Chapter 73

The Chinese protect their boys from evil spirits (the girls do not matter) by having a chain and padlock put about their necks at some religious ceremony, which deceives the spirits into believing that they belong to the temple. Earlaps embroidered in gay colors are widely used in Kansu in winter

Many of the faces seen in western China hardly seem Chinese

A dead man on the way to his ancestral home for burial, a trip that may last for weeks. Over the heavy unpainted wooden coffin were brown bags of fodder for the animals, surmounted by the inevitable rooster

Our party on the return from Lanchow—the major and myself flanked by our “boys” and cook respectively, these in turn by the two cart-drivers, with our allegedmafu, or groom for our riding animals, at the right

There was nothing really unusual about Ningsia, except perhaps its distance from any other city. The only foreigners we found there—a Scandinavian lady and a Belgian priest who maintained one of the mightiest beards in captivity, bitterly rival propagandists of Christianity—both assured us that the people of Ningsia were a “bad lot,” but we had no personal experiences to bear out the statement. Of the forty-five thousand reputed to dwell within the walls, a generous third were Moslems, as in Kansu as a whole, but as usual they were credited with a more industrious, aggressive character than the others, and a more united front in spite of internal disagreements. The Mohammedan general, who ruled the place, nephew of the powerful Moslem Ma Fu-hsiang, looked and acted quite like any other Chinese official, perhaps because the percentage of Moslem blood that runs in his veins is the same as the proportion of people of that faith in the city and the province. His yamen and his extensive barracks were noticeably spick and span for China, and his soldiers seemed to be well drilled and disciplined, thanks perhaps to the Russian officer or two who were giving the general the benefit of their training. But there was much recent building all about the town; even two elaborate woodenp’ai-louswere in course of construction. These fantastic memorial street arches are without number in China, but it is a rare experience to see new ones under construction, or to find old ones undergoing repairs, for that matter.

Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, “and all the thieves and rascals from four directions,” to quote the hirsute Belgian, make up the rest of the population. Mutton-shops and sheepskins were naturally in considerable evidence, though there was no lack of black pigs to be seen from the wall. A slight yet conspicuous detail that we had not seen elsewhere was slats or small poles set upright at close intervals in front of many business houses, evidently as a protection against thieves, which would bear out, I suppose, the assertion as to the make-up of the population. “Lanchow coppers” had quickly died out and were virtually forgotten by the time we reached Ningsia, though in theory its ruler was subordinate to the provincial Tuchun; and “cash” was again everywhere in evidence. A half-circuit of the city wall showed much vacant space, and even some farming, within it. Of the two pagodas standing like lighthouses above the surrounding country, one proved to be far outside the city, toward the wrinkled mountain range beyond which lies the ancient capital of Ala-shan. Many-sided but plain-faced, certainly of no great age, they seemed as high as the Washington Monument, though this may have been an exaggeration of the imagination, and beneath each of them stood a temple covering a great reclining Buddha.

We spent a whole day in Ningsia, the only one without travel between Lanchow and Peking, and could not see how we should have gained much by staying longer—unless perhaps for years, so that to our superficial impression would be added the detailed experience ofthe “old-timer.” Nor was our attention entirely given to mere sight-seeing and calls of respect. There were our three horses to be shod—though the timid Chinese blacksmiths who wander the streets, shop in hand, refuse to risk their precious lives at the rear end of the most harmless of such animals, even though they are tied hand and foot to stout stanchions. Any American worth his salt at the same trade would shoe any quadruped in China single-handed, behind as well as before, and he certainly would not leave the long, all but untrimmed hoofs which help to make the Chinese pony famous for stumbling, though he would of course throw the first hammer within reach at the man who proposed to pay him only twice as much for one shoe as his Chinese colleague gets for four. Then there was the task of getting rid of our opium-smoking driver without either violently breaking our contract with him or showing undue harshness. For, after all, he had kept up with the other cartman, who was as faultless a driver as one could ask for; and there had been times when his silly grin of doped contentment with life made up somewhat for the sogginess of his intellect during most of the journey. But we were tired of seeing his shaft-horse do all the work, while the two starved mules out in front only now and then staggered taut their rope traces; we were tired of furnishing opium pills for eating and smoking with money that should have been spent in food for beast and man; and we were particularly weary of wondering every time we got out of sight of our caravan whether the “old man” and his miserable animals had at last failed us.

When it came to a showdown his elimination proved simple and easy. Perhaps the pace of the past ten days had cured him of any desire to keep it up for twelve or thirteen more, over worse going. He had told Chang one night that he might shoot him if he wished, but that he could not go a step farther, though this had proved to be a mere figure of speech. Perhaps there were other arguments, of a monetary nature, such as a commission for selling his part of the contract to some one else; for even jobs are bought and sold in China. But of this we knew nothing, and cared less. For he agreed without argument to resign in favor of the new cartman whom his companion brought in, and thanked us profusely for thecumshawwhich no doubt quickly went up in fumes.

The new driver, like the one that was left, called our destination home, and had been waiting for sixteen days for a paying chance to return there. Except for a slightly less cheery temperament, he wasno less excellent a cartman than the other, though only a hired driver; while his companion owned not merely his outfit but an inn at the end of our trail. In the company of such fellows as these, one is struck with the sturdiness of the Chinese character. All about them were moral pitfalls, of which their opium-aged colleague was a striking example. They, too, and millions more like them, could easily get the poppy’s deadly juice and smoke themselves away from their at best dismal reality into the land of beautiful dreams; in fact, most of those whose duty it should be to remove this particular temptation do all they can, short of reducing their own “squeeze” from it, to make the wicked stuff available; yet they had never succumbed to it. Nor is the sturdiness of the Chinese coolie confined to the negative virtues. There was Chang, for instance, born a tiller of the soil in cruelly crowded Shantung, with a bare three years’ elementary schooling, who had taught himself to read, and to write a goodly number of characters, who in a few years as a foreign servant had acquired powers that to his simple parents probably seemed supernatural, who in his two months with us had so improved in poise and the ability to command the respect of his fellow-men that a trained scholar of many generations of similar experiences could scarcely have outdone him, either in deportment or the actual business in hand, when he was called upon to act as interpreter between us and the Mohammedan general, the very thought of meeting whom face to face would probably have set him trembling a few years before. Best of all, he had not let his rise in the world make him ashamed to do the most menial task that came to hand, on the ground that he was no longer a coolie, which is the stumbling-block over which rising young China is so apt to come a cropper. Chang and our cart-drivers were, of course, only individual instances; but I like to think of them—believe, in fact, that I can rightly think of them—as typical of millions of their class, as proofs that, given anything like a decent opportunity, the Chinese coolie can rise to a genuinely higher plane just as well as the American farmer can. If such is the case, it is not too much to hope that China may in time, even though it be centuries distant, advance to real democracy, that the name “republic” by which she now styles herself may some day become a reality and not merely a mockery and a catchword.

But to come back to Ningsia, which is still a long way from democracy of even the present imperfect type. Yet more important than matters of horseshoeing and the moral repair of our caravan was thequestion of a bath, which was eventually settled more or less in our favor by the placing of two large tin cans of warm water in our respective rooms. These were in Ningsia’s best hotel; in fact, the best hotel we graced during all our western journey, though that still does not bring it to the forefront of the world’s hostelries. Probably the main reason for its preëminence was the simple fact that it was quite new, and hence had never had an opportunity to grow filthy and unrepaired. Perhaps the Mohammedan proprietor—or should I call him “manager,” since it was several times confided to us that the real owner was Ningsia’s Moslem general?—had something to do with it, for he was so incessantly on the job that we could not push aside the cloth door across the street portal without finding him bowing us his respects behind it, though always without any violation of his Islamite dignity and certainly with no acknowledgment of inferiority. We might have taken only one of the identical rooms at either end of the unoccupied hall backing the long narrow courtyard, but one of the advantages of roughing it is that whenever the least possible excuse offers one can be extravagant without a twinge of conscience.

The most remarkable feature, perhaps, about the establishment was that it had no earth floors, but that courtyard, hall, and even our rooms were paved in brick. Thek’angswere so new that their straw mats were almost inviting; the flue was of some modern improved type which actually gave out more heat than smoke and there was a little baked-mud coal-stove in addition. This detail was important, for the almost summer weather in which we had reached the city had modified the instant we passed through its gate and had disappeared entirely by sunset. I trust it will not unduly shock Western readers to be told that an ox-cart-load of the splendid anthracite coal in huge lumps which is so plentiful in northwestern China sold in this region for about an American dollar, for in that case I should not even dare to mention another kind of coal, evidently of an unusually oily composition, which may be lighted with a match and burns anywhere—on the brick or earth floor, in shallow pans built for that purpose, in an old wash-basin—without smoke enough to be worth mentioning and with a sturdy heat that makes a little of it highly effective. But mankind is never satisfied with his blessings; even missionaries complained that in the good old days a cart-load of coal cost less than half what the wicked profiteers owning ox-carts were now demanding.

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