in mounds and rectangular heaps which gradually wash down from earthy brown to the white piles that are sacred to the government salt monopoly.

The traveler who lets his friends rush him about the foreign concession of Tientsin by trolley or automobile will get an impression of a comfortable Western community in an Oriental land, but he will carry off very little idea of the real China, or even of the real Tientsin, whichis a swarming Chinese city, none the less so for having had its wall reduced to a street of boulevard width as a punishment for the Boxer uprising. To those for whom commerce and modern efficiency are everything of importance, the Concession at Tientsin is of more consequence than a whole province of interior China, but I found myself more interested in any one of the ten Mohammedan mosques within the native city, or in the former home of Li Hung-chang, now a tomb in which he is worshiped by his descendants quite like any other prominent bygone Chinese from Confucius to Yuan Shih-kai, than in the whole length of Victoria Road.

A foreign concession in China, while it serves its purpose of making life more livable and business more possible to the foreign merchants who inhabit it, is altogether too convenient a refuge for the Chinese crooks who choose to make it one. How many of China’s ex-ministers of finance or of communications, how many former office-holders of every graft-collecting grade, have retired to the protection of foreign jurisdiction at Tientsin alone, living in luxury on their loot of office, and how much of this might have been recovered by the Chinese people to whom it rightfully belongs were there no such safety-zones of easy access, is suggested by the magnificent establishments many of these rogues maintain there. Yet the gaunt human horses who toil past them tugging at heavy carts piled high with imports and exports get barely six cents a day in our money, which they wolf in scanty, unwholesome food copper by copper as fast as their tally-sticks amount to one. As mere passers-by we could not but be thankful that, after a brief following of the example of other nations, the United States decided that concessions on Chinese soil were not in keeping with our national policy. The Russians and the Germans and the Austrians have lost theirs now, as they have their extraterritoriality, and it would not be strange if this recovery of sovereignty taken from them for the misdeeds of the Boxers gives hope to the people of China of chasing us all out before the century has grown much older. Where a bare score of Italians can hold a large tract of Chinese territory under their jurisdiction, trafficking in arms and munitions from it with the various factions that are doing their best to make China a continual battle-field, and selling at almost any price they wish to ask what is virtually the protection of their flag to Chinese rascals, it is not to be wondered at if enmity toward “foreign devils” in general does not show rapid strides toward oblivion. Jealousies among the various nationalities which still keep their holdings also make a queer story. Thus as many police forcesand fire departments are maintained as there are concessions, and one miserable little bridge connects the principal foreign quarter with the rest of China, when getting together would make really efficient substitutions. Tientsin is perhaps a pleasant dwelling-place for those who like it, but we left it without regret one morning soon after our arrival and by noon were rumbling along under the massive walls of Peking, which was to be our home for the unprecedented length of nine months that will not soon be forgotten.

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