The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone stairway which ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,” here seen in the upper right-hand corner
The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone stairway which ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,” here seen in the upper right-hand corner
The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone stairway which ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,” here seen in the upper right-hand corner
One of the countless beggar women who squat in the center of the stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every pilgrim to drop at least a “cash” into each basket
One of the countless beggar women who squat in the center of the stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every pilgrim to drop at least a “cash” into each basket
One of the countless beggar women who squat in the center of the stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every pilgrim to drop at least a “cash” into each basket
Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan, capital of Shantung
Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan, capital of Shantung
Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan, capital of Shantung
A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most sacred of the five holy peaks of China
A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most sacred of the five holy peaks of China
A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most sacred of the five holy peaks of China
With the example of decent dwellings and habits in plain sight about them in as well as outside the walls, this plodding through filthy streets between dismal mud dens seems to remain wholly satisfactory even to those visibly able to improve their conditions if they chose. Rows of modern two-story stone houses of the missionaries stand on two sides of the city, and with all the efforts of these enigmatical men and women from across the Pacific to jounce China out of her old ruts, it would have been curious to find how slight effect such patent examples have on the daily living of those in constant contact with them, even to the extent of a little increased effort for cleanliness and convenience—if one had not already seen China elsewhere. Just around the corner from the well equipped hospital manned by Americans and English, the Chinese medicine-shops continue to sell powdered fossils for curing diseased eyes, dried frog’s liver for kidney troubles, deer horns ground up into remedies for other ailments, and to send inquirers to native medicine-men who know the hundred and some spots on the human body where sickness can be let out by puncturing with a needle. The mission university with its big campus backed by a splendid landscape and reached by a hole cut specially for it in the main city wall continues to look utterly incongruous in its setting of ignorance and filth. The turnstile of a mission museum filled with graphic illustrations of China’s errors and the simple cures for them records hundreds of thousands of visitors from all the surrounding region and beyond during the pilgrim season alone, yet the callers seem to carry nothing home with them except the honor of having climbed the sacred mountain and worshiped at the shrine of the famous sage a little farther southward. Graphic proofs that deforestation has brought in its train devastating floods, that it contributes to the aridity of the soil on which even the snow, for lack of shade, evaporates before it sinks in, that it is mainly responsible for the locusts which birds might make way with if there were trees for birds to live in, has barely caused the planting of a few shrubs here and there on the mountains that roll up at the edge of the plain on which Tzinan is built—and these will be hacked down and carried off for fuel at the first good opportunity. The people of Shantung’s capital seem to regard as their chief civic asset the big spring that boils up in three mounds of water in the heart of the city and forms a great lake within the walls, through the reedy channels of which they are poled on pleasure-barges, set with tables for their favorite sport of eating, out to island temples where gaudy gods still gaze down upon worshipers unable to recognize the sardonic smirks on their color-daubed wooden faces.
South of Tzinan there are low mountains or high hills, bare except for temples and patches of snow that glistened in the moonlight. These culminate in fame, if not in height, in Tai-shan, most sacred of the holy peaks of China, two hours below the provincial capital. I had purposely timed my journey to Shantung so that I could climb Tai-shan with the pilgrims who flock to it during the fortnight following the Chinese New Year. Though he might have been extremely nasty at that season, the weather god evidently approved my plans, for it would be impossible to picture more perfect conditions for making this far-famed excursion than that brilliant first day of March according to our Western calendar.
Even in Peking those who should have been better informed had led me to expect strenuous opposition to my refusal of chair-bearers. There was nothing of the kind, though I seemed to feel an atmosphere ofmingled surprise and prophecy that I should deeply regret it before the day was done, when I asked merely for a coolie to carry my odds and ends. The ability of almost any foreigner in China to afford servants for all his menial tasks gives the great mass of the Chinese the impression that he has no physical endurance of his own, but only untold riches. The coolie who set off with me at sunrise was well chosen, for not only was he all that a coolie and a guide and “boy” combined should be, but he was so quick-witted and so free from the worst crudities of the Shantung dialect that we conversed almost freely on almost any subject in spite of the scantiness of my Mandarin vocabulary.
The way lay first across a stony plain sloping gently upward, with the compact mass of rocky mountains so close in the cloudless atmosphere that one might easily have been deceived about the exertions that lay ahead, had not common fame more than corrected any such error. Pilgrims were already converging from both directions upon the partly stone-paved route leading out of the north gate of Taianfu, surrounded by its time-blackened walls, and within an hour we were all passing in a single stream through the first great archway.I-T’ien-Men—“First Heaven Gate”—the Chinese call it, and over it hangs an inscription announcing in the brevity of Chinese characters that Confucius took this path when he climbed Tai-shan—enough to make it the accepted one even if there were other feasible ascents. Stone steps soon begin to hint at the obstacle race ahead, though this early they are merely in isolated half-dozens scattered up the gradually more sloping road floored with big irregular stones worn smooth by uncounted millions of feet. Already the beggars who decorate the entire ascent were raising their insistent clamor, and shops and temples and tea-houses and itinerant venders formed an almost unbroken wall on either side. Higher up there were increasingly open stretches looking off across the steep tumbled gorge we were climbing, to the swift rocky mountain-sides that shut us in. Here and there a cluster of rugged, misshapen pines gave as dainty a retreat as if we had been in Japan, but the general lack of cleanliness alone distinctly informed us that we were not. These clumps were rare, too, even on China’s most sacred mountain, otherwise almost entirely of stone, with hardly a patch of earth big enough for the planting of a flower-bed.
This did not make it infertile for its inhabitants, however; rather the contrary. My coolie companion, to whom the ascent was an old, old story, put the number of beggars that lined it at one thousand; but that certainly was over-modest. Surely there were several times thatnumber from bottom to top, and just as many from top to bottom. They sat in the center of the great stairs, so that chair-bearers passed one on either side of them, and those who were carried up passed directly over their heads. The top of each little cluster of stairs seemed to be the exclusive territory of one mendicant, or, in the great majority of cases, of one whole family of them, and not one did I see poaching even for an instant on his fellows’ preserves. Just as often as the half-dozen steps were surmounted a beggar was certain to be found squatting in the middle of the topmost, his woven-reed scoop lying invitingly beside him. Where the merely sloping stretches between these steps were more than ten or twelve feet long other beggars were regularly spaced along them; and higher up, where the ascent was all stairs, there was one, or a family group, about every sixth step.
Sleeker, fatter, more contented-looking beggars I cannot recall having seen anywhere on earth. Red-cheeked children, boys seeming to predominate, were the chief stock in trade, though there were a few adults who were visibly in sad states of health. During the pilgrim season, I was told, hundreds of peasants leave their little farms in charge of one member of the family and the rest establish themselves somewhere along the ascent to Tai-shan, until the spring grows so warm that their other occupation requires their presence at home again. On one side or the other of the climb, seldom more than a few feet from their squatting-place, each group had a makeshift dwelling,—a hut of rocks and grass-mats, sometimes a natural grotto covered over with whatever was available, generally only high enough for the adults on all fours, but carpeted with mountain hay and better than the average homes along Pekinghutungs. Mountain water, magnificent air, a far-reaching view across the plain below, if that means anything to them, made the dismal mud dwellings of most Chinese, within the reeking gloom of city, town, or compound walls, nothing to be compared with this life of perfect leisure in such a vantage-place.
There might have been one serious drawback to all this,—like the “horrible example” of the temperance lecturer, the exhibits could not be kept in proper condition to make the best appeal. The whole mendicant army on Tai-shan, except the small minority that was really ailing, looked so well fed and well slept that only an unusually charitable or exceedingly unobserving Westerner would have yielded to their pleas. He might have been inclined instead to thump the well padded ribs of the woman who here and there, at his approach, stripped suddenly naked the plump youngster she held in her lap, hastily trying to hide itsthick warmi-shangbehind her—for there was still a distinct bite in the air even on this southern slope of the mountain with a brilliant sun beating down upon it. But the visible prosperity of the mendicants seemed to matter little, for the Chinese pilgrims who made up the now almost constant stream of humanity toiling skyward had evidently some superstition that their pilgrimage would not be effective if they did not succor all who needed it along the way, and most of them were taking no chances on passing by a deserving case merely because it looked better nourished and housed than they did themselves. Those who gave confined their gifts almost exclusively to brass “cash”; but there were many scoops an inch or two deep in these cheap coins, occasionally with a real copper standing conspicuously out among them, though the recipients sneaked off to their lairs now and then to hide their gleanings. A whole scoopful of “cash” would not resemble riches to an American “panhandler”; to Chinese of the lower class, however, the pickings of most of the mendicants on Tai-shan, if that day was an average, would seem almost an income of luxury.
About nine o’clock the descending peasants and coolies had also grown to a constant stream, so that rules of the road—or, more exactly by this time, of the stairway—had to be more or less strictly obeyed if progress was to be made either up or down. There were no pilgrim costumes, such as the Japanese climbing Koya-san, for instance, so commonly wear, though frequent groups of coolies carried triangular flags bearing a few characters, touches of color that livened somewhat the almost invariable blue of the every-day garments of the masses. Unfailingly good-natured, the coolie pilgrims had neither a suggestion of the rowdiness of our popular excursions nor of the rather belligerent self-complacency of their island neighbors to the east. Except for two little Japanese professors from Manchuria, who conversed with me in English and German respectively and with the Chinese by characters scrawled on scraps of paper, I was the only foreigner making the ascent that day. The sight of me on foot did not arouse more than the usual gaping to which any Westerner outside the restricted orbits of his kind is subject anywhere in China—until my coolie made one of his often repeated answers to the question as to what had become of my chair. Even the little Japanese climbed on foot for an hour or more, their chairs trailing behind them, and only a few of the haughtiest and fattest Chinese declined to get out and stretch their legs at all. But that a man not only ostensibly of the wealthy class, but a weak “outside barbarian” into the bargain, should be so foolish as to risk getting himself stranded by undertaking a journey which naturally he could not finish unassisted, changed the mere gaping to excitement. It was all very well, I gathered from such of their remarks and gestures as I could understand, for even a foreigner to win whatever merit was given such beings by making as much of the journey as he could on foot, but he most certainly should have brought along a chair to rescue him when he could no longer climb.