Chapter 49

On the way home I changed places with one of our three wheelbarrow coolies, and found that the contrivance did not run so hard as I might otherwise have believed

The men who use the roads of China make no protest at their being dug up every spring and turned into fields

Sons are a great asset to the wheelbarrowing coolies of Shantung

Chinese history is full of accounts of the struggle to keep the Hoang Ho within limits. Some emperors are famous chiefly for their struggles against it. For centuries the “squeeze” connected with the building of dikes, or even their maintenance, has been one of the richest perquisites of certain official positions. Perhaps this is why the latest task of wrestling with the Yellow River has been given to an American firm established in China. Two years ago the river broke through its dikes again, though this time within a hundred miles of its mouth, and inundated what to crowded Shantung is an immense area, destroying many villages and withdrawing the land about them from cultivation. Several walled cities, too, were in great peril, particularly Litsing, situated in a bend of the river, andbelowit; for here as in its former course to the south the stream has gradually silted itself higher and higher, until one crossing it anywhere along its lower reaches must climb thirty or forty feet to the top of the dike from the land side, to descend only ten or twelve to the river. In flood season the waters washed at the walls of Litsing, which in time they must have undermined and broken, drowning out the city. Famine relief funds improved the lot of those who had been driven from their homes, some of whom built new shelters on the broad tops of the dikes, while others scattered, particularly to Manchuria. The dead and the living between them so crowd the land in Shantung that if one patch is taken away there is no other room for those who live upon it. Bids were asked for the task of retaming the river, to be paid for jointly from relief funds and by the province; the American firm offered to do the work at just onefourth the price asked by Chinese contractors, and having secured itself against the common misfortune of those working for Chinese Governments by insisting on monthly prepayments, tackled a job that was old when Confucius was a boy.

Clumsy native boats, bringing down rock for the work, as well as coolies and supplies, will carry one from Tzinan to the scene of operations in a day or two; but the more hasty American way is by automobile from Choutsun, two hours east of the capital on the Shantung railway. What is known in China as a motor-road, that is, a raised causeway made entirely of soft yellowish earth, which cuts up into ever deeper ruts, growing impassable with much rain, its steep sides gradually crumbling away until the barely two-car width is reduced to the point when passing is impossible for much of the distance, runs northward to the river, where cars take to the top of the dike. The workmen, strange as it may seem, are not so numerous as the company would like, and recruiting has to be carried on at considerable distances. The proverbial Chinese distrust of the “outside barbarian” has something to do with this; perhaps fear of bringing down upon their heads the wrath of the river gods for interfering with him may deter others; naturally in this season of the lunar New Year many had gone back to their ancestral graves. To put into American dollars and cents the wages paid would be to give a false impression of penuriousness on the part of the company; suffice it to say, therefore, that they are much higher than the average of wages in Shantung, that millet and rice and other essentials are furnished at cost to the employees, thereby saving them from heartless exploitation by their fellow-countrymen of the merchant class, and that reeds and other materials are supplied for covering their lodging-places. These are neither more nor less than holes dug in the earth; but mud dwellings, whether above or below the ground, have been the lot of Chinese coolies for many centuries, at least since the forests were turned into fuel and coffins, and these have the advantage that they can be moved in a few hours with a shovel as the work advances.

Here several thousand coolies already, with two or three times as many to come, it is expected, are engaged in straightening out a great crook in the river. The methods are of course those of the Orient, where many men with shovels and baskets, swarming like trains of leaf-cutting ants over the scene of activities, are more economical than snorting steam-shovels and endless strings of rattling freight-cars. In the early spring, when mountains of broken ice from up the river joined that which had covered the flooded region during the short winter, thesight was one worth coming manylito see. But that was gone now, even in the middle of March, and the task of taking a kink out of “China’s Sorrow” is on the high road to completion. The plan is to teach the river the way it should go, and then let it scour out its own channel. Western initiative and ingenuity, however, probably can no more cure permanently the vagrancy of the Hoang Ho than did the ancient emperors, and corrective measures will have to be applied to the incorrigible vagabond among rivers at least for centuries to come.

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