Chapter XV: Difficult Journeys

We could easily imagine ourselves in an airplane when looking down upon the great Yang-tze plain from Kuling, four thousand feet above it. Most of the summer the river was so full that it overflowed its banks and flooded much of the surrounding country. But we could still tell which was the real river, by the darker yellow of it, as it wound away across the green country like a gigantic snake. On the other side of our mountain we could look down upon the great lake of Poyang, the largest in China. The Tung Ting Hu, farther up the Yang-tze, is sometimes called the largest; but it is so only when the flooding Yang-tze fills it during the summer.

Far away across Poyang Lake lies a city that ought to be more famous than it is, for it is the china-town of China, where nearly all the best Chinese porcelain has been made for hundreds of years. Yet many foreigners who know that the most wonderful porcelains on earth have always been made in China have never heard of Kingtehchen, and millions of Chinese themselves do not know its name. That is what comes of a city’s being so far away from a railroad or any other modern form of transportation that only those who are willing to endure hardships can reach it. As the crow flies it is only about a hundred miles from Kuling to Kingtehchen, but it took me longer to get there than it does to go from New York to Salt Lake City.

First of all I had to descend the mountain, this time on the lake side. I had found a coolie, who carried my cot and bedding and some cans of food and other baggage, and who boiled my eggs and did other simple cooking for me along the way. He thought that seventy coppers a day (fifteen cents in our money) would be about the right wages. On the way down the narrow trail, steep as a stairway, we met many other coolies, such as we had seen climbing to Kuling all summer.

Everything that goes up there has to be carried on men’s backs, whether it is a trunk or a barrel of cement or the timbers as big as telegraph-poles that are used as beams in the foreign houses. We passed long trains of these coolies, each with two great poles tied together in V-shape over his shoulders. Almost all foreigners and wealthy Chinese who come to Kuling are carried up in chairs. The coolies were naked to the waist, with streams of sweat running down their sun-browned bodies. Yet when they stopped to rest, leaning the ends of their poles against the mountain side, they seemed to shiver, though we had often found Kuling too hot.

I have made many difficult trips in various parts of the world, but I do not remember a short journey that was as hard as that tramp to Kingtehchen. We might have gone by boat along the lake and up a river, but no one knew how long that might take. So after crossing the lake by _sampan_, we found one of those flagstone roads that wind through rice fields in southern China. Though hardly three feet wide, it dropped so suddenly into the muddy fields on either side that we had to walk on the stones all the time. You can imagine how hot it was, in the middle of August, with never a cloud in the sky or a tree along the way; for we were as far south as Georgia.

Did you ever hear of buffaloes wearing straw sandals? The driver is
carrying a supply of such footgear for these water buffaloes. The
animals’ hoofs are so soft that when a long trip is taken the
sandals are put on them for protection.
]

Wading along Flooded Roads

To make matters worse, much of the country was flooded. I waded all one day and part of another, in water often above my knees. If you have ever tried that, you know how it makes the thighs ache. My bare feet slipped on the slimy stones of a road which squirmed about almost invisible beneath the water. If I stepped off the edge I went up to my waist in mud. Once I split a toe-nail, but luckily it did not become infected. Before the trip was over I had a dozen blisters on my feet, and my legs ached from pounding the hard stones and ploughing through the water all day.

A crowded passenger boat on Lake Poyang, the largest lake in China.
You will notice that the one big sail has many parallel ribs, made
of strips of bamboo, to keep it stiff.
]

The first night I stayed with an English customs officer in a town at the edge of the lake. I was so hot from the walk that I might have been wakeful anyway, but the hubbub kept up by the night watchman made sleep quite impossible. For hundreds of years Chinese watchmen have made their rounds pounding sections of dried bamboo that sound like drums, or clashing pieces of iron together, or shouting at the top of their lungs. Some of them, like this watchman, do all these things at once. They say it is to prove that they are awake and on the job, but I suspect it is partly to give warning in time, so that they will not have to fight thieves and robbers. Can you imagine one of our policemen going about town pounding a drum or blowing a whistle all night?

The other nights I slept outdoors, putting up my cot with its mosquito-net on some corner of the narrow road, and once down on the bank of a river. The Chinese never sleep outdoors at night, if they can help it, no matter how hot it may be inside, and when traveling they always stop at the largest, noisiest, and dirtiest town they can find instead of out in the pleasant country. My coolie was horrified at my foolishness, and all the people for miles around came and stood near my cot half the night, talking about the “crazy outside-country-man.” In fact I was often pointed out along the way as the queer fellow who risked being moon-struck or killed by the evil spirits that fly at night.

It was harvest-time, and all day long the dull thump! thump! thump! of the threshers sounded in our ears. Instead of using reapers or binders and threshing-machines the Chinese cut their rice by the handful with a sickle and then beat out the heads of it into a big wooden box so heavy that it usually takes two men to carry it from field to field. Often there were four men at one box, each pounding on a different side of it and making a sound as regular as do several men with sledges working at the same blacksmith’s anvil.

This father and son of Kingtehchen are noted for the porcelain figures
they make. After the figures are baked, they are covered with bright
colors and baked again.
]

Where Chinese Porcelain Is Made

We reached Kingtehchen on the fourth morning and found it a very large, crowded, and busy town, with streets as narrow as they were a thousand years ago. It stretches five miles along the inner curve of a shallow river, and the bank is twenty or more feet high because broken china has been thrown out upon it for centuries. Walls and every other possible thing are made of porcelain dishes that melted together in the kilns or were broken or otherwise ruined in the making. Yet much rubbish remains unused.

An old potter of Kingtehchen, the china-town of China, who has worked
in a porcelain factory since he was a boy. He throws a lump of clay
upon a horizontal disk, or “wheel,” makes the wheel revolve, and
“shapes up” a vase or bowl from the whirling mass of clay, using his
fingers and a stick.
]

Almost everyone in town above the age of six or eight works in one way or another in the manufacture of porcelain. Hundreds of families make china dishes in their own homes, but there are also some larger factories. The most important establishment used to make porcelains for the emperors, and the manager of it showed me some of the most magnificent vases and delicate porcelain things I have ever seen. Hundreds of men do nothing all their lives but carry loads of pine firewood on their shoulder-poles from the boats that bring it down the river to the kilns where the dishes are baked. Sometimes as many as six thousand dishes are stacked up in a single kiln, where they are baked for about thirty-six hours.

These vases and other porcelain articles represent the finest work
done by the skilled potters of Kingtehchen, that fascinating city
far off the beaten track of travel.
]

During that time the kiln-boss never sleeps. He tells whether the fire inside is hot enough by spitting into the hole where the tons of pine wood have been thrown. Nearly everything else is done in the same primitive, old-fashioned way. For instance, the “biscuit,” as the unbaked dishes are called when they are still soft clay, are carried through town to the kilns on boards which are balanced on men’s shoulders. These men become so expert that they can make their way with a board on each shoulder through the narrow crowded streets of Kingtehchen without once having an accident. There are a few rickshaws in the china-town, but they are not allowed to operate until after four o’clock in the afternoon, because they would interfere with the “biscuit” carriers and the other thousands of carriers racing back and forth to do their part in giving to the world the famous porcelains of China.

Nearly all the best things made in Kingtehchen go down the river by which I returned to the lake. There were whole junk-loads addressed to an old Chinese firm located in New York City. The river is so shallow on account of the broken china that has washed down it during hundreds of years that the boatman of our _sampan_ had to wade and push most of the twenty-four hours. The dirty old steam-launch that carried me across the lake towed six fantastic old junks which reminded me of the ships of Columbus. They were all piled so high with porcelains packed in rice-straw and boxes that they looked doubly strange in the full moonlight.

Not “three men in a tub” this time, but only one; and perhaps the
result will not be so tragic as when the three wise men of Gotham
went to sea in a bowl. Certainly, in China, one sees a great deal of
boating of this sort. The man shown here was paddling himself about
the harbor of Jaochow on Lake Poyang, picking up anything that he
could use for food or otherwise.
]

Birds That Catch Fish

There are many cormorant fishers on Lake Poyang, and in other parts of southern China. The small boats they use have a pole perch along either side, and on these sit the silly birds who do the fishing. The instant a cormorant sees a fish in the water it dives, coming up with the fish in its beak. The bird would like to swallow the fish, or at least drop it into the great neck pouch which every cormorant possesses, until there was time for a meal. But the bird’s owner has put a ring around its neck, so that it can do nothing but drop the fish into the boat. Yet the cormorant goes on fishing all day long, and all it gets from the man is now and then a few of the smallest fish.

Publishers’ Photo Service

Cormorants fishing for their Chinese owners. Each bird, prevented by a
ring around its neck from swallowing the larger fish, drops these
into the boat.
]

Another Trip by Boat and on Foot

From Lake Poyang I made another very interesting trip, to Foochow on the southern coast. People said it would be dangerous, because of the many bandits along the way. On my river journey down to the lake I had been so crowded in a _sampan_ with a dozen Chinese that I could hardly turn over on my cot. This time I was the only passenger on a much larger boat, and I had my meals on another boat in which traveled two American women missionaries.

The river was so very shallow and the wind so often from the wrong direction that it took us eight days to go a hundred miles up the stream. Often we put on our bathing-suits and waded ahead of the boats, and sometimes we had to wait an hour or two before they caught up with us. I went ashore and walked the last fifteen miles, and had coolies ready to go on over the mountains to Fukien Province with us when the boats finally arrived.

This overland trip was also just about a hundred miles, but it was faster than the one by boat. However, instead of sitting in my canvas-chair and reading or sleeping, I had to walk more than twenty-five miles a day over very rough trails under a blazing sun. The ladies rode in bamboo chairs, each carried by three coolies.

The three most interesting things along the river had been the irrigation, the indigo, and the trackers. The land was dotted with circular thatch roofs over water-wheels, around which water-buffaloes or oxen or cows marched all day long slowly hauling up water for the thirsty rice fields. Often we saw from a dozen to twenty huge casks or tall tubs standing at the edge of the river. When I got ashore I found these filled with what looked like willow switches, covered with a very blue liquid. Fields of these switches grew along the banks, and I discovered that they were indigo, from which the Chinese make, not blueing for wash-day, because they do not use that, but the dye for the denim garments worn by nearly all the poorer people of China.

What we usually call trackers are a very common sight on the rivers of southern China. They are the coolies who haul boats upstream, sometimes with freight or passengers. We passed long lines of them on the shore or out in the water itself, each with the boat rope over one shoulder. In places the pulling was so hard that they bent double, touching the ground with their fingers, and pulling like plow-horses.

Because there are always so many looking for jobs in China, a man must toil his best if he is to satisfy his employer and avoid being discharged. Nearly all the way up the river we kept pace with a fleet of rafts loaded with American kerosene. Every morning the trackers started pulling them before daylight and every evening they worked until it was pitch-dark before they gathered around a small fire to eat their rice.

Traveling on the Min River

But going down a river is very different from coming up, especially on the native boats of China. From the ancient town where I left the ladies at their mission station, I took a “slipper-boat,” as it is called because of its shape, down the Min River. This stream was so swift that three days were enough for the last half of a journey which had already taken me more than two weeks. Every day there were dozens of rapids that I should never have gotten through alive if my Foochow boatman had not been so expert with his sculling oars.

There were many bandits along the Min just then. An American woman had been robbed even of her shoes. At one town I met a group of missionaries, returning from their summer homes on the seashore, who had lost most of their baggage when they were attacked by a large band. But it is hard to stop anyone going down-river on the Min. Once some bandits leveled their rifles at me and ordered me to come ashore, but before they had gotten up courage to shoot we were around a bend and out of sight.

Southern China is much more wooded than the north. Trees grow faster, and besides there have not been so many people through the centuries cutting them down and grubbing out their roots. Fukien Province had big forests, which made it look so different from treeless Shantung or Kansu that it did not seem to belong to the same country. But now an American lumber company is also doing its share toward making Fukien treeless and rainless. Some of the huge logs, started floating down the river at high-water season, were caught now on sharp points of rock. There were wrecks of boats here and there, too.

All the towns along these Chinese rivers are built so close to them that they seem to be fairly hanging over the stream. Rubbish and garbage are thrown from the backs of houses into the river. American cities often make the river-bank a boulevard or promenade, but the Chinese make it a dumping ground. The main street is just inside the first row of houses. Of course there is reason in this, because it is so hot most of the year in southern China that a narrow, shaded street is more pleasant than a sunny river-bank.

The big boats along the Min have a high platform, much like the bridge of a steamer. The steersman stands on this, so that he can see all the rocks and other dangers, and at the same time handle the enormous oar used as a rudder. Some of the oars were forty or fifty feet long, and even then they were not always strong enough to swing the boat around quickly in a dangerous place. In order to balance this oar-rudder so that one can handle it, the inboard end has a big stone tied to it. Or, as the Chinese are always very saving, it may be weighted with a piece of the cargo, such as a heavy bundle of brown rice-paper.

This is the coolie who carried my cot and other baggage on the
overland part of the trip from the Yang-tze to Foochow. The strip of
cloth keeps the pole from slipping off his sweating shoulders.
]

Below the pretty walled city of Yenping the Min is so broad and has so few rapids that we went on all night instead of tying up to the bank at the foot of a town. But along about two in the morning, when we were in a very wide place in the river, so strong a wind came up that the top of my boat was blown over upon me and we only just managed to get to a sandy shore without being upset. Later we found that a typhoon had swept the southern coast of China that night, and in the morning it was still blowing so hard that the boatmen did not dare go on. I decided to go across country. Four hours of tramping along winding flagstone roads brought me to Foochow, but my boat and baggage did not get there until the following evening.