This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest
This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest
This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest
A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to escort us through the earthquake district, though whether for fear of bandits, out of mere respect for our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a few coppers which he could not give them himself, was not clear
A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to escort us through the earthquake district, though whether for fear of bandits, out of mere respect for our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a few coppers which he could not give them himself, was not clear
A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to escort us through the earthquake district, though whether for fear of bandits, out of mere respect for our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a few coppers which he could not give them himself, was not clear
Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old tree-lined highway. In places this was covered hundreds of feet deep for miles; in others it had been carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile or more away
Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old tree-lined highway. In places this was covered hundreds of feet deep for miles; in others it had been carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile or more away
Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old tree-lined highway. In places this was covered hundreds of feet deep for miles; in others it had been carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile or more away
In the earthquake district of western China whole terraced mountain-sides came down and covered whole villages. In the foreground is a typical Kansu farm
In the earthquake district of western China whole terraced mountain-sides came down and covered whole villages. In the foreground is a typical Kansu farm
In the earthquake district of western China whole terraced mountain-sides came down and covered whole villages. In the foreground is a typical Kansu farm
Badly hit by the earthquake, Houei-ning was still full of cracks and chasms and ruins, and the “roads” leading down into or out of it seemed in many cases to drop into pitfalls and sometimes entirely to lose themselves, or at least their sense of direction. There were many times as many dead as living inhabitants. The almost golden-yellow landscape of the verdureless mountain slopes about the town were more thickly covered with graves than I could remember ever having seen before, either in China or Korea; the myriads of little conical mounds suggested spatters of raindrops on a rolling, golden sea. High in the hills close above were what seemed to be a plethora of temples and monasteries, while all the landscape bristled with stone monuments, most of them on the backs of turtles, the rest handsome old ornamental arches of carved stone, all more or less cracked and ruined. Houei-ning must have had something of a history in bygone centuries, like so many now sleepy old towns of China.
Now it seemed to be the big market for those crude forked sticks which do duty as pitchforks among the Chinese. All this region made a four-tined one, with a wooden crosspiece let into and tied to the tines and the end of the handle with tough grass, but Houei-ning evidently had a monopoly on those grown in the form of a two-pronged implement. In Honan perfect three-tined ones were grown in abundance, as rose-bushes and the like are trained into fantastic shapes in Japan. The flimsiness of construction which everywhere impresses itself upon the traveler in China is nowhere more noticeable than in such peasants’ tools,—rakes a mere bamboo pole with one end split, spread, and bent over in the form of teeth; woven-wicker buckets for use at open holes in the fields that do service as wells; little bent-willow shovels for the countless thousands of boys and men, and not a few women and girls, who wander the roads with their baskets—for gathering the droppings of animals seems to be the favorite outdoor sport of China; it is a lonelytrail and a depopulated region indeed where these are left to mingle with the soil. It was in Houei-ning, too, that we saw offered for sale guns that must have been old when the Manchu dynasty began, guns slender as a lance, eight feet or more long, with tiny butts apparently meant to be used against the thumb instead of the shoulder, and some contraption for firing that probably antedated the flint-lock by many decades. A fetching touch of color that increased as the weather grew more bitingly cold were the earlaps worn by nearly every one. In Kansu these are almost always home-made and hand-embroidered in gaily colored designs of birds, flowers, and the like, with much less violation of artistic standards than one would expect.
All through this region a custom wide-spread in China was very generally practised. That is, almost all boys from perhaps four to twelve years of age wore round their necks an iron chain big enough to restrain an enraged bulldog, and usually fastened together with a large native-forged padlock, though there would have been no difficulty in lifting off the whole contraption. The object of this adornment is to protect the precious male offspring from ill luck—here, perhaps, to keep the big fish from wagging his tail again. If parents have any reason to suspect that evil spirits are on the trail of a son, they hasten to a temple and put him in pawn to an idol, as it were; that is, they have a priest hang a chain, with much hocus-pocus, about his neck, thereby deceiving the powers of evil into believing that he is not their son at all but that he belongs to the temple. In a way this is true, for before he can be “redeemed” again by the parents the priest, who keeps the key of the padlock, must be generously rewarded. Let a boy fall ill, and no time is lost in evoking this sure protection; especially if one dies, his surviving or later-born brother is chained at once. The constant efforts of evil spirits to do injury to a family through the still unmarried sons, of whom ancestor-worship requires posterity, is one of the greatest banes of Chinese existence. Not the least uncommon of the tricks resorted to for the discomfiture of these unseen enemies is to give the boy a girl’s name, for naturally no evil spirit is going to waste his time in trying to injure a mere female.
The city gates of Houei-ning do not open until six, after which we went down again into labyrinthian loess gullies, across a broad fertile valley, and finally into a river cañon. Nothing could have been more dull than the long morning through this dreary chasm, in utter silence except for our own noises, and a rare donkey-boy singing his way alongthe top of the cliff far above. But, as if to make up for this dismal stretch, the road clambered early in the afternoon to the summit of a high ridge, with perhaps the most marvelous series of vistas of all our journey. There were crazy-shaped fields at every possible height, ragged little hollows that looked exactly like shell-holes, even their tiny bottoms carefully cultivated, threshing-floors throwing up grain like bursts of shrapnel, clusters of farm buildings of the identical color of all the landscape, and always surrounded by high mud walls, a wildly chaotic yet completely tamed land, utterly bare brown, turned golden by the brightest of suns and the clearest of air, with only the faintest purple haze on the far edges of the horizon. The trail had taken again to one of the pell-mell slopes of a mighty stream-worn crack in the earth and worked its way in and out along the haphazard face of this, across natural earth bridges, over jutting spurs and perpendicular ridges, into pockets where, cut off from the breeze but still in the brilliant sunshine, it was almost uncomfortably warm, and gradually carried us higher and higher on a ridge that swung more and more to the south. The miserable half-ruined mud village in which we found lodging was so high that to step out into the night was like diving into ice-water. Yet we kept to the ridge for hours more next morning before the road abandoned it at last and plunged headlong down into a big valley supporting the ancient town of Ngan-ting. An unusually huge wall of irregular shape, with very fancy high gates, surrounded the same crowds of staring, dirty people, of filthy-nosed, half-naked children and crippled women, all huddled together in the cold shadows instead of spreading out in the sunshine of the open world all about them. Ngan-ting seemed to be an important garrison town, through which we passed just in time to become entangled in some manœver resembling formal guard-mount, amid the barbaric blaring of many Chinese bugles. Our carts meanwhile had scorned the town and were on their way down the widest river valley yet. Along this the avenue of trees, some of their trunks scarred with pictorial obscenities, kept up in a half-hearted way; but scrub-poplar and sometimes almost branchless trunks were poor substitutes for the magnificent old willows farther east. Many of these had been cut down in this region, as huge stumps on a level with the earth showed. Apparently there is nothing that so exasperates the Chinese as the sight of a live tree; it would look so much better shaped as a coffin or turned into temple doors.
Suddenly, just beyond Ngan-ting, both sexes and all ages took to making yarn, in the Andean style of twirling a bobbin as they wanderedabout, and to knitting, not merely caps and stockings, but whole suits. We had once or twice been shocked some days earlier at the sight of a camel-driver calmly twiddling his knitting-needles as he strode or rode along, a pastime bad enough in talkative old ladies and tea-party guests who decline to waste their time, and certainly far beneath the dignity of the great male sex! But some missionary, it seemed, had started the craze—for a generation or so ago knitting was as unknown in China as real peanuts or the weaving of woolen clothing—and had neglected to explain its proper segregation. There had been no rain in all this region for a whole year, they said, and we had been advised to buy rain-water only of the Mohammedans, even if they forced us to pay high for it, since that to be had from the mere Chinese might be rank poison even after boiling. Somewhere along the way I had seen a blind youth marching round and round one of those two-stone grist-mills to be found all over China, and most often operated by a blindfolded donkey. His short hair where cues were still the fashion, and a not unattractive young woman watching him from a near-by doorway with an expression that might easily have been taken for a satisfied leer, naturally called up the memory of Samson and Delilah. Indeed, the fellow swung his head from side to side and lifted his feet unnecessarily high at every step in a way to prove that the late Caruso had learned at least one stage trick from real life. But the Philistines in this case were only the filth and lack of care which leave so many Chinese children sightless. There was a little blind boy of five that morning, for instance, carrying a baby brother of two, each wearing a single rag; and the baby was telling the boy where to step, though he afterward ran a bit alone and made the threshing-floor without mishap through many pitfalls.
In the account of his travels in China a decade ago Professor Ross has a chapter entitled, “Unbinding the Women of China.” One of the professor’s finest traits, however, is over-optimism. Foot-binding most certainly showed no signs of dying out in any of the territory through which we passed in our two months’ journey out into the northwest. A group of little girls from six to eight years old toddling along the road on crippled feet, yet carrying heavy baskets and driven, like calves to market, by a sour-faced old woman whose own feet still seemed to pain her at every step, was no unusual sight. One might easily have fancied they were to be offered for sale—girls can be bought for a mere song in this region. How often we passed a child in her early teens astride a donkey urged on by a man on foot, her little tapering legs ending inmere knots, her face so whitened and rouged that she looked like some inanimate and over-decorated doll! Only another bride, or concubine, on her way to the home of a husband or a master she had never seen. Girls certainly not yet ten years old were already shuffling about house- and threshing-floors in their football knee-pads; little girls dismally crying in some mud pen to which they had been banished because they could not suppress such signs of pain from their newly bound feet, or hobbling a few yards along the road with set lips, emphasized the fact that there are far worse fates even than being born a boy in China.
Crippled feet would be bad enough in comfort and warmth and with plenty of servants to save steps, as probably most Westerners fancy Chinese women have who are thus “beautified.” But if there is any decrease in foot-binding at all, it is among the well-to-do, the wealthy in large cities who might sit perpetually in cushions and spare their little feet. Your peasant and countryman is most insistent that the old custom be kept up; he would sneer with scorn at the thought of taking a wife with natural feet; he sternly insists that his daughters’ feet be bound. Stumping about their filthy huts, shivering with mountain cold, probably never washing all over once in a lifetime, it is astonishing that these country women do not all die of gangrene or something of the sort. How they keep such feet warm, when they cannot move rapidly, when they ride sometimes all day in a cold so bitter that even we were forced to get off and walk at frequent intervals, is a question I have never yet heard answered. Perhaps the foot becomes a kind of hoof, devoid of feeling and incapable of freezing.
At first thought one might fancy that at least a few mothers who had suffered all their lives would spare their daughters similar misery. For, they have told missionary women, their bound feet hurt whenever they walk, and generally they have pains also in the legs and the back as long as they live. Knowing how serious a mere broken arch may be, it is not hard for us to imagine what it must mean to have the arch doubled back upon itself by turning the toes under and squeezing the heel up to meet them, and then insisting that the victim walk. But even if the mothers were devoid of that wide-spread human cussedness which makes misery love company, even if the father did not absolutely insist, there is the economic question. Girls must have husbands—“or they will starve,” as even experienced Pekingamasput it. There is no provision in the Chinese scheme of family for old maids. But granting that all these insuperable difficulties have been overcome, there is thegirl herself with whom to reckon. If she has reached the age—six to seven—when the binding should begin, and it has not begun, she is likely to commence by insisting, and to advance to weeping and tearing her hair unless the oversight is corrected. In other words, girls cry if their feet are not bound; and they certainly cry if they are, so that there is apparently no escape from tears. You would hardly expect a modest American school-girl willingly to consent to mingle with her companions if she were obliged to wear trousers, or to cut her hair boy fashion; and in China “face,” the fear of ridicule and public opinion, is much stronger than in the United States, and customs and precedents are far more solidly intrenched. Naturally the Chinese girl would rather face a little suffering—for at her age she probably has only a hazy idea of the length of the ordeal and the severity of the pain involved—than to be made fun of all her life for her “boy’s feet,” and, worse still, to lose all chance of getting a husband, which she has been taught to think is the most dreadful, in fact the most unsurvivable, fate that can befall her. Once in a while some poor orphan girl is so “neglected” that no one takes the trouble to bind her feet; and she becomes the village slattern and a horrible example to all “decent” girls. For of course she cannot get a husband; she will be unusually fortunate if some one gives her a job as a barn-yard drudge.
Our hostess at one of the mission stations knew a girl whose feet had not been bound but who turned out to be very pretty. One day an important official happened to see her as he was passing through the district. “What a pity,” he said, “that her feet are not bound, for if they were I would take her as a concubine.”
“Oh, do not let that stand in the way of your desire, your Excellency,” cried the enchanted mother; “give me a year and I will have her ready for you.”
“But you cannot bind her feet in a year,” replied the official.
“Only leave it to me, your Excellency, and I shall not fail you,” persisted the mother.
A year later the girl took the proud position that had been offered her, as concubine to what, to the simple country people, was a very great man; but to this day, though she still keeps her precarious place, she cannot walk a step. For instead of starting gradually, by bending the toes under and wrapping them in wet cloths that shrink, then tying them down more tightly and beginning to draw up the heel the following year, and so on, this mother was working against time. So she literally cut much of the flesh off the girl’s feet, broke nearly every bone in them,and by the time the year was up she had made her as helpless a cripple as any mandarin could have wanted for a plaything.
The best style of bound feet, it seems, have the bones broken. Exacting men ask if this has been done, and show worth-while approval at an affirmative answer. Feet seem to vary in size and style by localities. In some places on our western trip they were so small that no real foot remained; the leg tapered down without a break to the end, almost as if it had been cut off at the ankle. In fact we often wondered if it would not have been much simpler and far less painful to amputate the feet entirely. In other places the big toe was left, and with it something of the shape of a foot. But under this the tiny shoe was generally fitted with a miniature heel, often red in better-to-do cases, which made walking next to impossible. With no give and take of the leg-muscles, these of course soon dry up, so that the leg resembles a tapering wooden stump and the gait bears out the likeness. Foot-binding is certainly a wonderful scheme to keep the women from gadding about; and in a land where they are seldom expected to leave the compound in which they are delivered to the husband—or mother-in-law—this no doubt is considered a great asset. Earlier writers have told of districts in which the feet are no longer bound because of the sad experiences of fleeing women who could not keep up with their men-folks at the time of the great Mohammedan rebellion. But we never saw any such districts. Probably the experiences have been forgotten, and custom has reasserted itself. The Mohammedans, by the way, are just as bad as the mere Chinese in this matter of foot-binding; if I remember rightly, the Koran has nothing to say against it.
As far as we noticed, the missionaries in the northwest did not seem to be making any great effort to reduce this most atrocious of Chinese customs. Some of them appeared to be more eager to save souls than soles, though in general they were men and women of sound common sense, with their own feet on the ground rather than with their heads lost in the clouds. Suffering and misery, immorality and wicked superstitions are so general in China that the mere crippling of the feet soon becomes but one of many possible points of attack. Christian converts are not allowed to bind their feet; if they are already bound, they are expected, in theory at least, to unbind them, though this in the case of older women is not always possible. Girls with bound feet are refused admission to most, if not all, Christian schools; and a few of the best government institutions are commencing to follow suit. The best argument of all against the practice is the plain economic one. If you bindyour daughter’s feet she cannot marry within the church, the missionaries tell a convert, for Christian boys will not have her. As available husbands of that point of view increase, the girls are of course more and more willing to run the risk of not having themselves adorned with lily feet. But, to be frank, Christianity is not rapidly increasing, and bound feet seem to be as prevalent, at least in northern China, as ever, except in Peking and a few coast cities, where it is against the law, in Manchuria, where it is contrary to custom, in the rather small and scattered Christian communities, and among a few of the more progressive families in the larger cities.
Custom is not only a curiously tenacious weed but often a quick-growing one. I was impressed with the latter thought one morning when, in riding into a town of some size, I caught sight of a woman with natural feet, such as I had not seen perhaps for a week; and the first flash to cross my mind might have been expressed in some such exclamation as, “My, but isn’t she ugly!” The abnormal type is always ugly, and if, in a mere week, a foreigner can become so accustomed to the normal Chinese woman, who tapers down like a sharpened stake, that an uncrippled one strikes him, even momentarily, as a kind of monstrosity, it is easy to understand why the Chinese have come in many centuries to consider this alteration of the human form both an improvement and a necessity. Nor is the custom so universally injurious to the health as the rest of the world naturally supposes. Women with cheeks bright red without the aid of rouge, yet with the tiniest of feet, were no more unusual in Kansu than the filthy, old, and totally unattractive ones who scuttled away into their holes as if they were in imminent danger when two harmless foreigners rode by on travel-weary pack-mules.
Beyond “Dry Straw Hotel”—most Chinese place names are quaint and simple if you translate them—where we made the noonday halt on the next to the last day of the journey, the hills were no longer terraced, perhaps because they were too steep, but lay piled up in a thousand folds and wrinkles that made them even more beautiful. Wheat was flowing the other way now, toward Lanchow, mainly on donkeys. There was much stone in the soil of the great plain across which we jogged with a growing sensation of eagerness that afternoon, and to the left, hazy under the low sun, the beginning of the high ranges bordering Tibet. Large towns were frequent, though there was no decrease in dirt and poverty.