{102}
XITHE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK
Within eighteen months China will have a parliament or a revolution (she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am willing to risk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking would indorse.
And the coming of a parliament, popular government, to guide the destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reigned supreme for more than four thousand years--this is only one chapter in the whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake. For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of history. "China Breaking Up" was the keynote of everything written about the Middle Kingdom ten years ago; "China Waking Up" has been the keynote of everything treating of it these last five years.
Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exaggerate when he declares that in a European sense China has made greater progress these last ten years than in the preceding ten centuries. The criticism one hears most often now is, not that the popular leaders are too conservative, but that they are if, anything, too radical; are moving, not too slowly, but too rapidly.
Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn what the West has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain that a little contact with Europe and America gives a leader {103} undue influence. "Let an official take a trip abroad and for six months after his return he is the most respected authority in the empire." Instead of English missionaries worrying over China's slavery to the opium habit, we now have English officials embarrassed because China's too rapid breaking loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues. Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the part of the provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others to aid Manchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the beginnings of an intense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence. Even Confucius no longer looks backward. A young friend of mine who is a descendant of the Sage (of the seventy-fifth generation) speaks English fluently and is getting a thoroughly modern education, while Duke Kung, who inherits the title in the Confucian line, is patron of a government school which gives especial attention to English and other modern branches--by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that the ancient examination halls in Peking to which students have come from all parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars among them rewarded with the highest offices, have now been torn down, and where these buildings once stood Chinese masons and carpenters are fashioning the building that is to house China's first national parliament--unless the parliament comes before this building can be made ready.
And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake up in a part of his body only, he wakes up all over. So it seems with Cathay. The more serious problem now is not to get her moving, but to keep her from moving too rapidly. In his Civic Forum address in New York three years ago, Wu Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes up, she will move like an avalanche." A movement with the power of an avalanche needs very careful guidance.
The one question about which every Chinese reformer's heart is now aflame is that of an early parliament. By the imperial decree of 1908 a parliament and a constitution were {104} promised within nine years. At that time there was little demand for a parliament, but with the organization of the Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 the people were given an opportunity to confer together and were also given a taste of power. For the first time, too, they seem to have realized suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact that since the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and the dismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting for the infant Emperor, the Peking government is without a strong leader. Consequently the demand for a hastened parliament has grown too powerful to be resisted. True, when the delegates from all the Provincial Assemblies voiced this demand to the Prince Regent last spring his reply was the Edict of May 29, declaring that the programme outlined by their late Majesties, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, could not be changed. Furthermore, the Throne remarked significantly: "Let no more petitions or memorials upon this subject be presented to Us; Our mind is made up."
Unfortunately for the peace of the Regent, however, John Chinaman is absurdly and obnoxiously persistent on occasion. If you will not heed other appeals, he may commit suicide on your doorstep, and then you are bewitched for the rest of your days, to say nothing of your nights. The talk of an earlier parliament would not down even at the bidding of the Dragon Throne. Quietly unmanageable delegations waited upon viceroys and compelled these high officials to petition for a reopening of the question. Down in Kiang Su a scholar cut off his left arm and with the red blood wrote his appeal. In Union Medical Hospital, here in Peking, as I write this, a group of students are recovering from self-inflicted wounds made in the same cause. Going to the Prince Regent's, they were told that the Prince could not see them. "Very well," they declared, "we shall sit here till he does." At length the Prince sent word that, though he could not receive them, he would consider their petition, and the students then sliced the {107} living flesh from their arms and thighs as evidence of their earnestness, coloring their petition with their blood.
{105}
PU YI, THE SON OF HEAVEN AND EMPEROR OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM.
The baby sovereign of one of the vastest and oldest of empires is shown here in the lap of his father. Prince Chun, the Regent.
{106}
HOW CHINA IS DEALING WITH OPIUM-INTEMPERANCE.
Burning a pile of pipes of reformed smokers at Hankow. The amazing success of China's crusade to free her people from the opium curse may be justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in history--a challenge to our Western world.
{107 continued}
At this period of our drama there came upon the stage a new actor, at first little heeded, but quickly becoming the dominating figure--the Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly. This body, consisting of 100 nobles and men of wealth or scholarship appointed by the Throne, and 100 selected members of Provincial Assemblies approved by the viceroys, was expected to prove a mere echo of the royal wishes. "It is evident that the government is to have a docile and submissive assembly. Mediocrity is the chief characteristic of the members chosen." So wrote one of the best informed Americans in China, some weeks before it assembled, October 3. Reuter's press agent in Peking predicted through his papers that a few pious resolutions would represent the sum total of the Assembly's labors.
And yet the first day that these two gentlemen went with me to look in on the Assembly we found it coolly demanding that the Grand Council, or imperial cabinet, be summoned before it to explain an alleged breach of the rights of Provincial Assemblies!
From the very beginning the course of this National Assembly in steadily gathering unexpected power to itself has reminded me of the old States-General in France in the days just before the Revolution, and I could not help looking for Danton and Robespierre among the fiery orators in gown and queue on this occasion. Significantly, too, I now hear on the authority of an eminent scholar that Carlyle's great masterpiece is the most popular work of historical literature ever translated into Chinese. May it teach them some lessons of restraint as well as of aggressiveness!
Be that as it may, the Assembly has proved untamable in its demands for an early parliament, not even the hundred government members standing up against the imperious pressure of public opinion. In late October the Assembly {108} unanimously petitioned the Throne to hasten the programme of constitutional government. The day this petition was presented it was currently rumored in Peking that unless the Prince Regent should yield the people would refuse to pay taxes. But he yielded. The trouble now is that he did not yield enough to satisfy the public, and there is every indication that he will have to yield again, in spite of the alleged unalterableness of the present plan, which allows a parliament in 1913 instead of in 1916, as originally promised. A parliament within eighteen months seems a safe prediction as I write this.
It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parliament will be wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practically established the rule of the people centuries before any European nation adopted the idea. Nominally, the local magistrate has had almost arbitrary power, but practically the control has been in the hands of the village elders. When they have met and decided on a policy, the magistrate has not dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, governors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and kept in check. Thus centuries of practical self-government in local affairs have given the Chinese excellent preparation for the new departure in national affairs. What is proposed is not a new power for the people but only an enlargement or extension of powers they already exercise.
Parliamentary government is the one great accomplishment the Chinese people are now interested in, because they propose to make it the tool with which to work out the other Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that they may set about these tasks inspired by the self-confidence begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements of modern times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success of their anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed.
Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to many provinces, finding in all the same surprising success {109} in enforcing anti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle of the Middle Kingdom and a lesson for the world."'
China's next great task is the education of her people, and the remedy for pessimism here is to compare her present condition, not with that of other nations, but with her own condition ten years ago. A reported school attendance of less than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a population of 400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we compare these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years ago there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metropolitan province of Chihli, for example, I find that there are now more teachers in government schools than there were pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from 8000 to 214,637!
Even if China had not established a single additional school, however, or increased the school attendance by even a percentage fraction, her educational progress these last ten years would yet be monumental. For as different as the East is from the West, so different, in literal fact, are her educational ideals at the present time as compared with her educational ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of 1905) the old exclusively classical and literary system of education was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement would have been hopelessly balked.
The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of history or geography outside of China, nothing of mathematics in its higher branches. Its main object was to enable the scholar to write a learned essay or a faultless poem, its main use to enable him by these means to get office. Under the old system the Chinese boy learned a thousand characters before he learned their meaning; after this he took up a book {110} containing a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the "Trimetrical Classics," consisting of proverbs and historical statements with each sentence in three characters. Now he is taught in much the same way as the Western boy. The old training developed the powers of memory; the new training the powers of reasoning. The old education enabled the pupil to frame exquisite sentences; the new gives him a working knowledge of the world. The old looked inward to China and backward to her past; the new looks outward to other countries and forward to China's future. The old was meant to develop a few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citizens. "Even our students who go abroad," as a Peking official said to me, "illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they preferred to study law or politics; now they take up engineering or mining."
A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under which her people labor and must always labor so long as the language remains as it is to-day--without an alphabet--separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and every word in the language. This means an absolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far as memorizing the characters counts as memory-training, and five years make up the bulk of the average student's school days in any country. If it were not for this handicap and the serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for present needs, it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advance of the next twenty years.
The school and the teacher have always been held in the highest esteem in China. Her only aristocracy has been an aristocracy, not of wealth, but of scholarship; her romance has been, not that of the poor boy who became rich, but of the poor boy who found a way to get an education and became distinguished in public service. Under the old system, if the son of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the {111} village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of unusual promise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beautiful to see, would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advancement. He would be put into long robes and allowed to give himself up wholly to learning, while parents, brothers, and sisters found inspiration for their own harder labors in the thought of the bright future that awaited him. The difficulty is that education has been regarded as the privilege of a gifted few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship has been held in such high favor, however, once let the school doors open to everybody and there is little doubt that China will eventually acquire the strength more essential than armies or battleships: the power which only an educated common people can give.
China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army. "Might is right" is the English proverb that I have found more often on the tongues of the new school of Chinese than any other; and we must confess that other nations seem to have tried hard enough to make her accept the principle. In the old days there was a saying, "Better have no son than one who is a soldier." To-day its new foreign-drilled army of 150,000 to 200,000 men is the boast of the Middle Kingdom, and the army is said to be the most honestly administered department of the government. In sharp contrast to the old contempt for the soldier, I now find one of the ablest journals in the empire (the ShanghaiNational Review) protesting that interest in military training is now becoming too intense: "Scarce a school of any pretensions but has its military drill, extending in some instances as far as equipment with modern rifles and regular range practice, and we regret to notice that some of the mission schools have so far forgotten themselves as to pander to this militarist spirit."
It has often been said, of course, that the Chinese will not make good soldiers, but whether this has been proved is open to question. Certainly, in view of their wretchedly inferior {112} equipment, their failure to distinguish themselves in the war with Japan cannot be regarded as conclusive. Take, for example, this description by an eye-witness:
"Every tenth man [among the Chinese soldiers] had a great silk banner, but few were armed with modern weapons. Those who had rifles and modern weapons at all had them of all makes; so cartridges of twenty different sorts and sizes were huddled together without any attempt at classification, and in one open space all sorts were heaped on the ground, and the soldiers were fitting them to their arms, sometimes trying eight or ten before finding one to fit the weapon, throwing the rejected ones back into the heap."
No sort of efficiency on the part of the rank and file could have atoned for such criminal indifference to equipment on the part of the officers. It seems to be the opinion of the military authorities with whom I have talked that the Chinese army is now better manned than officered. "Wherever there has been a breach of discipline, I have found it the officers' fault," an American soldier told me.
The annexation of Korea, once China's vassal, by Japan, and that country's steadily tightening grip on Manchuria have doubtless quickened China's desire for military strength. Moreover, she wishes to grow strong enough to denounce the treaties by which opium is even now forced upon her against her will, and by which she is forced to keep her tariff duty on foreign goods averaging 5 per cent., alike on luxuries and necessities.
The fifth among China's Herculean labors is the cleansing of her Augean stables, and by this I can mean nothing else than the abolition of the system of "squeeze," or graft, on the part of her officials. In fact, no other reform can be complete until this is accomplished. The bulk of every officer's receipts comes not from his salary, which is as a rule absurdly small, but from "squeezes"--fees which every man who has dealings with him must pay. In most cases, of course, these fees have been determined in a general way by long usage, but their acceptance opens the way for innumerable abuses. High {113} offices are auctioned off. When I was in Manchuria it was currently reported that the Governor of Kirin had paid one hundred thousand taels for his office. When I was in New-chwang the Viceroy of Manchuria had just enriched himself to the extent of several thousand taels by a visit to that port. The men who had had favors from him or had favors to ask left "presents" of a rather substantial character when they called. I learn from an excellent authority that when an electric lighting contract was let for Hankow or its suburbs a short time ago the officials provided a squeeze for themselves of 10 per cent., but that the Nanking officials, in arranging for electric lights there, didn't even seem to care whether the plant worked at all or not: they were anxious only to make a contract which would net them 35 per cent, of the gross amount! Under such circumstances it is not surprising to learn that many an office involving the handling of government revenues has its price as definitely known as the price of stocks or bonds.
In private business the Chinese have a reputation for honesty which almost any other nation might envy. With their quickened spirit of patriotism they will doubtless see to it that their public business is relieved of the shameless disgrace that the "squeeze system" now attaches to it.
These are some of the big new tasks to which awakened China is addressing herself. Of course, the continued development of her railways is no less important than any other matter I have mentioned, but railway building cannot be regarded as one of China's really new tasks. For years she has been alive to the importance of uniting the people of the different provinces by means of more railways, more telegraph lines, and better postal service. The increase in number of pieces of mail handled from 20,000,000 pieces in 1902 to 306,000,000 in the last fiscal year bears eloquent testimony alike to the progress of the post office and to the growing intelligence of the people. By telegraph the people of remotest Cathay now make their wishes known to the Son of Heaven and the {114} Tzucheng Yuan; it was by telephone that this Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly, requested the Grand Council of the Dragon Empire to appear before it on the day of my first visit. The slow and stately camel caravans still come down from Mongolia to Peking--I have seen them wind their serpentine length through the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they have been doing for centuries past--but no longer do they bring the latest news from the tribes about Desert Gobi. Across 3500 miles of its barren wastes an undaunted telegraph line now "hums the songs of the glad parts of the earth."
It is no longer worth while to speculate upon the probability of a new China; the question now is as to how the new China is going to affect the United States and the rest of the world. From our Pacific Coast, China is our next-door neighbor, and vastly nearer in fact than any map has ever indicated. Even New York City is now nearer to Shanghai and Hong Kong, in point of ease of access, than she was to Chicago a century ago. How Japan's awakening has increased that country's foreign trade all the world knows--and China has eight times the population of Japan proper, and twenty-eight times the area, with almost fabulously valuable natural resources as yet untouched! Some one has said that to raise the Chinese standard of living to that of our own people would be (from the standpoint of markets) equivalent to the creation of four Americas. The importance of bringing about closer commercial relations between the United States and the Middle Kingdom can hardly be overestimated.
It is to be hoped, however, that in our desire to cultivate China's friendship we shall not go to the length of changing our policy of excluding Asiatic immigration. To the thoughtful student it must be plain that in the end such a change would lead only to disastrous reaction. At the same time we might well effect a change in our methods of enforcing that policy. There is nothing else on land or sea that the Celestial so much dreads as to "lose face," to be humiliated, and it {115} is the humiliation that attaches to the exclusion policy rather than the policy itself that is the great stumbling-block in the way of thorough cordial relations with America. You wouldn't so much object to having the servant at the door report his master not at home to visitors, but you would object to having the door slammed in your face; and John Chinaman is just about as human as the rest of us. Moreover, our own friendliness for John should lead us to adopt the more courteous of these two methods. Why should not our next exclusion law, therefore, be based upon the idea of reciprocity, and provide that there shall be admitted into America any year only so many Chinese laborers as there were American laborers admitted into China the preceding year?
Finally, it must always be remembered that the awakening of China is a matter far more profound than any statistics of exports or imports or railway lines or industrial development. The Dragon Empire cannot become (as she will) one of the mightiest Powers of the earth, her four hundred million people cannot be brought (as they will be brought) into the full current of the world's activities, without profoundly influencing all future civilization. For its own sake Christendom should seize quickly the opportunity offered by the present period of flux and change to help mold the new force that it must henceforth forever reckon with. "The remedy for the yellow peril, whatever that may be," as Mr. Roosevelt said while President, "is not the repression of life, but the cultivation and direction of life." The school, the mission, the newspaper--these are the agencies that should be used. Japan has thousands of teachers in China and scores of newspapers, but no other nation is adequately active. The present kindly feeling for America guarantees an especially cordial reception for American teachers, ministers, and writers, and those who feel the call to lands other than their own cannot find a more promising field than China.
Peking, China.
{116}
XIIA TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA
I can't get over (and I hope I never shall) my boyish interest in the great strange animals that walk along behind the steam piano in the circus parades. And the animals that I like to see most, I believe, are the elephants and the camels. The elephant has about him such quiet, titanic, unboasting strength, such ponderous and sleepy-eyed majesty, as to excite my admiration, but the camel has almost an equal place in my interest and esteem.
He is a funny-looking beast, is the camel, and he always reminds me of Henry Cates' story of the very little boy who started making a mud man in the spring branch, but before he got the second arm on, a storm came up, and when he came back his man had mysteriously disappeared. But when Johnny went to town next day and for the first time in his life saw a one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up, he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?" Somehow the camel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks to me as if he got away before he was finished. He is either a preliminary rough sketch accidentally turned loose on the world, or else he got warped somehow in the drying process--great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene, goose-necked, saddle-backed Old Slow and Steady!
{117}
A MAN-MADE DESERT.
PUMPING WATER FOR IRRIGATION.
The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast areas that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing Chinese pumping water by human treadmill, furnishes another illustration of the Orient's waste of labor.
{118}
TRANSPORTATION AND TRAVEL IN CHINA.
The camels that come down from Mongolia and wind their unhurried way from Chien Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace form one of the most picturesque of the many picturesque sights in fascinating old Peking. The right-hand picture shows the author utilizing the most rapid means of transit in the mountains north of Peking.
{116 continued}
Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my entire tour has given me more pleasure than the sight of the camel trains about Peking and all the way to the end of the Nankou Pass in the mountains north of the ancient Chinese {119} capital. At the Pass this morning I saw three such camel trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert of Gobi: long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as if I had become a character in the Arabian Nights or a contemporary of Kublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest I have yet seen--twenty-five or thirty camels, I should say, treading Indian-file with their usual unostentatious stateliness, a wooden pin through each camel's nostrils from which a cord bound him to the camel next ahead, a few strangely dressed drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession.
Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered by my party, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself, as we rode our little donkeys mile after mile of rocky way from Nankou village through the Pass. To begin with, we were ourselves funny-looking enough, for my donkey was so small that he could almost walk under the belly of my saddle-horse at home, and my feet almost touched the ground. The donkeys ridden by my friends were but little larger, and altogether we looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules--an effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey dropped him twice in the mud! It was our clothing, however, our ordinary American and European trousers, coats, overcoats and hats, and the fact that we wore no queues down our backs, that made us objects of curiosity to the Mongolian and Manchurian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders, and mule-pack drivers whom we met on the way, just as we were interested in the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc., which we found them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments. These cotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily padded bed-quilts ineptly called "comforts," and as the poor Chinese in the colder sections of the empire cannot afford much fire in winter, they add one layer of cotton padding after another until it is difficult for them to waddle along.
On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey-ride over the rough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their {120} very simplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we meet come from away up in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet gone, and the camels and the donkeys (the donkeys in most cases larger than those we rode) bring down on their backs the Mongolian products--wool, hides, grain, etc.--and carry back coal, clothing, and the other simple supplies demanded by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack trains of donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose, each carrying a heavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps big, well-packed baskets or goods-boxes carefully balanced. A horse over here will tote about as much as a horse at home would pull. Then there were several immense droves of sheep: in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, and every sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the general effect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The Chinese raise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too, and drive them to market loose in the same way that they drive their sheep. We also met two or three droves of mountain horses, a hundred or more to the drove.
But it would have been well worth while to make the trip if we had gotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great Wall at the end of the journey. About two thousand miles of stone and brick, twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough on top for two carriages to drive abreast, this great structure, begun two thousand years ago to keep the wild barbarian Northern tribes out of China, is truly "the largest building on earth," and one of the world's greatest wonders. It would be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but where we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy, stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and thousands of tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the sheer steep mountainsides is a question that must excite every traveller's wonder. Certainly no one who has walked on top of the great wall, climbing among the clouds from one {121} misty eminence to another, as we did to-day, can ever forget the experience.
Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not clear. The mists that hung about the mountain-peaks below and around us; the roaring wind that shepherded the clouds, now driving them swiftly before it and leaving in clear view for a minute peak after peak and valley after valley, the next minute brushing great fog-masses over wall and landscape and concealing all from view--all this lent an element of mystery and majesty to the experience not out of keeping with our thought of the long centuries through which this strange guard has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long dead and crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era began, were the hands that fashioned these earlier brick and laid them in the mortar, and for many generations thereafter watchmen armed with bows and arrows rode along the battlements and towers, straining their eyes for sight of whatever enemy might be bold enough to try to cross the mighty barrier.
However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we cannot but admire the almost matchless daring of the conception and the almost unparalleled industry of the execution. Beside it the digging of our Panama Canal with modern machinery, engines, steam power and electricity, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, is no longer a subject for boasting. To my mind, the very fact that the Chinese people had the courage to conceive and attempt so colossal an enterprise is proof enough of genuine greatness. No feeble folk could even have planned such an undertaking.
On this trip into the heart of China, however, I have noticed a number of things of decidedly practical value in addition to the merely curious things I have just reported. In the first place, I have been simply amazed to find that these Chinese farmers around Peking, Nankou, and Tien-tsin are far ahead of some of our farmers in the matter of horsepower help in plowing.
{122}
Coming up from Peking to Nankou, I found farmers in almost every field busy with their fall plowing or late grain sowing, and while there were dozens and dozens of three-horsepower plows, I saw only one or two one-horsepower plows on the whole trip. This is all the more surprising in view of the fact that labor is so cheap over here--15 cents a day American money would be a good wage for farm hands--but evidently the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, they must have two or three horses in order to get the best results from the soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in good condition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys (they use large donkeys for plowing, even if small ones for riding) they get the land in good condition in spite of the fact that they cannot get the good plows that any American farmer may buy. I rode donkey-back through some farming country yesterday and watched the work rather closely. The plows, like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are much better in workmanship. Here they are made by the village carpenter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, and below it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point.
The Chinese farmers, it should also be observed in passing, fully realize the importance of land rolling and harrowing. It is no uncommon sight to see a man driving a three-horse harrow. It is also said that for hundreds of years the Chinese have practised a suitable rotation of crops and have known the value of leguminous plants.
Nankou Pass, China.
{123}
XIIIFROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG
I shall have to go back to Peking some time. You must hurry out of the city, men tell you there, or else ere you know it the siren-like Lure of the East will grip you irresistibly; and I felt in some measure the soundness of the counsel. The knowledge that each day the long trains of awkward-moving camels are winding their unhurried way from Chien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow-tiled roofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them, while to the left are the faint gray-blue outlines of the Western Hills--all this will be to me a silent but perpetual invitation to go back.
The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never-failing interest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese men in gowns and queues (the wives wear the trousers over here!), the nobles and officers in gorgeous silks and velvets; the fantastic head-dress of the Manchu ladies, and the hobbling movements of the Chinese women hampered by ruined feet; the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring, pig-tailed coolies in the shafts; the heavy two-wheeled Peking carts like half-sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreign or native woman glimpsed through the glass windows of her sedan chair, eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human burden; the long lines of shop fronts with such a pleasing variety of decorative color as to make one wonder why artists have not made them famous; the uniformed soldiers from every nation on the earth to guard the various legations, and {124} Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreign clothing. The strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memory ever after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, the jingling bells of the thousands of sturdy little saddle donkeys, the rattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging gong of a mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and behind to bear testimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of peddlers of many kinds, their wares balanced in baskets borne from their shoulders.
Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some man has died and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper-covered horse in the belief that it will be changed into a real horse to serve him in the Beyond; and imitations of other things that might be useful to him are burned in the same way.
Or perhaps a marriage procession may pass. A dozen servants carry placards with emblems of the rank of the family represented by the bride or groom, numerous other servants bear presents, and the bride herself passes by concealed in a gorgeous sedan chair borne on the shoulders of six or eight coolies.
Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however, Peking is even richer in historic interest. And by historic in China is not meant any matter of the last half-hour, such as Columbus's discovery of America or the landing at Plymouth Rock; these things to the Chinaman are so modern as to belong rather in the category of recent daily newspaper sensations along with the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy or the Thaw trial. If he wishes something genuinely historic, he goes back three or four thousand years. For example, a friend of mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country. Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom. "Yes,"' he answered, "that is our custom now, since we changed. But it has not always been so. We did the other way up to four or five centuries before Christ." Whereupon the audience, amazed at the utterly casual mention of an event two thousand {125} years old as if it were a happening of yesterday, was convulsed in merriment, which the young Chinaman was entirely unable to understand.
When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then bearing another name), having centuries before grown into eminence, had been destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering upon its second youth. About the time of the last Caesars it fell into the hands of the Tartars, who gave place to the Mongols after 1215. It was during the reign of the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital, then called Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nankou, built the great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to this day--forty feet high, wide enough on top for four or five carriages to drive abreast, and thirteen miles around.
Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have most often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only ten years and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. The widely current idea is that this Boxer movement originated in anti-missionary sentiment, but this is not borne out by the facts. The late Col. Charles Denby, long American Minister to China, pointed out very clearly that the main cause was opposition to the land-grabbing policies of European nations. Once started, however, it took the form of opposition to everything foreign--missionaries and non-missionaries alike. I passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the siege that sounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs; stories of Chinese Christian converts butchered like sheep by their infuriated fellow countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in another part of the city, was finally rescued by foreign troops, the surviving Christians and missionaries were dying of starvation; they had become mere wan, half-crazed skeletons, subsisting on roots and bark.
The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts {126}during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of the church, but of mankind; for what man of us is not inspired to worthier things by every high deed of martyrdom which a fellowman anywhere has suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers hurled arrow after arrow with letters attached offering immunity to the Chinese converts if they would abandon their Christian leaders, but not even starvation led one to desert. Colonel Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000 Chinese Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day of one family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked out by suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying their Master, and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, "Jesus Is Leading Me." At Taiyan-fu an especially touching incident occurred: Five or six young girls, just in their teens, were about to be killed, when a leader intervened, declaring: "It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and urged them to recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since that is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for their faith with their lives.
I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means river in Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the famous Chinese industrial centre, about 600 miles south of Peking. About Hankow I found farming much more primitive than that around Peking, Nankou, and Tientsin. Instead of the three and four horse plows I found in North China, the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox. The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of buying a "farm"; he buys a "field." In Kwang-tung there is a saying that one sixth of an acre "will support one mouth." As nearly as I can find out, the average wages paid farm laborers is about 10 cents (gold) a day. The average for all kinds of labor, a member of the Emperor's Grand Council tells me, is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18 cents gold a day.
In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in {127} China or Japan there are three or four things that must always be kept in mind. One is that there are no fences between fields; I haven't seen a wooden or wire farm-fence since I left America. A high row or ridge separates one field from another, and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm-houses. The people live in villages, from ten to fifty farmhouses grouped together, and the laborers go out from their homes to the fields each morning and return at evening. The same system, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as population becomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we shall doubtless attempt to group our farm homes also. Even now, much more--vastly more--might be done in this respect if our farmers only had the plan in mind in building new homes. Where three or four farms come near together, why should not the dwellings be grouped near a common centre? It would mean much for convenience and for a better social life. Another notable difference from our own country is the absence of wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any kind. In this part of China the farmhouse is made of mud bricks, or mud and reeds, or else of a mixture of mud and stone, and is usually surrounded by a high wall of the same material.
Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are basking in the joyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights they may reflect that the Chinaman on this side of the earth enjoys no such comfort. Enough fire to cook the scanty meals is all that he can afford. To protect themselves against cold, as I have already pointed out, the poor put on many thicknesses of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wear furs and woolens. When a coolie has donned the maximum quantity of cotton padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-plated cruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him.
At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plowing and harrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out to the Temple of Agriculture, where each spring the Emperor or Prince Regent comes and plows sixteen rows, the purpose {128} being to bear testimony to the high honorableness of agriculture and its fundamental importance to the empire. This happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it is in late fall that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy now flailing grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, or grinding it in mills operated by a single donkey.
In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions--possibly billions--of the Chinese dead are even more in evidence than in the northern provinces. Let China last a few more thousand years with its present customs and the country will be one vast cemetery, and the people will have to move away to find land to cultivate. As not one grave in a thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem as if they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that each Chinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The care of their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even when John goes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be used to bring his body back to the ancestral burying ground.
In a land so given over to superstition I have no doubt that the most horrible disasters would also be expected as the penalty for interfering with any grave. It seems odd that a people who had a literature centuries before our Anglo-Saxon ancestors emerged from barbarism should now be the victims of superstitions almost as gross as those prevailing in Africa; but such are the facts. Chang Chih-tung, who died a few months ago, was one of the most progressive and enlightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but not even a man of his type could free himself from the great body of superstition handed down from generation to generation.
In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as "Dragon Hill," because of the Chinese belief that a dragon inhabits it. This long hill divides the city into two parts; every day hundreds and sometimes possibly thousands of people must climb up one side and down the other in getting from one part of the town to another. Therefore, when Chang {129} Chih-tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that he would make a cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble. And he did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a painful abscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he consulted were quick in pointing out the trouble. By making the cut in the hill, they told him, he had offended the earth dragon which inhabits it, and unless the cut were filled up Chang might die and disaster might come upon the city. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but to restore the ancient obstruction to travel, and so it remains to this day.
In sight from Dragon Hill is another hill known as Tortoise Hill, supposed to be inhabited by a tortoise spirit or devil, and at its foot are some lakes in which it has long been said that the tortoise washes its feet. Now these lakes are on property owned by the Hanyang Steel & Iron Works and they decided a few years ago that they would either drain off the water or else fill up the lakes so as to get more land. But before they got started the Chinese civil authorities heard of it and notified the Hanyang Company that such a proceeding could not be tolerated. The tortoise would have nowhere to wash his feet, and would straightway bring down the wrath of Heaven on all the community!
It is from superstitions such as these that the schools must free the Chinese before the way can be really cleared for the introduction of Christianity. The teacher is as necessary as the preacher. And the task of getting the masses even to the point where they can read and write is supremely difficult. The language, it must be remembered, has no alphabet. Each word is made not by joining several letters together, as with us, but by making a distinct character--each character an intricate and difficult combination of lines, marks, and dots. Or perhaps the word may be formed by joining two distinct characters together. For example, to write "obedience" in Chinese you write together the characters for "leaf" and "river," the significance being that true obedience is as trusting {130} and unresisting as the fallen leaf on the river's current. My point is, however, that for each word a distinct group of marks (like mixed-up chicken tracks) must be piled together, and the task of remembering how to recognize and write the five thousand or more characters in the language would make an average American boy turn gray at the very thought. My friend Doctor Tenney, of the American Legation in Peking, asserts that at least five years of the average Chinese pupil's school life might be saved if the language were based on an alphabet like ours instead of on such arbitrary word-signs.
There is one thing that must be said in favor of the Chinese system of education, however, and that is the emphasis it has always laid on moral or ethical training. The teaching, too, seems to have been remarkably effective. Take so basic a matter as paying one's debts, for example: it is a part of the Chinaman's religion to get even with the world on every Chinese New Year, which comes in February. If he fails to "square up" at this time he "loses face," as his expressive phrase has it. He is a bad citizen and unpopular. Consequently all sorts of things may be bought cheaper just before the New Year than any other time. Every man is willing to make any reasonable sacrifice, selling his possessions at a great discount if necessary, rather than have a debt against him run over into the new period--an excellent idea for America!
I do not know whether Confucianism is responsible for this particular policy, but at any rate the fact remains that outside the Bible the world has never known a more sublime moral philosophy than that of Confucius. It means much, therefore, that every Chinese pupil must know the maxims and principles of the great sage by heart. Moreover, as Confucius did not profess to teach spiritual truth, the missionaries in China are fast coming to realize that it is both unnecessary and foolish to urge the people to abandon Confucianism. The proper policy is to tell the Chinese, "Hold on to all that is good and true in Confucius. There is very little in his teachings that is {131} in conflict with religion, and Christian leaders now recognize him as one of the greatest moral forces the world has known. But to the high moral teaching of the Chinese master you must add now the moral teachings of Christianity and, more essential still, the great body of spiritual truth which Confucianism lacks." The grand old man among Chinese missionaries, Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who has been in the work since 1850, said to me in Peking, "Some of the best Christians are now the best Confucianists."
Confucianism, as any one can see by reading the books, is no more a substitute for Christianity than Proverbs is for St. John's Gospel. As Doctor Brewster, another missionary, says, "We do not ask an American scholar to renounce Plato to become a Christian; why should we ask a Chinaman to renounce Confucius?"
Confucius lived five centuries before Christ, and at his old home in Shantung are the graves alike of his descendants and his ancestors--the oldest family burying ground in the world. "No monarch on earth can trace back his lineage by an unbroken chain through so many centuries." In Peking I was so fortunate as to form a friendship with a descendant of Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation--Mr. Kung Hsiang Koh--a promising and gifted senior in the Imperial College of Languages. At my request he inscribed a scroll for me in beautiful Chinese characters, representing one of my favorite quotations from his world-famous ancestor. I give an English translation herewith:
"Szema-New asked about the Superior Man. The Master said, 'The superior man is without anxiety or fear.'
"'Being without anxiety or fear,' said New, 'does this constitute what we should call the superior man?'
"The Master replied, 'When a man looks inward and finds no guilt there, why should he grieve? or what should he fear?'"
On boardS. S. Kutwo,Yangtze River, China.